Not so sure the fall edition of this field notes will have as many flowers to reference as the spring edition, but read on to see if I discover more than one!
P(doom)
New word of the day: P(doom) is the probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes (so-called “doomsday scenarios”) as a result of artificial intelligence
I leaned this word from a very interesting deep dive podcast by NPR Explains… titled AI and the Probability of Doom. Take a minute to listen to it and then come back and let’s discus P(doom)!
Indo-European languages
This morning I was cleaning my computer’s desktop and stumbled across this family tree of languages that I had downloaded from Wikipedia after listening to an interview of David Reich by Dwarkesh Patel. I could not just throw it away as it really is mind blowing and wanted to keep it handy for reference so here it is:
Finished Video Games
This post is just note to myself to document the video games I have finished.
Summer Moment of Zen 2025
I just got back from this summer’s moment of summer Zen!
Cercedilla Field Notes: Butterflies
This morning we went for a walk in the European Redwood forest of Cercedilla, and I was captivated by 4 or so white butterflies dancing among themselves and immediately wanted to get a picture of one of them to ID it, but they were too involved in their mesmerizing dance to settle on a flower for a picture so we continued our walk. A bit down the trail my wife said “There is one!” and so I caught it (virtually) and uploaded it to iNaturalist and will use this post as a place to document and reference the different buttefies I discover in Cercedilla!
Cercedilla Field Notes: Spring Flowers at Ermita de San Antonio
As I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog, we are having a very wet and cold spring, but this afternoon the sun came out a bit and we went to the magical Ermita de San Antonio and we stopped to smell the flowers (well not really, more stopped to admire and marvel at the variety and intensity of colors and take pictures and ID them on Pl@ntNet)!
RIP Google Reader
Ahh man. Google just killed Google Reader, again!