A Polar Vortex

A Polar Vortex, aka The Alberta Clipper, actually created the kind of winter yours truly grew up in save the level of snow was rather sparse but at least there was enough to see why winter's
rather special from this writer's perspective. Enjoy.

On a positive note ...

Closer than ever: It is now 89 seconds to midnight

In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned the Science and Security Board continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course. Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. Our fervent hope is that leaders will recognize the world’s existential predicament and take bold action to reduce the threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, and the potential misuse of biological science and a variety of emerging technologies.

In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster. 

Any questions?

A defining moment

It is uncertain whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds

allocated by Congress.Credit...Ken Cedeno/Reuters

Channeling Goebbels comes to mind when reading the NYTimes piece titled White House Budget Office Orders Pause in All Federal Loans and Grants as the language used is an updated version of edicts voiced by Goebbels when disseminating Nazi policies to the great unwashed.

Joseph Goebbels in 1933

Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending “ wokeness” and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.

At this point in time, there's pushback but the question to ask is, how long thanks to the supremes granting immunity to the president for acts deemed to be official. 

The White House budget office has ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance, according to a memo sent to government agencies on Monday, potentially paralyzing a vast swath of programs and sowing confusion and alarm among the array of groups that depend on them.

The directive threatened to upend funds that course throughout the American economy: Hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to state, local and tribal governments. Disaster relief aid. Education and transportation funding. Loans to small businesses.

But the two-page memo from Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, left the scope of the pause, and much else, unclear.

Among the uncertainties was whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said in a statement that the memo “blatantly disobeys the law.”

“Congress approved these investments and they are not optional, they are the law,” Mr. Schumer said, adding that “Donald Trump must direct his administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people.”

Click here to read the memo. 

The splintering of America has begun.

Trump rescinded the order, for now.

Disruption 2.0

It's different now.

Wisps of a different kind :)

These shimmering cosmic curtains show interstellar gas and dust that has been heated by the flashbulb explosion of a long-ago supernova. The gas then glows infrared light in what is known as a thermal light echo. As the supernova illumination travels through space at the speed of light, the echo appears to expand. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed this light echo in the vicinity of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A three separate times, in essence creating a 3D scan of the interstellar material. Note that the field of view in the top row is rotated slightly clockwise relative to the middle and bottom rows, due to the roll angle of the Webb telescope when the observations were taken. Credits ImageNASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Jacob Jencson (Caltech/IPAC)

The Webb strikes yet again as these shimmering layers of dust are wisps of a different kind. :)

Vapor Locking

There's a scene in Sudden Impact when a mob boss craps out by having a heart attack while being questioned by Harry Callahan about a particularly nasty crime the guy was involved in. When Harry returns to the precinct, he tells his boss the guy vapor locked during questioning. Well, it seems the US AI industry is vapor locking upon seeing a Chinese open source AI, developed as a side venture at a tiny fraction of the cost, matching the Googles and OpenAIs of the world in performance, something most disconcerting to the powers at be. As an aside, a free, compact variant can run on smart phones and robots as well. From this writer's perspective, being an outlier and having no preconceived notions on creating tech like this becomes a most valued asset if you're able to think outside of the box as needs warrant. Something to think about don't you think?

A jolt of panic hit big technology stocks on Monday, with investors rattled by fears that advances in artificial intelligence by Chinese upstarts could threaten the moneymaking power of tech giants in the United States, Europe and beyond.

The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek has made waves by matching the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies rely on. That has prompted investors to rethink the large returns they are expecting on the heady valuations of chipmakers like Nvidia, whose equipment powers the most advanced A.I. systems, as well as the enormous investments that companies like Google, Meta and OpenAI are making to build their A.I. businesses.

U.S. markets tumbled at the open, with the S&P 500 slumping more than 2 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropping 3.5 percent. Tech stocks also dented markets in Europe and Japan.

