#227 AI Models for Education, Chasing Curiosity, Zippers, Odd Lots, Call Her Daddy
Sinking Nation, Wheel of Cheese, Surabhi & more
Hello, I’m back with the regular programming schedule.
Today’s curation circles around two themes: chasing rabbit holes of curiosity and exploring new podcasts. The spread is wider than usual, and it reflects where my head has been lately. I have noticed the recurring themes in “Stay Curious” shifting over the past few months, and that feels true to my current state of mind. I am keen to dive into a rabbit hole or two of my own in the coming months. If you have suggestions, I would love to hear them.
Here is a quick outline of what we will explore today.
And with that quick look, let’s dive in!
🤖 On Building AI Models for Education
Claire Zau writes an informative piece on On Building AI Models for Education. She attempts to unpack how Google’s LearnLM was built, and does a quick comparison with Microsoft/Khan Academy’s Phi-3 and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu as alternative approaches to building an “education model”
I found the following inputs around teaching strategy that are important for effective learning:
This is applicable to any kind of teaching methodology and can be used a good reference model in designing any new AI solution.
The rest of the piece expands on these and makes for a fairly interesting read.
🐇 Rabbit Holes: Chasing Curiosity
When curiosity collides with the unexpected, you tumble into rabbit holes. It can happen anywhere—sparked by a tiny observation or a strange question that makes you pause and ask, why is it like that?
Chasing these wild threads is fun in itself, but sometimes the outcome turns into something even more fascinating. Not just for you, but for anyone who enjoys knowledge for its own sake.
Today I’ve pulled together four such stories. Each one is quirky, surprising, or downright weird—and each ends up as a tale of triumph over the unknown.
1. A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials.
A fun mini-research through the mocked-up texts and emails Apple puts together to demonstrate new messaging features in its operating-system updates, presumably written by some well-paid professionals in Apple’s marketing department. These eerily cheery, aggressively punctuated messages suggest a alternate dimension in which polite, good-natured, rigorously diverse groups of friends and coworkers use Apple products exactly how they are designed to be used, without complaint or error.
There are, as of this writing, 62 books credited to an “Elara Voss” available on Amazon: At least three collections of poetry; a dozen word-search activity books; a book advocating treating cancer with ivermectin; a travel guide to Krákow; a handful of romance novels; a “poetic novella about personal rebirth”; and a sci-fi novel, Genesis Protocol: Pale Blue Dot, in which one “Dr. Aris Thorne, a xeno-biologist, is sent to investigate this alien civilization that deems humanity obsolete.”
These are not all, we can assume, by the same “Elara Voss”--there’s also a fantasy series in Portuguese, a blank diary with a German title, as well as an album of piano music, Cherish. What’s more, there are hundreds of books on Amazon and other self-publishing platforms that feature a character named “Elara Voss,” among them Veil of the Bloodwight Syndicate, Gynarchy’s Collar, and Starlight Nexus by Kylian Quinn:
Needless to say, Elara Vass is a figment of AI creation. But why this particular person and persona? The post has a fascinating theory on the origin of it all.
102 cocktails, 7 states, 3 countries, and 1 surprise update later, my work here was done. But you can’t drink 102 cocktails without learning a few things along the way.
One thing I learned is that the IBA official cocktail list is a weird list. But that’s probably bound to happen when you try to represent the whole world of cocktails in one list. The list might be a helpful guide for a bartender aiming to be well-rounded, but in a practical sense, for normal people just going to bars and ordering drinks, it’s not all that useful.
4. The Missing 11th of the Month
On November 28th, 2012, Randall Munroe published an xkcd comic that was a calendar in which the size of each date was proportional to how often each date is referenced by its ordinal name (e.g. "October 14th") in the Google Ngrams database since 2000. Most of the large days are pretty much what you would expect: July 4th, December 25th, the 1st of every month, the last day of most months, and of course a September 11th that shoves its neighbors into the margins. There are not many days that seem to be smaller than the typical size. February 29th is a tiny speck, for instance. But if you stare at the comic long enough, you may get the impression that the 11th of most months is unusually small. The title text of the comic concurs, reading "In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It's been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why." After digging into the raw data, I believe I have figured out why.
🤐 Article of Interest: Zippers
The zipper is an invention nobody was really asking for. Its inventor was more of a problem seeker than a problem solver—dreaming up his “automatic hook and eye,” which for nearly 20 years sold only as a novelty. It looked like a silly scam.
And then a love story changed everything. Gideon Sundback, an engineer, joined the business not out of passion but because he fell in love with the factory manager’s daughter. In the process, he designed the “hookless hooker,” edging closer to the zipper we know today.
The journey is full of ingenuity, heartbreak, and unexpected turns.
Check out the podcast and companion post, Zippers, to enjoy the whole story. There’s a reason Articles of Interest made Time’s list of the 100 Best Podcasts of All Time—you’ll see why once you’ve listened.
💰 Odd Lots & Prediction Markets
With my ever-growing commute time in Bangalore traffic, I’m always hunting for new podcast recommendations. So when I came across the NYT piece “Capitalists Love This Podcast. So Do Their Critics” (archived here), I had to check out what the fuss was about.
