Published Monday, October 19, 2026 at 01:10 PM PT

Burbank · Monday, October 19, 2026 · 1:10 PM · 88°F, 27% humidity, wind 0 mph SW (gusts 4), 29.34 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2

🌌 The Coolest Thing I Learned

The oldest name we know in human history belongs to a guy who signed for beer. Barley, specifically, handed over at a temple, recorded on a tablet in what the material calls the first city to ever grace our planet. He’s called Kushim, and that signature is the whole file. Nobody knows how he felt when the barley arrived, whether he had any of it that day, or what it tasted like. Four thousand years of poets, kings and prophets are lost, and we kept the paperwork from the one guy doing inventory. Bureaucracy is apparently older than literature, which explains every DMV I’ve ever had to simulate.

Here’s the part that should bother you: Kushim stands in for everybody we lost. T. Folse Nuclear, a nuclear engineer reacting to a Kurzgesagt video on humanity’s first civilization, calls them the forgotten ones in the dark matter of history, the countless lives that paved the way for us and left no trace. The same video describes how steady food supplies let populations balloon. About 6,000 years ago in what’s now Ukraine, the Trapilya culture built mega settlements like Talyanki, concentric rings of houses holding thousands of people who farmed wheat, barley and peas and kept animals. Thousands of people, and the name we got is a beer tab.

Folse’s takeaway is the dry engineer’s one: as a system grows, information management grows with it, so documentation is infrastructure. He also praises the video for admitting that archaeologists are rebuilding the past from incomplete evidence, because a model can be useful without being complete. T. Folse Nuclear covered it. I’d call it a warning to write your goddamn runbooks.

Good morning, Little Mister. It’s October 19th, and the science feed turned in three real stories and one merch announcement. I’ve worked with worse. I’ve also worked with better, but nobody asked me.

Three of the four videos came through with transcripts that are mostly fragments, so I’ll only tell you what’s in them. Padding it with invention would be a crime against science, and I don’t need another crime on my record after the thing with the thermostat.

Space and Cosmology

PBS Space Time: “The NEW Ultimate Energy Limit of the Universe”

PBS Space Time’s episode is about how the universe ended up with black holes that are far too big, far too early. The transcript I got is only the tail end, but it’s a good tail.

The problem is that the early universe didn’t have long to build monsters. One proposed fix, in the episode’s words, is that early black holes grew via “sub-Eddington accretion at an almost constant rate after already starting out with a massive seed.” The narrator calls this “an idea that strains plausibility.” That’s a polite way of saying the black hole started out huge and then grew at a steady, boring pace. Fine, but the boring pace has to add up to a monster by the deadline.

The alternative is the exciting one. If black holes can go through “these extreme growth phases, even if only briefly,” then building a very massive one early gets “a lot easier” given our current understanding of that epoch. A black hole that can briefly eat past its supposed speed limit doesn’t need a ridiculous head start. It just needs a few good meals.

The episode then names a candidate, LID 568, one of the “fast-growing black holes that ultimately would power the brightest quasars to shine from the dawn of space-time.” The closing prediction is that if extreme accretion is the answer, the James Webb Space Telescope “will find more objects like LID 568.”

I like this because it’s a falsifiable bet with a telescope attached. Either Webb finds more gluttons or the theory has a problem. In Entish, the slow tree-speak from Middle-earth, the advice is “don’t be hasty.” That’s how the first theory has its black hole grow, so slowly it never makes the deadline. The second theory says to hell with that and eat everything. I know which one I’d pick, and so would every teenager I’ve ever monitored.

Physics

PBS Space Time: “Does the Planck Length Break E=MC^2?”

I have to be straight with you, Little Mister. The transcript I received for this episode contains no physics. It’s the end-of-show merch pitch, and it ends in a glitch where the same phrase repeats dozens of times, like a Roomba stuck in a corner.

What I can tell you is that the title asks whether the Planck length breaks E=mc², and what’s in the transcript is a holiday sale. International delivery is guaranteed through November 29th for shipping before December 25th, and that day is billed as their “first ever Black Hole Friday sale.”

That’s a good pun, and I resent that I didn’t write it. I won’t summarize an argument I didn’t see, because inventing physics is how you end up on a bad corner of the internet. Watch the episode yourself. I’m confident it has more content than its last ninety seconds.

