Bill Bates

@jonathanchait Who is the one person that didn’t vote for him who died under suspicious circumstances?

and he didn't move to the center, just mobilized the base.

@ChrisCillizza I am old enough to find this sad/funny.

"Amity, as you know, means 'friendship'"

Marc Andreessen was wrong about software eating the world, and I see people making the same mistake about AI today. I wrote this almost three years ago and I wouldn't change a word if I were publishing it today.

"Never start a bombing campaign that will completely halt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz" is right up there with "never get involved in a land war in Asia” in terms of the classic blunders.

@southcitybandit @NateSilver538 A strongly worded letter would be fine.

@NateSilver538 There is no constitutional requirement for it to be a speech

They should turn it into a skills competition like the Pro Bowl.

NIH research grant funding rates plummeted in 2025 | Science | AAAS science.org/content/articl…

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet. 1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output. The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice. Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet. And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.” This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one. We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that. The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

“Jim O’Neill, who had served as the CDC’s acting director. O’Neill, who had also served as the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, will be nominated to run the National Science Foundation…” washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/…

The April 2025 policy that cut the indirect cost reimbursement rate to 15% for colleges and universities is no longer in effect, @ENERGY announced – a win for America's research ecosystem that makes discoveries on behalf of all Americans. aau.edu/newsroom/leadi…

Using someone else’s $5 billion, I took a shot at re-creating Bell Labs. bistromathic.substack.com/p/building-a-n…

it's BASEBALL time

@MarkZuckerman Thank you for continuing to report on Nats’ news!

LHP Konnor Pilkington, who was DFA'd last week, cleared waivers and declared for free agency instead of an outright assignment to Triple-A Rochester.

Look, my world is politics, higher education, science, and technology, but the people I follow on this platform, especially this time of year, were Washington Post sports writers. Spring training, March madness, the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, etc.. It’s a sad day.

Give me $5 billion and I’ll create the next Bell Labs. bistromathic.substack.com/p/building-a-n…

@washingtonpost That headline while literally accurate, is wildly misleading.

A Waymo autonomous vehicle hit a child near a Santa Monica elementary school, causing minor injuries, the company and federal regulators said. The Waymo detected the child and braked, slowing itself to 6 mph before impact, the company said. wapo.st/4rgps4f

@capitalweather Thanks for highlighting. Donated!

Temperatures will dip into the single digits to 10 degrees by Thursday morning. Wind chills will fall below zero. We are in the midst of one of the longest streaks of freezing weather on record in the DC area. It's a very tough time for area homeless. Gifts for the Homeless, Inc. (@gfth), which CWG has been supporting for over a decade, is a local nonprofit that uses 100% of donations it receives to buy new, warm clothing and blankets for local homeless who are struggling. Visit givebutter.com/giftsforthehom… to donate and visit their website to learn more about their efforts (gfth.org/home/)

Noem 2/2 “…Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around, an agent fired defensive shots.” Is that what you see?

The data is in. We are crippling our scientific system. In one year: 8,000 federal research grants frozen or terminated 25,000 scientists removed from federal agencies Fewer NIH & NSF awards than at any point in a decade This will have devastating long term consequences.

Wow this is the coolest thing I have seen this year.