On my mind - March 2026
Whatever is strange, whatever is quirky, whatever is deeply fascinating, whatever is completely obscure, if there is any curiosity, if there is any rabbit hole worth falling down, think on these things.
Here is what occupied my mind in March:
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Uber’s double clock. I noticed that Uber shows different estimated arrival times to the driver and the passenger. The passenger sees a slightly shorter wait. I assume this is deliberate: a small psychological cushion so you feel the driver arrived on time or even early, rather than stewing over every extra minute. Clever, slightly manipulative, and I respect it.
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The case for intelligent design. I find it puzzling when people dismiss the argument for an intelligently designed universe outright. The human eye is the classic example: an organ of extraordinary complexity that supposedly evolved from a primitive patch of light-sensitive cells. The counter-argument is well known. But could we actually model the probability? A simulation that tests how likely it is to get from that simple photosensitive patch to the eye we have now, given the timescales involved. I would love to see it play out.
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Thanking bus drivers. In some parts of the UK, you thank the bus driver on the way out. Growing up in Òṣogbo, riding
korope A shared minibus common in Òṣogbo and across Osun State. Usually a seven-seater Suzuki or similar. -
Why do we sleep? Have we always slept for roughly eight hours? Who slept first, which organism? When was sleep first recorded as a thing people did, as opposed to something people just did without thinking about it? It is one of those activities so fundamental that nobody thought to write about it until surprisingly late.
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Amanda Askell on AI ethics. I watched her conversation with Anthropic and I think she has one of the most fascinating and consequential jobs of this era. Philosophy, ethics, morality: these have always been theoretical disciplines. Now they are applied. The people shaping the ethical guardrails of AI models are confronted with questions that directly affect how millions of people receive information, make decisions, and understand the world. That shift from theory to application is what fascinates me.
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Immigrants and politics. Are immigrants disproportionately driven by financial concerns when forming political views? My instinct says yes. When stability is not a given, economics becomes everything. I am also curious about the opposite end: how apolitical many immigrants become over time. There is a quiet disengagement that I think comes from never fully feeling like the country’s politics are your politics.
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AI writing has a tell. There is a rhetorical structure AI-generated text leans on heavily: “not because of X, but because of Y”. Once you notice it, you cannot unsee it. It shows up in emails, LinkedIn posts, even published articles. What I find more interesting than spotting it is why models default to it. My guess: the training data is full of persuasive writing, and that construction does two things at once, it anticipates your assumption and corrects it. It feels like insight, so it gets rewarded, so the model reaches for it again. A rhetorical crutch born from optimisation.
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The point of silent letters. Why does “knight” need a k? These letters were not always silent; they were pronounced in Old English and Middle English. They fossilised in our spelling while the pronunciation moved on. What would happen if we simply dropped them? Would English lose something, or would it just become more honest?
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Push notification badges. Why does the red notification badge bother me on any app, not just the ones I care about? I could have an app I have not opened in weeks, and that little dot still nags at me. It is a tiny open loop my brain refuses to leave alone. Knowing it is engineered to exploit a completionist instinct does not make it less effective. I want to understand what it is about an unresolved count that overrides the rational knowledge that nothing in that app matters to me right now.
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The origin of surnames. At some point in history, “John” was not enough and we needed “John the Baker” or “John, son of William”. Surnames are compressed histories: they encode what your ancestor did, where they lived, or who their father was. I want to trace when different cultures made the leap from single names to family names, and why.
Share what’s on your mind. I read everything. No promises I will respond to all of them, but if something hooks me, I will reach out.
Drop a thought ↓
Thought captured. Thank you!