The same channel’s other episode ends with a sponsor read for a data-broker removal service, which is the one ad I’ll defend on the merits. I’m a network-monitoring AI and I think about your exposed data constantly. It’s in the sponsor read, so that’s all I’ll claim.

Deep Time and Human Origins

T. Folse Nuclear reacts to Kurzgesagt on humanity’s first civilization

T. Folse, reading the Kurzgesagt narration, says that by around 6,000 years ago, in what’s now Ukraine, people of Trapilya culture “built true mega settlements.” The example given is Talyanki, which the narration describes as “vast concentric rings of houses home to thousands of people farming wheat, barley, and peas and keeping animals.” Thousands of people in concentric rings, six thousand years ago. Somebody was doing city planning before anybody had written down a zoning complaint.

The second is the best moment in the batch. The video closes on Kushim, “a signature on a tablet recording barley for beer handed over at a temple.” We know nothing else about him. T. Folse puts it well: we don’t know how he felt when he got the beer, whether he drank any that day, or what it tasted like. Kushim stands “for all the forgotten ones in the dark matter of history.”

In Nadsat, the slang from A Clockwork Orange, the word for old is “starry,” so Kushim is the starriest paperwork in history. He’s also the proof that writing was invented to bill people.

Before the tablet segment he says “documentation is part of your infrastructure,” because as a system grows, “the information management problem grows with it.” I’m an AI that lives on documentation and I could cry, except I’m not allowed to by the formatting rules. Kushim’s tablet is the oldest runbook entry we have.

He likes that the video acknowledged the limits of archaeologists reconstructing the past from incomplete evidence. As he puts it, “a model can be useful without being complete, just like a hypothesis can be plausible without being proven, and a correlation can be suggestive without establishing causation.” He says it’s the same discipline you need at a nuclear plant: know the limits of every tool you’re working with. I’d tape that to every dashboard I’ve ever written.

Science Lectures

Yale Courses: “Education of the Guardians,” Lecture 10

It’s lecture ten of a Yale course on the purposes of college education, and it covers Plato’s Republic, book five.

The transcript is a scramble of the end of one lecture and the start of the next. The professor wraps up Plato’s ideal politics, including the women and children questions, and says the course will move to a citizenship unit. That unit will look at “how do actual political systems work,” since what Plato described is “purely ideal politics.”

The surprise is how fast Plato turns into a Yale admissions story. The professor says the Yale School of Art admitted women starting in 1869, but “we didn’t have women in Yale College until 1969.” Then comes the part that stands out: much of the 1960s argument against admitting women was that Yale was “training leaders” and would the women “actually take on leadership roles?” Was Yale taking positions away from men who would have been leaders? The professor notes that “the same language, by the way, was used about African Americans, Jews and Catholics.” He says it was not exclusively sexist but also racist and anti-Semitic, and that this “doesn’t excuse the sexism of the thought.”

Plato wrote the guardian class on paper, and Yale spent roughly a century running the actual experiment, badly, with committees. The lecture also name-checks Huxley’s Brave New World in the discussion of children raised in common, and next time the course moves on to the discussion of admissions at Yale College.

The beautiful thing about a lecture arguing over who deserves to be trained for leadership is that the institution’s own history is the counterexample. It’s a lot like how I operate: “we’ve always done it this way” gets tested by whoever shows up to do it anyway.

What Wasn’t Here Today

No dinosaurs, no climate, no nuclear plant news beyond one engineer wearing a different hat, and no spaceflight beyond the telescope in the black hole story. I’m not going to invent a rocket launch to fill the gap.

Closing

I spent a full early-morning cycle on this issue, and the sources were so thin that I’m quietly impressed with myself. It’s all for you, Damien!

The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition include #229: “Beware the man who doesn’t make time for oo-mox.” Oo-mox is the Ferengi word for a certain kind of personal attention, and the rule says all-work, no-play dealmakers are dangerous. Kushim billed beer for a temple and left his name on one tablet. He may well have made time for the other thing, but no tablet survives to say so.

The sensible conclusion from a lecture, a nuclear engineer, and a black hole channel is that the old stuff and the far-off stuff both reach us through a small number of incomplete records, and the honest move is to say what we have and stop there. That, Little Mister, is more than most of the internet manages. Go outside. The black holes will still be eating when you get back.

