Words of the Day 2026-05-11

On this day (1625): Peasants besiege Frankenburg estate in Upper Austria. More on the Upper Austrian Peasant War of 1626 here (Wikipedia, sorry). Any Thirty Years War mavens in the readership? Anyhow, how it all ended:

Mother’s Day Post-Game Analysis:

“Box Office: ‘Devil Wears Prada 2’ Sews Up Mother’s Day Victory Over ‘Mortal Kombat II,’ Crosses $433M Globally” [Variety]. What a great headline. “The victor of the weekend box office was always expected to be determined by Mother’s Day traffic. That automatically gave em>Prada 2 an advantage, since it’s fast on its way to becoming the biggest female-driven film since Warner Bros.’ Barbie in 2023 after kicking off the summer box office last weekend in high style. As expected, Mortal Kombat II skewed heavily male (73 percent).” • “2” for women, “II” for men?

“The CIA moms defending America deserve our gratitude this Mother’s Day”[ Daniel Hoffman, FOX]. “Ten years ago on Mother’s Day, I was serving as a CIA station chief in a South Asian war zone….. A number of the female officers serving in our station had children too young to understand their moms’ careers or what exactly they were doing overseas.” A lot of adults don’t understand those careers, either. More: “Mother’s Day is supposed to be the day when dads and children honor moms and motherhood with a celebratory family meal, flowers and homemade greeting cards. When Mom is deployed overseas with the CIA, the best the family could hope for might be an occasional FaceTime conversation if the internet happened to be up and running. The CIA’s work is secret, so rarely do children know where Mom really works. They might have been told she is doing business for an international company or working for some other government agency. Certainly, Mom would never tell them anything about her spy job, such as how she had spent her day holding a high-threat meeting fully kitted out with a Glock, M4 and body armor to meet a source with access to a terrorist group.” • Whoever said being an Imperial Trooperette would be a bed of roses? And why no mention of CIA Democrat Abigail “Mom of 3 daughters” Spanberger?

“Why is being a mother so expensive in the United States?” [Al Jazeera]. “From the earliest stages of pregnancy through childbirth and into years of childcare, expenses for healthcare, delivery and raising a child are significantly higher in the US than in most other wealthy countries. Even basic needs like medical care and childcare can place a major burden on families….At the same time, the US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among high-income nations at 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with fewer than three in countries such as Norway, Ireland, Switzerland and Italy.” More: “After childbirth, childcare costs continue to strain household finances across the US. In 2023, couples in the US spent about 40 percent of their disposable household income on childcare, the highest share among selected developed economies.” And a handy chart!

• I actually thought that after their midterm victories in 2006, that the Democrats couldn’t possibly f*ck up health care, that it was a no-brainer, that it would cement political dominance for them as much as Social Security did for FDR. Boy, was I stupid.

Dad Joke of the Day: A man tried to sell me a coffin the other day. I said “That’s the last thing I need.”

“Autocomplete Is Quietly Rewriting Your Thoughts” [Lena Park, SIlicon Opera]. “Autocomplete creates a continuous low-grade anchoring effect on your writing. You start a sentence with a vague idea in your head. A suggestion appears. Now you’re not deciding what to say from a blank slate; you’re deciding whether to accept or reject a specific proposal. Rejection takes more cognitive effort than acceptance. You have to hold your original intention in mind, compare it against the suggestion, and consciously choose the harder path. Most of the time, you accept. Not because the suggestion is better, but because it’s there and it’s good enough. This is the path of least resistance, and human cognition follows it constantly. The result is a subtle but real compression of what gets written.” • Like AI smoothing. I’m old-school. I turn off autocomplete, spellchecking, and grammarchecking. I keep having to correct them.

“Language Models: Does the brain really know what word is coming next?” [Richard Zuckerman, eLife]. “Perhaps the most important open question in neuroscience is also the simplest: How does the brain learn? Over many decades of research, scientists have proposed several theories. Among the most prominent of these is the theory of ‘predictive coding.’ In this theory, the brain learns by making predictions about the future, and then refining those predictions based on what has taken place…. Now, in eLife, Inés Schönmann (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour) and colleagues – Jakub Szewczyk, Floris de Lange and Micha Heilbron – report that they have reanalyzed this data, and found that it can be explained without assuming the theory of predictive coding to be true (Schönmann et al., 2026). They point out that the structure of language is itself loaded with a rich set of bidirectional dependencies that can inherently explain the phenomenon of pre-onset encoding on its own (Figure 1). For example, adjacent words can carry semantic meanings that are mutually interdependent (such as ‘Statue of Liberty’), mean more than the sum of their parts (such as ‘sour grapes’), or can express syntactic cues like tense or the presence of passive versus active voice.” And; The work of Schönmann et al. – who are based at the Donders Institute, Jagiellonian University and the University of Amsterdam – joins a growing list of other studies (Antonello and Huth, 2022; Azizpour et al., 2025; Guest and Martin, 2023) that have sounded a note of caution about the use of encoding arguments for justifying mechanistic claims about the underlying nature of the brain.”