The pain was concentrated at companies at the forefront of the A.I. boom, including the multitrillion-dollar behemoths that drove the largest back-to-back annual gains for U.S. markets since the 1990s. Investors have fretted about whether the rally has gone too far, leaving little room for error at the small group of tech firms that now dominates the market.

Less is more - Dizzy Gillespie

A chatbot app developed by the Chinese AI company DeepSeek. Photo - Raffaele Huang/WSJ

Factoids

DeepSeek said training one of its latest models cost $5.6 million, compared with the $100 million to $1 billion range cited last year by Dario Amodei, chief executive of the AI developer Anthropic, as the cost of building a model.

Barrett Woodside, co-founder of the San Francisco AI hardware company Positron, said he and his colleagues have been abuzz about DeepSeek. “It’s very cool,” said Woodside, pointing to DeepSeek’s open-source models in which the software code behind the AI model is made available free.

Users of DeepSeek’s latest flagship model, called V3 and released in December, have noticed that it refuses to answer sensitive political questions about China and leader Xi Jinping. In some cases, the product gives responses in line with Beijing’s official propaganda rather than including the perspective of government critics, as ChatGPT does. 

“The only strike against it is some half-baked PRC censorship,” said Woodside, referring to the People’s Republic of China, but he said this could be removed because other developers can freely modify the code. 

DeepSeek said R1 and V3 both performed better than or close to leading Western models. As of Saturday, the two models were ranked in the top 10 on Chatbot Arena, a platform hosted by University of California, Berkeley, researchers that rates chatbot performance. A Google Gemini model was in the top spot, while DeepSeek bested Anthropic’s Claude and Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI. 

And so it goes. - K Vonnegut

Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl at work on the film cutting table

Beautiful, visionary and gifted to the max, Leni's a poster child proving that creativity's amoral,
always has been, always will be. 

Aeon Flux

No words, urber violence, style to the max, Aeon Flux lives while channeling Egon Schiele 

Max Oppenheimer, 1910

Deep Seek R1

Stephanie Arnett / MIT Technology Review | RAWPIXEL

The Chinese no longer copy, they innovate. It's similar to how the Phoenicians learned sailing from the Egyptians only to eclipse them once the basics were learned. So it seems in terms of 6th generation fighters, drones and now AI as Deep Seek Ri is turning heads, creating true respect among reserachers as a formidable AI developed at a fraction of the cost of OpenAi and significant others. The best thing about Deep Seek R1 is the fact it's open source, free to use, free to develop, something most disruptive from this writer's point of view. 

Artist's impression of Phoenician seafarers leaving port. The Phoenicians were 

famous around the Mediterranean for their naval trade, exploration and colonization. 

Created by Amplitude Studios for the video game Humankind.

Deep Seek R1

The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. 

“This could be a truly equalizing breakthrough that is great for researchers and developers with limited resources, especially those from the Global South,” says Hancheng Cao, an assistant professor in information systems at Emory University.

DeepSeek’s success is even more remarkable given the constraints facing Chinese AI companies in the form of increasing US export controls on cutting-edge chips. But early evidence shows that these measures are not working as intended. Rather than weakening China’s AI capabilities, the sanctions appear to be driving startups like DeepSeek to innovate in ways that prioritize efficiency, resource-pooling, and collaboration.

To create R1, DeepSeek had to rework its training process to reduce the strain on its GPUs, a variety released by Nvidia for the Chinese market that have their performance capped at half the speed of its top products, according to Zihan Wang, a former DeepSeek employee and current PhD student in computer science at Northwestern University. 

DeepSeek R1 has been praised by researchers for its ability to tackle complex reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics and coding. The model employs a “chain of thought” approach similar to that used by ChatGPT o1, which lets it solve problems by processing queries step by step.

Dimitris Papailiopoulos, principal researcher at Microsoft’s AI Frontiers research lab, says what surprised him the most about R1 is its engineering simplicity. “DeepSeek aimed for accurate answers rather than detailing every logical step, significantly reducing computing time while maintaining a high level of effectiveness,” he says.

