Loop quantum gravity has this idea called a planck star, and it’s the most elegant fix to the black hole singularity problem I’ve come across:
Classical GR says a collapsing star can crunch down to a singularity – infinite density at a point, physics’ polite way of saying “the math broke”. Planck stars say nah. Once density hits planckian (5.1 × 10⁹⁶ kg/m³, comically extreme), quantum gravity kicks in, the inward pull gets balanced by a repulsive force, and the collapse halts. You get a stable-ish ball at planck density. Not point-sized either – density triggers it, not size. Could be macroscopic.
And it’s not stable forever. It’s mid-bounce. Microseconds in proper time, billions of years from outside thanks to time dilation. What we call a black hole is just a very slow ball hitting the floor. PBS Space Time breaks it down nicely.
talkie: a 13B language model trained only on pre-1931 text. no modern web, no leakage, no awareness of anything after 1930. that last part is what’s wild.
think about what this unlocks – archaeology, historiography, counterfactual history, reviewing past predictions of the future from the inside. every historian alive is contaminated by knowing what came next. talkie isn’t.
it’s also, i’d argue, the closest thing to a time travel experience we’ll ever get. physics doesn’t permit the real version in either direction (forward you just wait, backward causality says no). a conversation with something whose worldview ends in 1930, with no memory of WW2, no Hitler, no internet, is functionally the same trick.
now imagine the 17th century version. that’s the door this opens 🤯
Singapore for a week without a single photo of the Merlion - wetlands, hornbills, empty rain-soaked parks, and the small human encounters most tourists miss.
arte dropped a line last week that’s been rattling around my skull: “the countries of the global South will grow old before they reach the prosperity of the North.”
i went looking for counter-evidence. found none. France took 115 years to double its elderly share. Vietnam will do it in 17. Japan hit aged-society status at 40k USD per capita. Vietnam will hit it at 5k. of 40 countries that crossed 13% elderly since 1972, only three were poorer than Vietnam is now.
the horror isn’t that it’s unfair, though it is. the horror is that it’s already decided. the kids who weren’t born in the 80s and 90s can’t be un-not-born. no election changes this. no reform. the math was locked in before most voters were alive to vote on it.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within bankrupted a studio, changed cinema forever, and looked like a game I desperately wanted to play. Twenty-five years later, I found it on Netflix.
Stumbled across this video by Hal On Earth about Vietnam’s infamous power line chaos and it’s way better than the clickbait title suggests. Focused on Hà Nội but applies to Sài Gòn and the rest of the country just the same. It traces the whole spiderweb from 1895 French colonial power stations through wartime destruction, Đổi Mới-era rapid electrification, and the informal repair culture that turned every pole into an archaeological dig of cables. The term he coins – “additive infrastructure” – is perfect: systems shaped by survival, not strategy. If you’ve ever looked up at a Vietnamese intersection and thought “how does any of this spider web mess work”… this is your answer. Surprisingly detailed. Recommended watch.