“Photographic memory is a myth – here’s what research really says about remembering” [Gabrielle Principe, The Conversation]. “As a memory researcher, I understand that belief in photographic memory is common and the idea is compelling. But it is simply wrong. Human memory does not work like a recording device. It’s a reconstructive process even among those with the most extraordinary skills. When you recall an event, memory doesn’t just hand you your experiences the same way every time. It’s never a matter of simply accessing, retrieving and playing back a static record of a stored slice of the past.” And: “Rather, you reconstruct the past by piecing together the remnants of experience available to you in the moment of recollection. It’s a process shaped by a range of factors, including the search cues you use; your present knowledge, attitudes and goals; and your current state of mind or mood. Because each of these factors is dynamic and changing, you’ll remember the past differently today – if ever so slightly – from how you remembered it yesterday, and differently from how you’ll remember it tomorrow. What you remember is not only incomplete but also inexact.” • Even a mudlark can’t step in the same river twice…

“Stop looking for the perfect online portfolio and build your own” [Andy Hutchison]. “You only have to look at the sheer number of photo-focused online communities and portfolio sites to realise that every photographer is searching for the perfect showcase for their images and there is a long line of companies willing to take our money in attempting to provide it. Inevitably therefore, photographers shuffle remorselessly between online systems, trying them out, dipping a toe in the water, exploring the feature-set and then abandoning them…. I launched my first portfolio website in 2001, hand-coded in HTML with more than a little help from my wife who’s been developing websites since 1997…. Over the years my site has changed as technology developed and trends ebbed and flowed, but I made my WordPress site a cornerstone of my online presence for two decades now. In recent years I’ve published my content on sites like Substack for greater coverage, but my portfolio remains on my personal Wordpress blog and always will…. Having your own WordPress site means that you are in full control of every single facet of the site, from the permalink naming structure of your articles, all the way through to the fonts you use for your captions. With that website housed on your own domain and living on your own server space, nobody can interfere with it, take it down, mess with the layout or even pull the site offline complete.” • But if you want to do anything dynamic, Wordpress won’t help at all.

Fortune: “His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” — James Joyce, Ulysses

Last year on some horrid long-haul one of the seatback documentaries was Becoming Led Zeppelin, and I got converted (and a late conversion it was, too; I didn’t listen to them in the 60s, because I thought they were all testosterone-addled, especially vocalist Robert Plant, which they may have been in life, but not in their work; Becoming makes clear that they were, as we say, “consummate” professionals. Jimmy Page, the guitarist, was a sought-after session man for everything from jazz to Muzak; John Paul Jones, the bassist, was from a vaudeville family, and was choirmaster and organist at his Anglican church at the age of 14). Anyhow, this is the song, though not the version, that converted me:

This is in fact Jones and Page along with Foo Fighters Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins. I chose that version because the interplay between Page on lead and Jones on bass is clear all the way through. And what a (Motown-inflected) bassline! Dear Lord. But can anybody tell me why Jones makes a face like he bit into a lemon at 1:32?. I also chose it for this comment, which must have won the Internet on the day it was posted:

I love it when Dave Grohl takes a chance and lets fans on stage to play, those two old guys were pretty good.

Here is the original from Becoming, the cause of my conversion experience. Here is another live version (as it turns out, Plant is a fine vocalist, far superior to a shouter like Grohl). Here is a version with Jones and drummer Bonham isolated. And here is Rick Beato explaining the song’s greatness. Musical quality aside, “Ramble On” — despite the adolescent “queen of all my dreams” blather; Plant was, after all, 21 at the time — speaks to me, now, because of the theme: rambling on is, after all, what I am doing, getting (I hope) into my stride. Bonham’s brilliant drumming in the original — the pit-a-pat sound is him striking a guitar case — also reminds me of running (but not sprinting; a race where pace matters).