When you think about it, isn’t it sort of crazy that the continents drift over time, and used to be joined together as a single landmass around 200 million years ago? What’s even crazier is that this only became consensus in the late 1960s. For the decades leading up to then, it was dismissed by most geologists, and called “Germanic pseudo-science”. It “takes considerable liberties with our globe” wrote one leading geologist. It ignores “awkward, ugly facts” and “plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules.” A brilliant new Works in Progress article by Elizabeth Van Nostrand (@acesounderglass) explains how the theory all came together and what convinced the skeptics. worksinprogress.co/issue/on-… Continental drift was proposed multiple times over history, most famously by Alfred Wegener, who first laid out the theory in 1912 and compiled several lines of evidence: • the coastlines of South America and Africa fitting together • matching geological formations on either side of the Atlantic • glaciers on continents now too warm or too far from the poles to have had ice • fossils of the same species lining up across separate continents but not within them Wegener’s research was dismissed by many experts in part because Wegener did not have a background in geology, though it carried more traction in Europe than America. It gained steam again during the Cold War, from work funded by the US Navy to improve submarine navigation, which led to its rediscovery and rapid acceptance. Now, it is geology’s ‘theory of everything’, explaining volcanoes, earthquakes, mountains, and even geological records of the Earth’s magnetic field. This is On the origin of continents. Read it here! worksinprogress.co/issue/on-…

the uk government's official ai guidance tells civil servants to use gemini flash instead of pro, keep prompts short, and not say thank you to it, for the environment i do wonder at which point we forked the road. instead of building and using it to automate the work, we write guidance on how to use less of it we have the attitude of a high school prefect. caring more about the rules than actually doing the work

The original article from @PatRubenFitz is fascinating but Sam's additional claim that iron caused the Late Bronze Age Collapse just doesn't line up. The collapse begins around 1200 BC and at that time, there was very little production of iron even though early iron smelters did exist. The iron that was traded was hematite, an iron that forms in meteors. A couple years back I wrote all about iron in the Late Bronze Age in a piece titled "King Tut's meteorite dagger: A weapon from the heavens" Link: exformation.williamrinehart.…. As I explained: "Tut’s blade is truly a rare piece because the total catalog of Bronze Age irons is so limited. Nearly every piece of Bronze Age Iron is made from meteorite. Axes from Syria and China dating back to about 1400 BC, a Syrian pendant from 2300 BC, a Turkish dagger from 2500 BC, and beads from Gerzeh, Egypt from 3200 BC all have levels of nickel and cobalt that line up with meteorites. Other than this blade, the Ugarit axe from Syria is probably the most well-known Bronze Age iron." The most comprehensive piece I read on the grand sweep of this history is Nathaniel L. Erb-Satullo's "The Innovation and Adoption of Iron in the Ancient Near East" Link: link.springer.com/article/10…. This piece really is required reading. It dispelled my initial thinking that the Collapse caused iron to be adopted. Erb-Satullo frames this as a push model. It is intuitive. Bronze requires tin, which was mined in only some select places including Cornwall, Brittany, and Cyprus. When the large civilizations collapse, those trading routes can no longer be maintained and so iron is adopted instead. But bronze production patterns don't show a clear collapse around this time period. The Cypriot copper industry seems to have expanded. Instead, I think there's better evidence for a pull model where political reorganization made iron attractive. Smaller decentralized polities exploited local iron rather than relying on extended copper and tin trading networks. As I wrote in that King Tut piece, "The significance of minerals in the study of history and political power cannot be overstated. Minerals have shaped human societies and political power in countless ways, from the use of copper and iron in ancient times to oil, rare earths, and silica of today."

Happy Friday! Iʼve created a game for you to play! Will AI cure all diseases in 10 years? Inspired by bottlenecks discourse, I created a game to help build your intuitions. Play it here: game.clinicaltrialsabundance… Naturally, it’s bottle-themed with bubbles and there are leaderboards too.

Never been to the opera before? Now’s your chance. We’re giving away 70,000 free tickets to the @MetOpera at the iconic Lincoln Center. Go to on.nyc.gov/opera to enter the lottery. There’s not a bad seat in the house.

AI is upending the world. The paradox is that to make it safe we - here in the UK - need more of it. More compute and more security. That’s the contribution Britain can make to the Western tech stack, and to the safety and prosperity of our people. dannykruger.substack.com/p/b…

I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron. Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence. Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons. Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist. After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence. New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today? worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…

.@billburr criticizes corporations' reaction to Luigi Mangione's killing of a health care CEO: “The response to the Luigi [Mangione] thing. It wasn’t ‘Maybe we need to look at what we’re doing if it makes some crazy person do this.’ [Healthcare executives’] response was to take their faces off the internet and get security. It’s like, you don’t think you need to examine this? You’re not the president. You’re just the CEO of a business.”