Latest

2025-04-02

Week 221: Cell rejuvenation

I replaced the battery in my electric toothbrush. After ten years of daily use, the capacity of the NiMH cell inside had shrunk to the point that it could no longer make it through a single brushing.

I found a website with batteries for sale and instructions for replacement and for about £8, a lot of de- and re-soldering, and a little bit of careful hacking at the internal plastic, I installed a new, larger battery with 180% of the original capacity.

As long as the rest of the device holds up, it shouldn’t end up as e-waste for at least another 18 years.

A couple of years ago there was a bubble of popular discourse about how men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day, or something like that. I don’t. But I do often think about the Islamic Golden Age, a period of several centuries of enormous scientific and cultural achievement, and how it came to an end. There’s no single answer as to why: some attribute it to the depredations of Mongol invasions or the Crusades; others on droughts and plagues; some blame colonialism. The hypothesis that plays on my mind is that described by Chaney (2023):

A contraction in secular bureaucratic structures strengthened conservative religious elites who altered institutions to discourage the study of topics that undermined their societal control.

As I watch the US cut funding for science, impose ideological constraints on universities, and ban books that are slightly inconvenient to régime narratives, I find this hypothesis ever more credible.

We watched The Substance (2024), an excellent, grotesque, disturbing, and thought-provoking film. Demi Moore is great, as is the visual style and the soundtrack.

One-sentence summary: What if the Soulwax remix of Work It by Marie Davidson was a body horror movie?

I bought tickets for Interesting 2025 in May. See some of you there?

I’ve been practising for Okinawa Day on 28 June. I’ll be playing sanshin and guitar this year (though not, obviously, at the same time) so I’ve been taking my guitar to practices and using one of the spare club sanshins that are already there. That means that I haven’t had my sanshin bachi (a kind of big claw that goes on the index finger) with me, and I’ve been using a guitar plectrum instead. That’s not particularly unusual: many people do so. The weird thing is that, even though I can play guitar with a plectrum, I find it much harder to play the sanshin that way. I’ve always used a bachi, and something abut mixing the techniques makes me confused about which instrument I’m playing.

Links:

• Trump’s Secret Police Are Now Disappearing Students For Their Op-Eds. “Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight.”
• Tomoko Kubo is Embroidering the Entire Hiragana Lettering System . Each syllable contains pictures of things starting with that syllable. Delightful.
• When ChatGPT tells you Australians don’t need a visa to enter Chile but it’s wrong and too late now. Remember, kids: LLMs are not information retrieval systems.
• OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself.
• LLMs, But Only Because Your Tech SUCKS. “Tech is cool and it doesn’t end at fancy plagiarism machines. Try the existing stuff and use whatever actually solves the problem. And then maybe you won’t need to burn all the fossils ChatGPT requires you to burn.”
• Take This On-Call Rotation and Shove It.