Type, “high end grocery stores WSJ” into the browser and you get the article. In front of the pay wall, it’s all, “A new crop of gourmet grocers has hit the city, drawing lines of trendy TikTokers, MAHA-curious health fiends and Instacart devotees who want to pop in for a treat.”

In the East Rock neighborhood, that very 2026 bucket list is almost cartoonishly satisfied by Atticus. In a moment of unparalleled synchronicity, The 1975 swooned into my AirPods with, I know some “Vaccinista tote bag chic baristas”, literally just as I was opening the door to the establishment.

You don’t need a weatherman. At the checkout counter, Atticus has a glazed artisanal bowl to support impulse purchases. Until recently the dish was filled with brightly colored pronoun pins. Xe-Xim-Xers etc.

Jarringly, yesterday, I noticed that the identity pins had been abruptly replaced with ironic-aggressive (or is it aggressive-ironic) cigarette lighters.

Says he’s got a bad cough, wants to get it paid off.

In early 2009, this blog sort of reached the periastron of its parabolic trajectory.

After I spent several years trying to hype the highly eccentric planet HD 80606b, the orbital geometry of that particularly singular world came in well beyond expectations. An observational campaign by the now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope showed that the sky-plane inclination of HD 80606 b’s orbit permits the planet to pass completely behind the parent star, an event that occurs every 111.4 days and which is centered 2 hours prior to closest approach to the parent star. That was a lucky coincidence, as there was only a 15% a-priori chance that secondary eclipse would occur when viewed from Earth’s vantage. I have to say that I did take full advantage, managing even, to snag a spot on NPR’s Science Friday, the public-radio-crowd-scientific Joe Rogan of its day. Times sure change.

Remarkably, it also developed that the planet transits the parent star almost a week after periastron, a state of affairs whose a-priori odds were a mere one percent. It all seemed pretty exciting. I felt important. Man, I felt like I’d arrived.

That fame game in astronomy, however, is something of a moving target. If you don’t adhere to the Rick Ross exhortation of every every every day I’m hustlin’ hustlin’, you get legacy placement on multi multi multi author observin’ observin’ proposals and that’s about it.

I was a distant co-author on JWST observing proposal #2008. It occurred to me the other day that not only have the MIRI observations been made, but the proprietary riff-raff excluding lockup on the publicly funded (about $6M worth) data has expired. Hmm.

So I went and had a look. Turns out the observations turned out quite well! A little agentic go-at-it gives a pretty clear picture.

The secondary eclipse is nicely visible as the horizontal band centered roughly 10 hours after the start of the observations. That grounds the situation. It’s not an overfit-the-systematics fantasy. (Doesn’t that sound like an LLM rhetorical construction, so 2026?). It’s also clear that the planet has a short radiative time scale at the mid-infrared photosphere. And WTH is going on redward of 12 microns? Systematics? Probably. Physics? Hope springs eternal. Need to look carefully into that…

The light curve blueward of 10 microns looks real nice. Presumably the spike at the start of the sequence is detector ramp systematics.

One thing that’s a little unfortunate is that big 3D atmospheric simulations, or even little 2D advection simulations put the cart in front of the horse. Simulations look cool, but that’s about it. The take-aways can be gleaned from a simple four-parameter thermal model.

The upper atmosphere has some sort of absorber that allows an ambient maybe transient haze to heat up quickly. I think it’s probably algae being burnt to a crisp.

As you know, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon proposed that 1e-4 is the threshold for “moral impossibility,” meaning it is the smallest probability that a rational person should care about or be afraid of.

As you likely also know, Metaculus currently assigns a 0.5% probability to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena being determined to have an ontologically shocking explanation prior to July 22, 2028, a date slightly more than two years from now. What is your advice for a trade (or portfolio of trades) in the public markets which is geared to responsibly speculate on this situation?

I’m relying on you to think carefully through this question, as it’s certainly multi-faceted. Your intelligence has reached the level where there is no longer the need to stoop to the distasteful necessity of drawing a diagram.

Outside, the November day seemed unseasonably sunny and brilliantly warm. Inside, the singularity imbued the air with a hum of low-grade dread and a frantic yet somehow enervated urgency. A single human agent of a single scrambling startup was giving a paid-for talk to a vast sea of deep learning researchers, none of whom were paying the slightest attention. Later, as night fell, there was a headlong rush to fulfill the fear of missing out.

A great deal has happened since last pressing publish…