Words of the Day 2026-05-05

On this day: First US train robbery occurs at North Bend, Ohio. “Possibly” “diehard Confederate guerillas.”

“Secrets of the Bees: Revealing the Sneaky Genius of Nature’s Brightest Thinkers” [National Geographic]. “There was a time not too long ago when scientists believed that bees were automatons—mindless robots whose actions were hardwired into their genes. Even the most eminent scholars of animal behavior believed that bees’ actions were guided purely by instinct—’inherited through countless generations,’ wrote German scientist Karl von Frisch, who won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for discovering how bees communicate. ‘The brain of a bee is the size of a grass seed and is not made for thinking.’ But in recent decades, researchers like behavioral ecologist Lars Chittka have designed a series of increasingly ambitious experiments that reveal the many ways that bees’ brains are indeed made for thinking. In 1990, when Chittka was studying bee neurobiology as a Ph.D. candidate in Berlin, he led a group of undergraduates to a gigantic agricultural field to explore how bees estimate distance and direction in a featureless landscape with no trees, bushes, or hills. Over a bottle of Irish whiskey one night, they decided, as a joke, to design an experiment to see whether bees could count. ‘We initially laughed. It was a ridiculous idea,’ he recalls. But the next day, they constructed a row of identical, tent-shaped objects to act as landmarks for a colony of honeybees going back and forth to their hive. They placed a feeder filled with sugar water, to mimic nectar, between the third and fourth landmarks. Then, once the bees were familiar with the location of the feeder, the students varied the tents’ positions. The bees, however, still searched for the feeder after the third tent. They seemed to count the number of landmarks they passed on their way to the feeder. ‘At the time, that raised some eyebrows,] Chittka says, but other labs replicated the results and confirmed his findings. The success of that experiment, he says, ‘triggered me to probe even deeper into how much intelligence you could squeeze into a micro-brain like that.’” • One imagines a science fiction story about a civilation that uses ginormous beehives instead of data centers….

Dad Joke of the Day: What did the banana say when it answered the phone? Yellow!

“Hyde Stevenson” [Manuel Moreale]. From the “People and Blogs” series of interviews:

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

It depends. First, I need a topic, or an idea.

Sometimes a blog post, a news, a new tool, or basically anything can inspire me to write directly a post.

But, often, I like to go through my Zettelkasten.

Zettelkasten

A Zettelkasten (German: ‘slipbox’, plural Zettelkästen) or card file consists of small items of information stored on Zetteln (German: ‘slips’; singular: Zettel), paper slips or cards, that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags. It has often been used as a system of note-taking and personal knowledge management for research, study, and writing.

In the 1980s, the card file began to be used as metaphor in the interface of some hypertextual personal knowledge base software applications such as NoteCards.

Or Apple’s HyperCard. I loved HyperCard! Apple should never have killed it.

In the 1990s, such software inspired the invention of wikis.

“Zettel” = “find” or “item of value”!

Every morning, I use this keybinding -0. That opens a random note. If it doesn’t sparkle [a “bright shiny object”!] anything, I hit the same keys again. A “new” note appears, and, sometimes, a discussion starts. I will add more content, or argue with previous thoughts. That’s how some drafts start.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I don’t. I just need my laptop, a terminal, and a coffee. That’s all.

100%!

Maybe the physical space could help some people. Maybe if I had a seaside view, it could impact my creativity 😅.

For me space does not matter so much (within reason). What matters is that the space be consistent.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

Previously, for other projects, I used Drupal, then Wordpress. But, for this one, I wanted something easily to maintain. No database, or plugins updates. Something simple. That’s why I went for a SSG, a Static Site Generator.

Not for me. I want dynamic!

“Does reading do us any good?” [Aeon]. “Does reading turn us into better people? Does it make us more sensitive and empathetic? Does it improve our judgment? And if it is not edifying, then what good does it do? About 120 years ago, the indecisive, dilettante offspring of a wealthy physician found these questions so important that he took up his pen to argue that, no, books are never the instruments of moral betterment. He based his argument on his own memories. Though he had always been an avid reader, books, he claimed, never gave him any sort of useful, respectable instruction. That does not mean they were meaningless – far from it; they shaped his apprehension of life by preserving indelible impressions of his surroundings. Relatives now long gone, places he hadn’t seen in years – these were nevertheless still present in his mind through memories of his readings. Books helped keep past sensations alive…. Hindsight makes it easy to find in Marcel Proust’s essay On Reading (1905) the spark that would later flare into his multivolume novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27).” And: “[Proust] found it preposterous to recommend reading as a valuable access point to a world of wisdom – akin to thinking you could access truth through ‘recommendation letters’…. In his view, it is futile to praise reading as an encounter with great minds…. Books do not create a higher form of conversation but instead allow for a unique ‘fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude’. Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the ability to make sense of words, and things. In this sense, books connect us with the richest part of ourselves. The meaning we attach to words as we read is uniquely connected to our experience – it can never be replicated. This is how reading becomes, in Proust’s view, the fullest, most concrete mediation to our sensations.” • I wonder what Proust would think of AI slop?