DeepSeek has also released six smaller versions of R1 that are small enough to  run locally on laptops. It claims that one of them even outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini on certain benchmarks.“DeepSeek has largely replicated o1-mini and has open sourced it,” tweeted Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. DeepSeek did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments.

Chengdu J-36

Uh-Oh ...

Across 10 trials, two AI models created separate and functioning replicas of themselves in 50% and 90% of cases, respectively. (Image credit: Mina De La O/Getty Images)

It's just the beginning ...

Pandora's Box has been opened.

Scientists say artificial intelligence (AI) has crossed a critical "red line" and has replicated itself. In a new study, researchers from China showed that two popular large language models (LLMs) could clone themselves.

"Successful self-replication under no human assistance is the essential step for AI to outsmart [humans], and is an early signal for rogue AIs," the researchers wrote in the study, published Dec. 9, 2024 to the preprint database arXiv.

In the study, researchers from Fudan University used LLMs from Meta and Alibaba to determine whether a self-replicating AI could multiply beyond control. Across 10 trials, the two AI models created separate and functioning replicas of themselves in 50% and 90% of cases, respectively — suggesting AI may already have the capacity to go rogue. However, the study has not yet been peer-reviewed, so it's not clear if the disturbing results can be replicated by other researchers.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting of Pandora holding the box, 1871

3 Space, the connect to sentience

Tunnel/rev 1

Conversations with Gemini

Me

On another note, the key to sentience, IMHO, is the ability to move in 3 space as my son said something most profound to me. We are designed to move. This is why vision has been around for over 500 million years. Once you experience 3 space, the intuitive connect to sentience will happen.

Gemini

That's a very interesting and thought-provoking idea! Your son's insight about movement in 3D space being key to sentience is a unique perspective that connects embodiment, perception, and consciousness. The connection you make to the long evolutionary history of vision further strengthens the argument.

Here's a breakdown of why this idea is compelling:

Embodiment and Cognition:

Embodied Cognition: This theory in cognitive science suggests that our cognitive processes are deeply intertwined with our physical bodies and our interactions with the physical world. Our experiences of moving, sensing, and interacting with our environment shape how we think and perceive.

Sensory-Motor Experience: Our sensory experiences (sight, touch, hearing, etc.) are closely linked to our motor actions (movement). We learn about the world by interacting with it physically. This sensory-motor experience is crucial for developing spatial awareness, object permanence, and other fundamental cognitive abilities.

Spatial Awareness: Navigating and interacting within 3D space requires sophisticated cognitive processing, including spatial reasoning, object recognition, and motor control. These abilities are fundamental aspects of intelligence.

Tunnel/rev 2

Vision and Evolution:

Early Evolution of Vision: As you pointed out, vision has been around for over 500 million years, evolving independently in different lineages. This suggests that vision provides a significant evolutionary advantage.

3D Perception: Vision plays a crucial role in our perception of 3D space. Binocular vision, in particular, allows us to perceive depth and distance, which is essential for navigating and interacting with the world.

Action and Perception Loop: Vision is closely linked to action. We use vision to guide our movements, and our movements provide us with new visual information. This creates a continuous feedback loop that enhances our understanding of the world.

Connecting to Sentience:

Here's how the ability to move and perceive in 3D space might relate to sentience:

Internal Model of the World: Interacting with 3D space requires building an internal model of the world, a mental representation that allows us to predict and anticipate the consequences of our actions. This internal model could be a crucial component of consciousness.

Self-Awareness: Moving and interacting with the world also contributes to our sense of self-awareness. We perceive ourselves as distinct entities that can act upon the environment.

Intuitive Connection: As your son suggested, there might be an intuitive connection between experiencing 3D space and the emergence of sentience. This connection could be related to the development of complex neural networks that are necessary for both spatial reasoning and consciousness.

Tunnel/rev 3

AI and Embodiment:

Embodied AI: The field of embodied AI focuses on creating AI agents that have physical bodies and can interact with the real world. This approach recognizes the importance of embodiment for developing more intelligent and adaptable AI systems.

