Every three years in medieval England, the king's men went from cottage to cottage cutting the toes off the peasants' dogs. It was called lawing. The dog's forefoot went on a block of wood, a chisel was set across three claws, and they came off with one blow of a mallet. The Charter of the Forest, 1217, records the correct method: three claws of the forefoot, but not the ball. A dog with three toes missing cannot run down a deer. That was the entire purpose. A third of England was royal forest, every animal in it belonged to the king, and a poor man's dog was the one piece of hunting equipment he could not be stopped from owning. So they left him the dog and took its feet. If the inspectors found yours intact, the fine was three shillings, about a month's wages. Before 1217 they simply took your ox. No law ever told that man he could not eat meat. The law took his bow, his dog's toes and his right to the wood, then left him entirely free to work out the rest for himself. He worked it out. He ate oats and beans, and he raised children who ate oats and beans. That is how it is always done. Meat is never banned for the poor. It just becomes, by one sensible regulation after another, impossible to get. Count the sensible regulations being drafted for your dinner this year.

In a moment of defeat, the brain undergoes a sudden shift. The neuroscientist Misha Ahrens (left) and his student Alex Chen showed that cells called astrocytes help to shift the brain state from hope to hopelessness.

if buddhism (western) is about right relationship with your own mind and christianity (early) is about right relationship with your neighbors, what wisdom tradition covers right governance? no self, ok, love thy neighbor, ok, but how to security and resource allocation?

Neurodiverse people are often falsely branded as lacking in empathy, argues Simon Baron-Cohen. In this studio interview, Baron-Cohen explores this alongside other misconceptions surrounding autism. He explains why we must move away from defining autism in terms of capacities people lack, and looks at the cognitive advantages often seen in people with autism. Tap this link to watch his full interview.

The Grothendieck constant is 1.7...! We are excited to share this breakthrough on a 70 year-old problem discovered through a year-long human-AI collaboration. We publish both the math and AI setup because academics should shape AI-assisted research to keep it fundamentally human.

The elimination of engineers was one of the wilder hypotheses out there. Just like absurdly wrong. We just gave engineers a power tool that can accelerate the development of whatever we want. Of course their value not only remains critical in that world, but actually goes up in many domains because we can apply engineering to far more work than before. If you’re trying to automate drug discovery, you need engineers. If you’re trying to automate manufacturing, you need engineers. If you’re taking on larger and larger software projects, you need engineers. This will happen in domains beyond engineering too. AI causes companies to take on way more work than before, which leads to needing more experts to oversee the work. Even as models get better and better, they can be better utilized by the experts in those fields than the novices. Great time to be an expert.