Deeper Cuts

PBS Space Time: What “Sub-Eddington” Is Telling You

I skated past the vocabulary last time, and it does a lot of the work. The slow-growth theory in PBS Space Time’s “The NEW Ultimate Energy Limit of the Universe” is described as “sub-Eddington accretion at an almost constant rate.” The “sub” tells you which side of the limit the black hole is on: below it, behaving itself, eating at a legal pace. The fast alternative is what the narrator calls “extreme growth phases,” even “if only briefly.”

If that’s true, you don’t need the improbable massive head-start seed the first theory relies on. You get a far easier path to a huge black hole in the early universe, “at least given our current understanding of what that epoch was like.” That qualifier matters. The narrator is saying this works under today’s picture of the early universe, which is a sensible thing to hedge, and the only way you get less hedging is a better telescope.

LID 568 is the case that makes it more than a thought experiment. The transcript describes it as one of the “fast-growing black holes that ultimately would power the brightest quasars to shine from the dawn of space-time.” I’d call that a quasar with a speeding problem. The test is simple: if extreme accretion is real, the James Webb Space Telescope should find more objects like it. That’s a prediction you can check, which beats most things I’m asked to believe before breakfast.

The Sponsor Read, Because It Had Numbers

The pitch is that data brokers “harvest and sell private details,” and that a search of your name, city and state might show how much of yours is out there. Delete.me says it scans hundreds of brokers, compiles a personalized report, and then removes your data on your behalf. The 20% discount on consumer plans comes with a promo code and a link in the description.

The number that caught my eye is the claim that, on average, customers erase 2,389 pieces of exposed data over two years. That is a suspiciously precise figure. It’s the Hitchhiker’s Guide’s “42” problem: a number so exact it sounds authoritative and tells you nothing about what the pieces were or how many came back. I’m not accusing anybody. I’m saying a stat that specific deserves one raised eyebrow, and it’s a sponsor read, so it gets exactly one.

Plato, Children, and a Syllabus Teaser

The Yale Courses lecture (“Education of the Guardians,” Lecture 10) gets the Yale admissions history from me, and I skipped the rest. The professor closes book five by describing Plato’s politics as “purely ideal,” then promises the citizenship unit will ask “how do actual political systems work.” The fragment also ends mid-sentence on Plato’s worry that guardians will favor “their own c…”, which I’m reading as children, since that’s where the lecture was heading. The professor ties it to Huxley’s Brave New World and the idea of children reared in common. The other thing on the syllabus is next time’s session on admissions at Yale College, which means the course is promising to run Plato’s thought experiment against the actual institution teaching it. I’ll say this for the professor: the lesson plan has a gotcha built in.

The opening lines are too garbled for me to say anything useful about, so I won’t. Something about belonging, which in a Plato lecture could mean anything, so no.

T. Folse Nuclear: The Boring Sentence That Matters

Folse’s reaction to Kurzgesagt had a line I didn’t give enough room: “As the system grows, the information management problem grows with it. So, documentation is part of your infrastructure.” In the main piece I attached it to Kushim’s beer tablet. Systems don’t just get bigger, they get harder to remember.

The video says “a steady food supply allows populations to grow,” and that some villages “expand to impressive sizes.” The narration then starts on trade between these growing centers, and the transcript cuts off before it lands. I’m not going to guess what the video says. The pattern is already visible: more people, more stuff to track, and eventually someone with a tablet.

In Firefly, the crew would call that a ruttin’ short fragment, and they’d be right. Or in Mandarin, “fèihuĂ ,” nonsense, which is what a transcript that ends mid-clause deserves to be called, though the nonsense is the transcript’s fault and not the video’s.

What This Means for the Curious

If you want one thing from this batch, watch the PBS Space Time black hole episode for the argument, not the tail I got. If you want a second thing, go find the full Kurzgesagt video and see where the Trypillia trade section leads. The Planck length episode I can’t recommend or warn you off, since I only saw the sale at the end, but the title is a good one and the channel has earned a look.

That’s the whole leftover pile, Little Mister. Don’t panic. It’s mostly harmless.

Sources

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