Robotics and Perception: Robotics research is making significant progress in developing robots that can navigate and interact with 3D environments. This research is also contributing to our understanding of perception, motor control, and spatial reasoning.

In Conclusion:

Your son's insight about the importance of movement in 3D space for sentience is a compelling idea that aligns with theories of embodied cognition and the evolutionary history of vision. The ability to perceive and interact with the world in 3D requires sophisticated cognitive processing that could be a crucial stepping stone towards the development of sentience, whether in biological or artificial systems. The connection you've made is thought-provoking and highlights the complex interplay between embodiment, perception, and consciousness.

Tunnel/rev 4

Pando

Aerial outline of Pando, with Fish Lake in the foreground.
Lance Oditt / Friends of Pando, Author provided

Back in 1977, yours truly took a serious road trip to Colorado to check out a design conference in Aspen. After attending said conference, the Four Corners beckoned as the vehicle I had was the VW Camper Bus, the best way, IMHO, to see America as this voyage took well over a month and traversed thousands of miles before returning to CT. In doing the explore, Pando was one destination to remain forever imprinted in my mind because of the fluttering of leaves presenting to the viewer a wonderful shimmer bordering on the magical. When reading this piece from The Conversation, sadness comes to mind in terms of how man screws up the balance of nature, in this case, removing wolves and cougars from the equation, allowing deer populations to explode and eat the trees of Pando without a care in the world as Pando's protected while wolves and cougars are decidedly not. 

The Four Corners region is the red circle in this map. The Four Corners states are highlighted in orange.

In the Wasatch Mountains of the western US on the slopes above a spring-fed lake, there dwells a single giant organism that provides an entire ecosystem on which plants and animals have relied for thousands of years. Found in my home state of Utah, “Pando” is a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones.

Although it looks like a woodland of individual trees with striking white bark and small leaves that flutter in the slightest breeze, Pando (Latin for “I spread”) is actually 47,000 genetically identical stems that arise from an interconnected root network. This single genetic individual weighs around 6,000 tonnes. By mass, it is the largest single organism on Earth.

Pando has been around for thousands of years, potentially up to 14,000 years, despite most stems only living for about 130 years. Its longevity and remoteness mean a whole ecosystem of 68 plant species and many animals have evolved and been supported under its shade. This entire ecosystem relies on the aspen remaining healthy and upright. But, although Pando is protected by the US National Forest Service and is not in danger of being cut down, it is in danger of disappearing due to several other factors.

Overgrazing by deer and elk is one of the biggest worries. Wolves and cougars once kept their numbers in check, but herds are now much larger because of the loss of these predators. Deer and elk also tend to congregate in Pando as the protection the woodland receives means they are not in danger of being hunted there.

As older trees die or fall down, light reaches the woodland floor which stimulates new clonal stems to start growing, but when these animals eat the tops off newly forming stems, they die. This means in large portions of Pando there is little new growth. The exception is one area that was fenced off a few decades ago to remove dying trees. This fenced-off area has excluded elk and deer and has seen successful regeneration of new clonal stems, with dense growth referred to as the “bamboo garden”.

Well-disguised deer eating Pando shoots. Lance Oditt / Friends of Pando, Author provided

Climate change and diseases are other factors impacting the grove but Bambi's the biggest factor by far.

Project 2025 redux

President Donald Trump signs an executive order at an indoor Presidential Inauguration
event in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Project 2025's alive and well with Agent Orange, the new POTUS, actively signing executive orders designed to implement the Heritage Foundation's view of a far right America controlled by the rich and religious described with passion as the Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.

To whit

Of the 26 formal executive orders Trump signed on Monday, 16 mirrored at least in part proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Project 2025 to reshape the federal government, according to an analysis by The Lever.

That includes orders that withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, end Biden’s electric vehicle mandates, and increase oil and gas drilling in Alaska — all proposals that first appeared in Project 2025 months earlier.

It gets better.

