Published on November 2, 2025 12:12 PM GMT

I am tired, but haven’t given up on Halfhaven yet, so I am lowering my standards and will probably just write more unstructured brainstorming exercises. Today I am just posting 25 questions that interested me that I came up with while looking around my room.

1. What advice/concrete instructions would a future superintelligence send down to me that would completely transform my life (excluding munchkinism like stock prices or lottery numbers)?
2. What types of mental skills are underrated and I should practice them more?
   • Is it skills I have never heard of or should I double down on things I am already good at?
   • Numeracy?
3. What book should I read next?
4. What pictures would make linear algebra better understandable? . I recently read this article that was supposed to make SVD more intuitive, it didn't really work for me, but then I was wondering if there are better pictures.
5. Why is sleep so universal among animals?

• Is it so convergent because of day-night shifts?
• Do deep sea creatures sleep then?
• newborn dolphins are mammals that don't sleep for a month. Is it because sleeping as a dolphin is difficult because breathing, predation or warmth? Is it bad for learning to not sleep?

6. Why is there fat in hair?
7. How did pink become a color associated with girls?

• Somehow related to red being romantic?

8. Why are nitro groups still the most favored explosive?

• I watched this veritasium video on Nobel and how guns often use this nitro cotton stuff.
• Has the explosive space been fully explored or are people not making alternative explosives save because making them save involves dangerous experiments?

9. Why is it so common for birds to sing, but not for other animals? Is it because they can fly away?
10. Do ants communicate ever via sound through air? Or only through sound through the ground?

• Do they have different scaling laws and that is why at small scales via ground works better?

11. What is the most efficient microwave? Is every microwave just as efficient as another like heaters? I guess pretty marginal differences.
12. When was soy sauce invented?
13. Who invented all the different words?
14. What words have been lost to the equivalent of a population bottleneck for words?
15. How much more or less rich are the languages of remote cultures?
16. Why do we have fingernails?
17. Why is sand on beaches beige?
18. Will the most efficient computers in the future involve reversible computing?
19. Will most aliens in the universe use roughly the same computers? Or will they look quite different because they are interested in computing different things (some are just one large hieve mind vs. others keep a lot of individuals? Would that make big differences for what type of hardware you use?)?
20. Why is the number of different vegetables not exploding? The Zuchini was only bred in the 19th century. Should there not be lots of new interesting plants to breed? Or do I just not know about them?
21. How exactly did we bootstrap ourselves to smaller and smaller computer hardware? It still seems kind of insane to me, because I don't understand the details.
22. What makes things shiny? Like metal and glass and plastic. But when I look close, my skin is also shiny. Is it more noticeable with smooth surfaces?
23. Heuristics are hard to translate into math. It seems most of the intuitions in math are mostly exchanged verbally rather than written down (or at least that is the stereotype). What would a textbook for these look like? Are those just physics textbooks or similar?
24. I heard kcal on food are computed by combusting things. How does this work for things made of fiber we mostly can't digest? Do people just do rough estimations for those?
25. Why do we yawn?