Jorg Brown

racer, coder, EV driver, father of three, master of none

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@JungleJoosh @ryangrim Literally every other armed force in the region isn’t invading Lebanon. Probably because the leaders of those other nations aren’t on trial - trial that can only be paused by war.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@Jlcash_n @esaagar Yes, "inflation-adjusted" income isn’t "fixed". That's what the word "fixed" means.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@ggreenwald While the problem is nowhere near as bad, I've seen the same on the left: There are Dems who think the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was fake news.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@jeremyscahill The last 2 times the Iranians thought they were close to a deal… didn't Israel kill all the Iranian negotiators?

I want to believe a deal is close, I really do. But it's hard for me to imagine Netanyahu allowing any peace that would allow his own trial to resume without delay.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@yashiran @jeremyscahill I once believed reports of an internet blackout in Iran. But the tweets by senior Iranian officials made me wonder… and then I saw the Iranian Lego propaganda videos, and the *video* interviews with the creators of those videos… so I don't believe those reports anymore.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

The problem isn’t what you don’t know. The problem is git itself. Git puts everything in easy reach, regardless of how useless or destructive. If cars were designed like git, there would be seven pedals on the floor: brake, clutch, hood release, parking brake, gas pedal, passenger eject, and windshield wipers. And mistakenly ejected passengers would be a common problem, for which most people would blame bad drivers. It’s infuriating.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@esaagar That’s because Trump correctly sees the Epstein files as an existential threat to his presidency.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@ryangrim But what are they trying to accomplish? Iranian lego videos are aimed at American voters, as part of regime change Iran wants to see in November. That's why Iran's lego vids are in English.

What's Cuba trying to accomplish with Spanish-language videos?

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@MarcGar73219607 @LiamHalligan Except the Trump administration may be selling short these futures so that the reported price of oil seems lower than it should be. I don't know what else would explain the disconnect between short-term futures, and spot prices, which are further apart than ever before.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

If I didn’t know this was an actual creature, I’d assume it was a piece of nanotechnology!

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

Bdelloid Rotifers have been having sex for 50 million years.

Except they haven't.

Every single one of these microscopic chainsaw mouth creatures you see under a microscope is a female. They clone themselves. Perfect genetic copies, generation after generation, for longer than mammals have existed on Earth.

Evolution textbooks will tell you this is impossible. Sexual reproduction exists because it shuffles genes and creates diversity. Without it, harmful mutations accumulate. Populations crash. Extinction follows.

Bdelloids missed that memo completely.

They survive radiation doses that would liquify a human. They dry out into dust for decades, then resurrect when water returns. They endure temperatures that freeze solid and heat that boils. They've colonized every continent including Antarctica.

All while breaking the fundamental rule that sex is required for evolutionary success.

The secret lies in their feeding strategy. Those rotating mouth crowns that look like biological chainsaws do more than shred algae. When rotifers eat, they accidentally consume DNA fragments from their prey. Instead of digesting these genetic pieces, they incorporate foreign genes directly into their own genome.

They turned eating into horizontal gene transfer.

While every other complex animal relies on mating to remix DNA, rotifers steal genetic diversity from their lunch. They've been practicing genetic engineering for 50 million years without realizing it.

The implications rewrite what we thought we knew about survival. These creatures prove that life finds ways around rules we assumed were absolute. They've solved the genetic diversity problem without sex, the aging problem without death, and the environmental stress problem without hiding.

They're living proof that evolution has backup plans we never imagined.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@its_The_Dr This is altered video to make the train look much, much faster than it actually is. You can see the original at https://t.co/0p7TZJUHeR

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Lithuanian composer and conductor Mindaugas Piečaitis, directs his orchestra on the notes of Nora the cat playing the piano.

She earns a standing ovation.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@esaagar Thinking that we could win that war quickly is a big part of why we got into it.

I predict Trump will still be at war with Iran in five months.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet.

His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard.

The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language.

Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort.

Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes.

After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in.

Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter.

She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying.

The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it.

The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works.

Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them.

You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank.

He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort.

Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning.

The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely.

This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique.

The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies.

Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words.

Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work.

His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning.

He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about.

He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that.

The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours.

They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@empyrez55 @CBSSacramento It’s only about a dollar less, not half.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@Lina_rays1ya I trust that if I asked them what to do for an important decision, they would make the wrong choice. So if there was a “-100%” choice, that would be my answer.

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@spenderallegra It's been almost 2 years... has @TheEconomist done an update on the Solar Age?

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@TheTeslaHoe That just means you're in one of the good Teslas. Here's what can happen if you're in a bad Tesla: https://t.co/Fw1xoZRUeC

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

@ByOtherMeansX @esaagar @ryangrim And not on Netanyahu, the leader that orchestrated the killing of 200,000 Gazans, and launched the Iran war in the first place?

[Jorg Brown @jorgbrown]

Damn! Just look at the degree on that chick!

(I didn't have the patience to continue on for a PhD, so I'm always impressed by those who stick to it. Her thesis was about insects but also has implications for coordination in multi-agent AI systems.)

[Dr Juliet Turner @juliet_turner6]

🎊 I passed my viva exam!

After ~4 years of research, I successfully defended my thesis.

You can call me Doctor 😎