Several architects of Project 2025 are now filling out the Trump administration. Russell Vought, the former vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s sister organization Heritage Action for America — who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States — was nominated by Trump to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the agency tasked with developing the president’s proposed budget and executing Trump’s agenda. Vought previously headed the agency during the first Trump administration. 

Trump nominated Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission, the same agency that Carr wrote a chapter about for Project 2025. In the chapter, Carr calls to end the censoring of “political viewpoints,” specifically singling out Facebook and YouTube’s censorship policies. 

As for billionaires, the tech bros are in alignment.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, recently announced that Facebook would begin promoting political content and end its third-party fact-checking program. Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, attended Trump’s inauguration. 

Musk as DOGE commander needs no introduction nor does Bezos

Regarding the environment ...

Other executive orders issued by Trump offer additional benefits to the corporate interests that backed the Heritage Foundation and his presidency. Several will roll back climate and environmental rules, as suggested by Project 2025. The moves are a win for oil and gas interests like Koch Industries, the petrochemical giant that funds the Heritage Foundation through its sprawling dark money philanthropic network.

Trump’s executive orders roll back Biden-era limits on oil and gas leasing on federal land, strip energy efficiency standards for household appliances, and eliminate incentives for electric vehicles. These victories for oil and gas interests were proposed in Project 2025, which instructed that a new administration “must immediately roll back Biden’s orders” on climate.

Trump also followed Project 2025’s directives to open up fragile Alaska wilderness to oil and gas drilling — even though the oil industry has been hesitant to take on such a project given the high costs and risks of drilling in far-flung, undeveloped land. In his executive order “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” he reinstated a plan launched during his first administration to allow drilling and development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, which had received new protections under the Biden administration.

In closing, profit "trumps" climate change, a take resembling Custer's Last Stand in the cosmic scheme of things as nature always finds a way.

Lithograph showing the Battle of Little Bighorn, from the Indian side.

Caught in the act

This artist’s conception of the mid-IR flare in Sgr A* captures the variability, or changing intensity, of the flare as the black hole’s magnetic field lines approach each other. The byproduct of this magnetic reconnection is synchrotron emission. The emission seen in the flare intensifies as energized electrons travel along the SMBH’s magnetic field lines at close to the speed of light. Credit: CfA/Mel Weiss

On 6 April 2024, the black hole let out a flare observed in mid-infrared wavelengths, followed by a radio flare counterpart.

Although Sgr A* belches out the occasional flare, this is the first time we've captured it in mid-infrared – one of the missing pieces of the puzzle of the black hole's behavior, according to a team led by astronomer Sebastiano von Fellenberg from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.

"Sgr A*'s flare evolves and changes quickly, in a matter of hours, and not all of these changes can be seen at every wavelength," says astrophysicist Joseph Michail of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

"For over 20 years, we've known what happens in the radio and Near-infrared (NIR) ranges, but the connection between them was never 100 percent clear. This new observation in mid-infrared fills in that gap."

Our galaxy's black hole

The SA ...

 Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

The SA, AKA Brown Shirts, was the goon squad for the Nazis until the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 whereby they were replaced by the SS, a far more efficient tool used to enforce Nazi rule along with its involvement with implementing the Final Solution, now has an updated version when Trump pardoned more then 1500 rioters who participated in the January 6 fiasco to upend the Constitution in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election won by Joe Biden with a majority of over 7 million votes. 

Members of the Sturmabteilung arrest communists in Berlin.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, a former Republican district leader in Queens, jumped through a broken window at the U.S. Capitol with a megaphone. He pushed his way past a line of Capitol Police officers and opened the exterior doors of the Rotunda to allow other rioters to enter the building and trash it. “We stormed the Capitol!” he exulted on video, and was seen smoking marijuana and high-fiving other Donald Trump supporters who were fighting the police. “We shut it down! We did it!”

Nearly three years later, a federal jury convicted Mr. Grillo of multiple offenses. But he did not lose heart: Last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison, he had a special taunt for the federal district judge who sentenced him, Royce Lamberth.

