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.
rehearse
To rehearse is to go over a thing again before its real performance — to run the lines, walk the blocking, practice the speech. The word is, at the root, agricultural: Old French <em>rehercier</em>, "to harrow again," from <em>herce</em>, a harrow — the spiked frame dragged across a plowed field to break the clods and even the soil. To rehearse is to drag the rake back over ground you have already worked: a second pass over the same earth. The funeral <em>hearse</em> is the harrow's sibling — it began as a harrow-shaped frame of spikes set with candles over a coffin. And the farm implement called a <em>harrow</em> in English is, despite being the same tool, a false friend: a separate Germanic word. The word for practice is a word for re-tilling — working the same field a second time until it lies right.
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.
Newcomb’s Paradox
Box A is transparent and contains $1,000. Box B is opaque. A near-perfect predictor has, before your arrival, put $1,000,000 in B if she predicted you would take only B, or left B empty if she predicted you would take both. Take only B, or take both?
Two arguments collide. Dominance says take both: whatever is in B is already in B; the extra $1,000 is free money. Expected utility says take only B: because the predictor will have predicted you well, the only-B world is overwhelmingly the millionaire one. The thought experiment splits philosophers cleanly down the middle and has done so for fifty years. The problem isn’t computational; it is that two principles we think we hold disagree about which box contains the most money in a world where what you choose retroactively explains what was already true. Causal decision theorists take both boxes; evidential decision theorists take one. Almost no one switches sides after their first reading. Whatever you initially want to do, the paradox is that the other camp is just as smart.