“Humanity on the Page” [Commonweal]. Long form, very much worth reading in full. ‘ “Chat is useless when it comes to real literature,’ [Dan] said. Chat begged to disagree. ‘That’s a fair opinion based on Dan’s limited use,’ it responded via Darryl. “But respectfully, it’s incomplete. I don’t spontaneously generate strong literary fiction on my own without input. But if someone collaborates, sharing themes, emotions, character arcs, or partial drafts, I can co-create nuanced, powerful fiction pieces—scenes rich with metaphor, character depth, and emotional payoff.’ Darryl, meanwhile, was urging me to get a subscription and take on Chat as my writing partner. I could get it for $20 a month, he said. ‘How can you go wrong?’” Well, one might argue that colluding with an industry based on fraud and theft is always wrong (albeit, well, “convenient”). More: “The fate of writers in the brave new world of AI is a driving preoccupation of my friend David Baldacci, the mega-bestselling author of suspense novels and legal thrillers…. [W]hen you listen to David Baldacci talk about AI and writing, you sense an injury that far exceeds the legal and financial one. David told the senators he finds it “enraging” that AI enables anyone to design a novel drawn from pirated works of his and then sell it as something that reads like a David Baldacci novel. ‘And yes, it does read like my novels,’ he conceded tersely, ‘because it is my novel. It is my imagination.’ And: “Which leads to the second point of outrage. Not only does AI steal and copy, designing a simulacrum of our work and our voice, but even worse, it does it instantaneously. Testifying about his formation as a writer, David described a childhood spent going to the library in his hometown of Richmond, recalling how his dream of writing grew from his love of reading, and how long it took for him to make that dream real. ‘I worked away for decades, getting rejected over and over, but I kept going—honing my craft, remaining disciplined, taking the rejections head on and using them as motivation, until finally I was successful.’ It took him twenty years to get published.” • And then Silicon Valley oligarchs stole all those years. With impunity, too.

Fortune: “If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.”- Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson

“CDC NHANES Dataset: Rescued Just in Time” [Data Rescue Project]. “The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States conducted by the CDC. The survey is unique in that it combines interviews and physical examinations. This is a very important dataset for health, public health, and nutrition fields. Last week, the DRP was alerted that the NHANES dataset release page was down – since then, the page has been restored. But, in even better news, a few weeks ago DRP volunteer mkraley worked to scrape the NHANES releases page, and uploaded it to Data Lumos. This backup is currently available for anyone to access NHANES public use data.” • I like very much that the Data Rescue Project exists, to preserve public data from the Administration’s depradations. I also wish somebody would give archive.* (*.ph, *.is, *.md, *.today) a nice chunk of change, so that they are more reliable, and actually perform their archival function.

“Introducing the Protocol Institute” [Timber Stinson-Schroff, Protcolized]. “The mission of this institute is to advance the theory and practice of protocol design, analysis, and stewardship across domains, as well as promote protocol literacy, appreciation and cultural salience globally. In other words, our mission is to build the field and community capable of stewarding the ongoing planetary processes of protocolization – the slow, largely invisible means by which human behaviors become standardized into the coordinating infrastructure of civilization.” Have these brain geniuses never heard of ISO? W3C? IEtF? To pick the most obvious examples. Here is a fine example of goalpost shifting. The windup:

Protocols are a strange thing to work on. Effective ones fade into the background, as do the people who maintain and study them. When someone becomes literate in protocol wrangling, it’s as if they’ve bought a pair of glasses that reveal a new layer of the world around them. But as they immerse themselves in this world, by attending to and working on things that others typically don’t, they themselves become invisible in proportion to the impact their perceptiveness has.

Imagine you walk into a hospital. All around you are hard-to-see orchestration technologies that allow actors in the space to perform together: triage, handwashing norms, double- and triple-checking patient IDs, standard metrics for hormone measurement, recurring supply orders, wipe-down routines, badge-based access control, maintenance tags on fire extinguishers, designated waiting areas, randomized control trials, and dosing algorithms for anticancer drugs. Despite the fact that these technologies tend to operate below the awareness of individual participants, they nonetheless choreograph them and guide the increasingly unconscious performance of important, life-saving operations. The people who work on these protocols also operate below our awareness, continuing to provide stability, security, and uptime to important civilizational operations.

All very true. The pitch:

The recently invented Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a live example. In the span of a year [Remember “slow, largely invisible means”?], it has become the default connective tissue between AI assistants and the tools they use, coordinating a sprawling ecosystem of integrations without any central authority. If it keeps working, it too will steadily fade from the conscious attention of the developers and users who depend on it.

It won’t “keep working.” It’s AI!

MCP’s success will be quietly manifest in integrations that simply work, and in friction that never materializes.

Friction will “materialize.” It’s AI!

“When Your Digital Life Vanishes” [The New Yorker]. “[Sarah Farrell of DriveSavers] once spent a week recovering an iPad for a couple with an autistic child who was so attached to a farming simulator that he couldn’t calm down without it. ‘They still invite me to barbecues,’ she said. There have also been litigants who’ve lost their evidence; scientists, their research; the bereaved, their dearly departed’s final words. DriveSavers’ own death has been foretold many times. The cloud was supposed to destroy them; before that, it was commercial backup services, solid-state drives (SSDs), and encrypted smartphone hardware. Still, people keep finding ways to imperil their files, which grow ever more numerous and irreplaceable. Our precarious datasphere extends from cryptocurrency to telemedicine; now, with the advent of virtual companions, it’s even possible to lose the love of your life to a glitch. Technological progress may be increasing our exposure. A.I. agents are becoming notorious for accidental deletions, while the proliferation of data centers has wildly inflated the cost of storage. And, despite exponential growth in capacity, the average hard drive’s life span remains just under seven years. Considering the hundreds of zettabytes of data estimated to exist in the world, it’s as though a million Libraries of Alexandria were saved from annihilation solely by hamsters on wheels.” • It think I need to get NAS. Do any readers have one?

Word of the Day: To Augur is to show or suggest, especially from omens, that something might happen in the future. Used most often in formal speech or writing, augur is often followed by an adverb, such as well. Usage example: