research as a hobby, blog edition

11 Nov, 2026

last updated 0 minutes ago

this post is gonna be some thoughts on two research topics i am trying to wrangle into shape for a blog or video or either. i think i try too hard to make videos in particular more of an ✨ experience ✨ which means i want a coherent, entertaining and novel point to make, which might be asking a lot of myself. i am a lot more comfortable throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall on this blog. but you don't want to listen to me, you just want to dance:

natural "immunity"

• immunity/natural resistance to a certain "poison". can stop consuming whenever I want, don't find it painful to withdraw from, and may not even be particularly drawn to it (social media, AI, processed food¹)
  • with processed food i know there are reasons some people just aren't interested - flavour preferences, ghrelin levels, other hormones - but what's the mechanism for some people being more predisposed to doomscrolling than others? not all down to neurodivergence i assume given the volume of complaint, and anecdotally knowing ND people who don't struggle with scrolling habits.
  • social media/mobile phones aren't addictive in the traditional sense. confounding factor?

infrastructural technologies that remade the world

• trains
  • massively disruptive
  • changed leisure
  • made the United States
  • took you from being able to go ten miles from home max to the entire country
  • surprised i couldn't find a non-train nerd book on this topic but i will try one of the ones i found
• telephone
  • literally can't imagine going from no ability to contact someone synchronously who wasn't in front of you to hearing their voice over wire in X years
  • mobile phone networks surely electrifying in a similar way
  • gutta-pecha and other materials used for early undersea cables
  • needed for the creation of the first subsea cables in the 1800s was extracted from southeast asia and lead to the collapse in population and near extinction of this type of tree due to the unsustainable practices used to produce enough for demand
    • other "materiality of the web" stuff could be a whole other section of this post!
  • copper wire phone lines being phased out, even though they would apparently still work in power cuts/blacksky scenarios?

(AI) data centers... in space?!

• a response to and explanation of spaceX's attempt at this from darksky international
  • i'm interested in dark skies (most people could see the milky way at night from outside of their homes for most of history! no more!) separately 😈
• environmental impact of launching one million starlink AI data center capable satellites (as is the plan in the above if you didn't click lol)
• in case you weren't sad/annoyed already google is also thinking about a similar idea.
• low earth orbit full of AI satellites? it's more likely than you think.

what have you been researching recently? what rabbit holes are you going down? let we know!

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