Today, across the dailies
Three daily surfaces I run, each on its own audience — a word and where it came from, a U.S. patent worth looking at, a paradox worth re-reading. Three independent rotations; this page is the editorial home that pulls today's pick from each. The dailies live where their readers find them; this is where they sit together.
consider
To consider is to think a thing over carefully — and the oldest guess about the word is that it means to read the stars. Latin <em>considerare</em> looks like <em>con-</em> ("with, together") plus <em>sidus / sideris</em> ("star, constellation"): to observe the stars, perhaps as a navigator reads them to fix a course, perhaps as an augur reads them before an action is permitted to begin. It would make <em>consider</em> the sibling of <em>desire</em> (<em>de sidere</em>, "from the stars"). The turn is beautiful and it is genuinely unsettled — de Vaan weighs the alternatives and commits to none; one scholar (Tucker) doubted the star-reading and proposed a different derivation; and <em>sidus</em> itself has no agreed origin. So this is the leading story, not the proven one: to consider may be, at the root, to stand under a sky you did not write and read it for what to do.
Three-Electrode Circuit Element Utilizing Semiconductive Materials
The transistor. Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated the point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947 — a small slab of germanium with two close-spaced gold contacts on its surface. William Shockley, their group leader, was furious not to be on the patent and within a month had designed the more practical junction transistor. All three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize. Bardeen would win a second Nobel in 1972 for superconductivity — still the only person to win the physics prize twice. By 2024, an estimated 13 sextillion transistors had been manufactured worldwide.
Simpson’s Paradox
A trend that appears in groups of data can disappear or reverse when the groups are combined.
The classic instance: in 1973, UC Berkeley’s graduate admissions appeared to favor men. Broken down by department, almost every department favored women. Women were applying disproportionately to departments with low admit rates. The aggregate trend was real; the per-department trend was real; both were correct, and they pointed in opposite directions. The paradox is most often presented as a statistical curiosity, but the deeper problem is that almost every “controlled for” claim in observational data depends on choosing the right grouping — and the data alone cannot tell you which grouping is right. The choice is causal, not statistical, and you cannot make it without a theory of how the world works. Simpson published the canonical 1951 paper; Pearson and Yule had stumbled into the same structure half a century earlier without naming it.