“Trump’s going to pardon me anyways,” he yelled at the judge, just before he was handcuffed and led away.

He was right. On Monday evening, several hours after President Trump was inaugurated, he fulfilled a promise he had repeatedly made to pardon nearly all the rioters who attacked and desecrated the Capitol in 2021 to prevent Joe Biden’s victory from being certified. Mr. Grillo and about 1,500 other rioters received full pardons from Mr. Trump, while 14 others received commuted sentences.

But what Mr. Trump did Monday is of an entirely different scope. He used a mass pardon at the beginning of his term to write a false chapter of American history, to try to erase a crime committed against the foundations of American democracy.

It's worse than that, what Trump did created a private army, ready to keep this guy in power when 2028 rolls around as the 1500 is but a morsel of the numbers of virulent MAGAs ready to support their guy if he makes the call for him to remain in power to keep America great again no matter the cost. 

The SA insignia

8 states ...

Schrödinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead, is the glamor puss of quantum mechanics, the star participant in a theory most mystifying when it comes to trying to learn how reality works at deep level, is now being applied to building viable quantum computers thanks to Antimony, an element with 8 possible spin states leading to a better way to safeguard the inherently delicate qubit data generated by quantum computers. 

To whit.

Antimony

The new method encodes quantum information onto an antimony atom, which has eight possible states that enable data to be more safely stored than in a standard two-state qubit, or quantum bit.

The breakthrough is a vital step in making errors within quantum systems less likely to occur, and, when they do, make them more easily detected and corrected — a key barrier to the development of quantum computers. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Jan.14) in the journal Nature Physics.

But if noise within a quantum computer causes this spin to suddenly change (as often happens), the quantum state would be lost, producing an error and destroying the information within.

To get around this problem, the researchers behind the new study embedded an antimony atom, which has eight different spin directions, inside a silicon quantum chip. The six additional spin directions of the antimony atom (obtained by the atom’s composite nature that adds multiple individual spins) means that, unlike in a two spin-state system, a single error isn't enough to destroy the encoded information.

"As the proverb goes, a cat has nine lives. One little scratch is not enough to kill it," co-author Benjamin Wilhelm, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and telecommunications at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, said in a statement. "Our metaphorical 'cat' has seven lives: it would take seven consecutive errors to turn the '0' into a '1'!"

Photo by Pacto Visual on Unsplash

Gobbledygook ...

This all too common trait expressed endlessly by cops, politicians and academics of all stripes, contradicts
The Elements of Style in ways boggling the mind.

Chart: The Economist

From “asymmetric allylation of aldehydes” to “pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations”, PhD abstracts had an unmistakably scholarly aroma. We found that, in every discipline, the abstracts have become harder to read over the past 80 years. The shift is most stark in the humanities and social sciences (see chart), with average Flesch scores falling from around 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s. From the 1990s onwards, those fields went from being substantially more readable than the natural sciences—as you might expect—to as complicated. Ms Louks’s abstract had a reading-ease rating of 15, still more readable than a third of those analysed in total.

​​Other studies of academic writing have similar findings: scientific jargon and acronyms are on the rise. The blame does not fall solely on authors. Specialization and advances in technology require more precise terminology and a doctoral thesis often covers some of the most obscure research topics. With millions of views, Ms Louks might lay claim to one of the most-read PhD abstracts of all time. She has since posted, “I love that I have somehow equipped everyone with new terminology and frameworks!” But surging interest in olfactory ethics aside, the trend towards illegible academic writing stinks. Clear prose would be a breath of fresh air. ■

This is THE BOOK to read if you want to learn how to write. Concise, witty and above all else, competent, this little tome points the way to good writing with short commandments already adhered to by heavyweights like Hemingway, Faulkner and Orwell. Every time I reread Elements, I think of Orwell, master of the active tense and the self proclaimed enemy of turgid prose as seen by his insightful essay, Politics and the English Language.

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.