Nobel disease

Nobel disease or Nobelitis is an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise, although it is unknown whether Nobel Prize winners are more prone to this tendency than other individuals. Paul Nurse, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, warned later laureates against "believing you are expert in almost everything, and being prepared to express opinions about most issues with great confidence, sheltering behind the authority that the Nobel Prize can give you". "Nobel disease" has been described as a tongue-in-cheek term.

Scavenger's Reign

[ ] Do you like science fiction?
[ ] Do you like biology?
[ ] Do you like Moebius's illustration style?
[ ] Do you like animation?

If you scored two or higher, you should fire one up and go watch Scavenger's Reign on HBO.

Listening To

Fuck the world. Music time.

  • Fontaines DC - Romance. 2024. Their sound gets bigger and bigger with every album. Their first record was raw brutal minimalism. But, three albums later, they're doing interesting dynamic and harmonic changes, layers of sound, and vocal melodies (!). Which is all great. As electric as that first record was, it was obvious even then that there was only so much they could do with that sound; expanding their palette is working-out for them.

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  • Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - Endless Rooms. 2022. Not a huge change from their previous two, but that's fine! They have a great sound and they know how to work it. I can listen to them do their thing all day (and have, many times).

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  • XTC - Drums And Wires. 1979. I bought "Oranges And Lemons" back in college, when "Mayor Of Simpleton" and "King For A Day" came out. I liked it, but it was a little too fussy for my tastes at the time and I didn't explore them any further. A few years ago I picked up their giant collection of singles from 1977-1992, "Fossil Fuel". That introduced me to some of their earlier stuff, which I didn't know aside from "Making Plans For Nigel", "Senses Working Overtime" and "Dear God". And last month, on a whim while driving somewhere, I asked Spotify to play this album. I was shocked. And I bought it as soon as I got home. So much energy, so many ideas, so clever, so catchy, so much of that restless 1979 nervousness. I wish I'd bought this in 1989, instead of "Oranges and Lemons"!

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  • The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World. 2024. While they remain a top-3 favorite band, I haven't really listened to a new Cure album since 1992's "Wish". They've tried a few sounds, but none have really grabbed me. But this one is somewhat of return to 1989's epic "Disintegration", or the slower songs on "Wish" - sonically enormous, slow but majestic, with Smith's vocals pleading over it all. So, that's nice. Robert Smith's voice sounds just as it has since the early 1990s, amazingly. There are some nice guitar freakouts. The bass is huge and growly. All good. The songs are pretty good, too. But... I'm just not in the mood for this stuff these days. I don't even listen to "Disintegration" anymore.

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  • Cocteau Twins - Heaven Or Las Vegas. 1990. Swirling, vibrating guitars, layers upon layers of vocals that might be singing in actual English, or at least English words, or possibly whatever sounds Elizabeth Frazier thought would work at the time. It's all very disorienting. That's any Cocteau Twins album. But this one does it perfectly. I can't think of an album, from anyone, that shimmers as much this one. On many songs, there's a high-pitched part that just sits and scintillates while everything else pulses and bounces around it. Quite magical. And, of course it would be nothing without the great songs.

    They're yet another band that I've listened to for a long time, but somehow I missed their best work. I've had a couple of their earlier records since the early 90s. I like them, but I've listened to them enough that I somehow thought I had the band all figured out, that their other records couldn't possibly have anything else to say. It's a dumb way of thinking.

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  • Cocteau Twins - Blue Bell Knoll. 1988. No matter how many times I play it, my brain simply refuses to engage with this. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. My brain just refuses to latch on. I think the problem is that it's clearly the album before "Heaven Or Las Vegas" - you can hear them heading in that direction - and I just want to hear HoLV over and over instead.

  • Mount Eerie - Night Palace. 2024 A guy is softly singing while a hypnotic tremolo vibrates the sound around your head. And sometimes a building falls on him. Or he's the building, mid-crash. Another fine entry in the list of sludgy psychedelic bands that I love from the past 35 years (Bardo Pond, Dino Jr, Sebadoh, Codeine, Sonic Youth, Blonde Redhead, Holy Sons, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, so many more).

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  • Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us. 2024. Looking for intelligent lyrics and extravagantly-orchestrated melodies? For four albums, Vampire Weekend has been eager to provide. Number five is more. They even work in motifs from, and references to, their previous songs. And miraculously, rather than seeming cheap and lazy, the references make this album feel like a reflection on, and a continuation of, a bigger project.

