2025-09-12 17:29:50
Bloomberg gained access to an email cache from Jeffrey Epstein’s Yahoo Mail inbox, spanning two decades between 2002 and 2022. They highlight the relationship between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and how the timing and nature of the emails reflect a closer timeline than Maxwell has suggested.
The cache also included a spreadsheet from Epstein’s accountant that lists gifts and payments, such as watches and massage lessons. Bloomberg charted three years of transactions with a bubble chart over time.
It’s only a fraction of Epstein emails, as he used multiple addresses over decades, but it’s quite the digital trace. Find more on how Bloomberg verified and analyzed the cache here.
Tags: Bloomberg, email, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein
2025-09-12 04:40:21
This sight is growing too common in the United States. The New York Times shows an aerial view of where Kirk was and where the shooter is believed to have been. A Utah locator map appears in the top left to provide geography, and a north arrow on the bottom right sets orientation.
Tags: aerial, Charlie Kirk, New York Times, shootings
2025-09-12 01:21:09
In case you’re trying to navigate from one star to another in the Star Wars galaxy, there is an official detailed map of the fictional space. It is not comprehensive, as apparently the galaxy “contains billions of stars and is home to trillions of beings” but it seems like it should at least be good enough to figure out which direction to go. (via kottke)
2025-09-11 23:08:04
Hi everybody. Nathan here. This is the Process, the member-exclusive newsletter on data and charts beyond defaults. I refreshed an old project with new data and interactions. This week we walk through the steps.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2025-09-11 16:47:41
For Quanta Magazine, Shalma Wegsman provides a history of Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier’s transform. James Cooley and John Tukey get a nod:
Any 8-by-8 image, for example, can be built from some combination of the 64 building blocks [above]. A compression algorithm can then remove high-frequency information, which corresponds to small details, without drastically changing how the image looks to the human eye. This is how JPEGs compress complex images into much smaller amounts of data.
In the 1960s, the mathematicians James Cooley and John Tukey came up with an algorithm that could perform a Fourier transform much more quickly — aptly called the fast Fourier transform. Since then, the Fourier transform has been implemented practically every time there is a signal to process. “It’s now a part of everyday life,” Greengard said.
I’ve said this before, but this would’ve been useful for me in college. The two-hour lectures on Fourier transforms, after lunch and in the dark, were brutal and I might’ve missed a slide or twenty.
Tags: Fourier Transform, James Cooley, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, John Tukey, Quanta Magazine
2025-09-10 19:04:43
Synthetic sampling uses models to “survey” fake respondents. G. Elliott Morris and Verasight compared real polling data against the synthetic variety to find that the latter is error-prone.
We find that the AIs cannot successfully replicate real-world data. Across models, the LLMs missed real population proportions for Trump approval and the generic ballot by between 4 and 23 percentage points. Even the best model we tested overstated disapproval of Trump, and almost never produced “don’t know” responses despite ~3% of humans choosing it.
For core demographic subgroups, the average absolute subgroup error was ~8 points; errors for some key groups (e.g., Black respondents) were as large as 15 points on Trump disapproval, and smaller groups had larger errors still (30 percentage points for Pacific Islanders). This is unusable for serious analysis.
Find the white paper here.
The point of polling is to estimate reality, so the premise of synthetic sampling through mathematical models instead of through people does not make sense to me.
Tags: G. Elliott Morris, polling, sampling, uncertainty, Verasight