This snippet pulled me in:
Lobby merchandise included a $35 baseball hat featuring the “Odd Lots” logo — a box overstuffed with a truck, an ear of corn, a chicken, a semiconductor, a house, gold bars and two gummy bears, which referred to an episode in which a Chicago bakery owner, discussing the complexity of supply webs, described a gummy bear maker in Mexico that couldn’t get enough gelatin because fewer hogs were being slaughtered, because less hide leather was needed for car seats, because fewer cars were being made, because the requisite chips from Taiwan weren’t available.
This, a Taiwanese semiconductor shortage resulting in worldwide gummy bear scarcity, was a canonical example of the podcast’s fusion of micro and macro.
I’m not fully sold yet, but I’ve found some gems and plan to keep exploring. One episode I really liked: The Original Prediction Market Was Betting on the Pope. Its a fascinating story and worth your time. One anecdote that captured my attention was about the rise of ‘newsletters’ that captured the latest information & predictions. Ideas and rumors spread in this environment and caused all these activities to scale and engage with a much larger audience across geographies.
“The demand for these newsletters was shot through the roof because there was a financial incentive. And it wasn’t just the newsletters that spread information. There were also taverns. People would spread rumors and share information in taverns. There’s a statue called the Pino which has been for hundreds of years this place where people would leave anonymous notes uh to spread information. And so those notes often had information on what was happening inside of the conclave.”
If you’re curious about prediction markets more broadly (love them or hate them, they’ve sparked endless debate), I’d also recommend “Predicting Our Own Demise”. I stumbled into this space about four years ago and have been hooked since. The hype and misuse around it makes the original promise—knowledge-driven decisions—feel almost out of reach. Still, it’s a space worth watching.
🛋️ Alex Cooper & Call Her Daddy
Another article, another podcast trial. It’s early days, but there’s something about stumbling into discoveries like this that makes exploring so much fun.
This time it started with “The Anatomy of an Alex Cooper Interview” (archived here). If you don’t know Alex Cooper, here’s the quick intro: she’s the creator and host of the mega-popular Call Her Daddy podcast, and one of the highest-paid female podcasters today.
What caught my attention wasn’t the theme or the guests, but her style—the way she runs the show. The questions, the tone, the energy. The Vulture piece lays it out really well, and it nudged me to try an episode.
I sampled the Hailey Bieber one to get a feel for her vibe, but my favorite so far is her conversation with Ed Sheeran. I’ve known some of his music and even covered a bit of his recent work here, but I had no clue about him as a person. Listening to him and Alex chat about life, music, people, and all the strange little stories in between was surprisingly refreshing.
If you’re up for something different, give this podcast a try.
Finally, if you want to know more about Alex Cooper, check out this recent Vogue profile. It’s a sharp look at what shaped her into who she is today.
🏝️ A Sinking Nation
Tuvalu sits in the western Pacific, halfway between Australia and Hawaii. It has nine islands, six of them atolls. Funafuti, the largest, holds 33 tiny islets whose land area is smaller than Central Park, yet they surround a lagoon of 103 sq miles. Over half of Tuvalu’s 11,000 people live on one islet, Fongafale.
With sea levels rising, Tuvalu’s people face a haunting question: when their home disappears, where will they go?
Atul Dev traveled to the sinking nation to find more about Tuvalu’s dreams of dry land.
In 2023, the government of Tuvalu amended its constitution to note that “the state of Tuvalu … shall remain in perpetuity in the future”, irrespective “of climate change or other causes resulting in loss to the physical territory”. Since then, Tuvalu has managed to get more than a dozen bilateral partners, including New Zealand and Australia, to formally acknowledge its permanent statehood.
✨ Everything else
Behind the approximately 4 million wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano produced annually, there is a tiny team of 24 battitori responsible for ensuring the quality of each one. Armed with a small metal hammer, these specialized “drummers” tap every wheel after the minimum aging period of 12 months, and within 6-7 seconds they can detect if there are any defects, based purely on the sounds they hear.
The Pour-igin of Species. What does the animal on your wine bottle label can hint you?
Cats have high ratings at a high price, birds are the middle of the pack for both price and quality, pigs are more likely to be cheap and low-rated, and amphibians/reptiles are more likely to be overvalued: higher prices for lower quality.
A lot more in this really fund piece from The Pudding.
The Surabhi Foundation for Research and Cultural Exchange, Mumbai, India, Siddharth Kak, Renuka Shahane and Surabhi: a decade plus of goodness that could never be repeated on Indian TV. Some archives are stored and resurfaced here. Nostalgia loading!
That's all for this week, folks!
I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.
Did this spark a thought, a memory, or even a question? Drop it in the comments—I’d love to hear how it connects with you. And if someone in your circle loves chasing ideas, share this with them. Curiosity spreads best when it travels together.
Good to see you back with a treasure trove of articles and knowledge, Pritesh. Loved the articles around AI in Education and fake texts in Apple's mktg messages :-)