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  • Robyn Hitchcock - 1967: Vacations In The Past. 2024. In 2014, Robyn put out "The Man Upstairs", which was half covers. He also had an outtakes album from that, which was 40% covers. He also has a whole double album of Dylan covers. (Next to Miles Davis, he's the most prolific of anyone in my music library. I count 49 albums (some partial) from him and his projects, in my collection.) This one is almost entirely covers, and all from 1967: Procul Harem, Small Faces, Hendrix, Kinks, Floyd, Beatles, Incredible String Band and more. The sole original here is the title track. Most of the songs are him and a guitar, with piano, second guitars, vocal harmonies on a few - a mode he's been in and out of since 1984.

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Deep Thoughts

AI is going to do for white-collar jobs what robotics did for blue-collar jobs, but 1,000,000x more because while robots are expensive, AI is incredibly cheap.

America Defeats America

WASHINGTON — In a historic outcome that promised to halt the rising scourge of the United States in its tracks, America has defeated America at the ballot box, sources confirmed Wednesday. “After 248 years of tense and often divisive conflict, we can finally say, as of this morning, that the nation turned out at the polls and delivered a decisive blow to the nation,” said electoral analyst Kurt Howitzer, describing the results as a remarkable triumph of the democratic experiment over democracy. “It’s a stunning turn of events. But it really shows the power of one citizenry to come together and prevail over themselves. The message was loud and clear: We are sick and tired of our country, and we want it to end.” At press time, millions of emotional Americans had reportedly gathered on the National Mall in an impromptu celebration of their resounding victory over the forces of liberty and equality.

Guitar Angst

Folk guitarist John Fahey had some deep thoughts about things:

Those who fear their guitars are essentially cowardly faggots who have allowed themselves to be conquered by perverse tendencies. There are unable to sit anywhere for six hours under any circumstance. Their span of attention is short, but what is much worse is that they don't care. They don't even care to lean how to lengthen it. They have constituted themselves as essentially as hatred, opposition - pure negativity. Homosexual guitar playing is an imitative gesture of the non-essential (i.e. temporary) characteristics of women - bitchiness, frivolity, flightiness, and super-sensitivity. These superficial characteristics are not the essence of the feminine. Look at the homosexual guitarist pick up the guitar - he is afraid to touch it. He is afraid of it. He thinks it hates him because he hates it so much. He has constituted his spirit against - he is against life. He is a Nazi. His politics are against freedom. He is a totalitarian at heart, but he has no power. He must overcome this fear of the guitar. And he can. The guitar must be his secret love, narcotic, whatever image he prefers. But he cannot forget to abuse it also, to learn to bang on it and to make a percussion instrument of it, to play hard on it, and bend it to his will.

The Odds

The election odds cited by Mr. Trump came from a crypto-powered gambling website called Polymarket. Using digital currencies, gamblers on Polymarket have wagered more than $100 million on the outcome of the presidential race, turning the site into the internet betting phenomenon of the 2024 election.

Elon Musk has promoted Polymarket’s odds on X, calling them “more accurate than polls, as actual money is on the line.” CNN and other news media organizations have featured the projections in their election coverage. And as the market has swung heavily in Mr. Trump’s favor, he has relentlessly publicized the site’s numbers, seeking to create a sense of inevitability about the election’s outcome.

“A gambling poll, as they call it,” Mr. Trump said recently of Polymarket. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means that we’re doing pretty well.”

But Mr. Trump’s apparent lead may be an illusion. The odds on Polymarket began favoring him this month after just four accounts, with user names like Fredi9999 and PrincessCaro, bet more than $30 million on a Trump victory, according to an analysis of transaction records by Chaos Labs, a crypto data provider. Polymarket said on Thursday that all four accounts were controlled by one person, whom it described as a French national with a financial services background, without revealing the person’s identity.

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For much of the fall, Polymarket’s odds suggested that Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris were locked in a tight race, mirroring the polls. Then the odds diverged substantially this month, after the four accounts placed large bets on the former president.

On Oct. 11, Mr. Trump posted a screenshot of Polymarket that showed he had a 55.5 percent chance of winning the election. On Monday, he posted a new screenshot showing that his chances had increased to 64 percent.