Thursday Morning Links

• It’s official: the world stock market is now as wild as it was during the tech-stock bubble. Since April 2026, we’ve had epic levels of return dispersion. AI excitement is driving extreme price moves, with some large-cap technology stocks up 50% to 100% in a single month. While it’s normal for small-cap stocks to sometimes rise 50% in a month, it’s not normal for the whole market to be meaningfully impacted by extreme winners. The chamber of dispersion has been opened, the beast of volatility has awakened, and the season of chaos is at hand. [Acadian] 
• The fact that short-lived strains are desirable for research because they allow it to go faster has polluted the literature because short-lived, convenient-to-research strains produce unreliable results for the very reasons behind their being short-lived. Pabis et al. therefore argued that, in order to demonstrate longevity benefits credibly, strains with long control lifespans in optimal conditions are needed. [Cremieux Recueil] 
• A short while later, the book ends suddenly and ignobly. It turns out that keeping the army alive one more season was all that was required. The real Spartan army is launching an operation against a Persian satrap in Asia Minor, and Xenophon’s troops get summoned to participate, initially as their own unit and then gradually getting absorbed into the main body of soldiers. In other words, it ends with an acqui-hire, as so many startups do. The dreams of great wealth and fame are over, and their independence is over too. It’s back to being a wagie at AWS. [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf]
• Rayonier was founded in 1926 as the Rainier Pulp and Paper Company in Shelton, Washington, with a headquarters office in San Francisco, California. Its name was inspired by Mount Rainier in Washington state. Its first mill opened the next year in Shelton Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. The mill used Tsuga heterophylla (western hemlock) trees to create a premium bleached paper pulp. In September 1930, Rainier Pulp and Paper began working with the DuPont chemical company to produce hemlock pulp for the manufacture of rayon. Two additional pulp mills were constructed and began operation in the state of Washington at Hoquiam, Washington and Port Angeles, Washington. Rainier Pulp and Paper changed its name to Rayonier, a portmanteau of the words rayon and Rainier, in 1937, when it became a publicly traded company. [Rayonier]
• In response to the demand by residents for the board to stop the wind farm from being built, Supervisor Jason Whiting asked County Attorney Brad Carlyon if the board is legally authorized to prohibit the project. “Bottom line answer: No.” Carlyon further explained that the board’s authorities lie in land use and zoning. “You can’t deny it unless there is a health, safety, or welfare issue.” Chair Darryl Seymour also spoke on the work that was done to regulate incoming development. “The work that we did for two years to make it not easier, but to make it where we had more authority, which is already limited by the state. To make it more conducive and more neighborly to our people that we have.” The board then entered executive session to discuss the development agreement, after which the agreement was approved. [Painted Desert Tribune]
• The Rowlings, who own Omni Hotels & Resorts, in March paid $289 million for Justice family debt partly secured by the Greenbrier from a Virginia-based bank. They say the Justice family has siphoned revenue from the resort to pay bills at their coal mines and other businesses, letting the hotel fall into disrepair, skipping payments to contractors and employees, and risking its value as collateral. Jim Justice is credited with saving the Greenbrier when he purchased it out of bankruptcy in 2009. His daughter, Jill Justice, is president of the resort. Jim Justice said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Friday that the resort has been profitable, retained its clientele and that he plans to continue investing in it. He called the allegations hurtful. “I’ve poured about everything I’ve got into the Greenbrier, and I’d do it again tomorrow,” he said. “I love that place beyond all good sense. It’s not just bricks and mortar to me.” [WSJ]
• This year, Google became the only large tech company to own a power company with the $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect, a wind and solar developer that in recent years pivoted to building such projects to support data centers. Intersect has energy projects under development to supply multiple gigawatts of electricity, Google said. One gigawatt can power hundreds of thousands of homes. The company has also amassed a bench of energy-sector experts on its staff. “Google really has hired in-house to develop their data centers, and as a result, they have a more integrated approach that I would suggest is a lot more thoughtful,” said Jigar Shah, an energy entrepreneur who formerly directed the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office. Having on-site power is becoming a strategic advantage for tech companies. Regulators and power officials in many regions are considering whether data centers built alongside new power sources should be afforded a faster connection to the grid because they would be less reliant on it. [WSJ]
• In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage. The only one of his heroes who has a plausible profession is David Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer and then a novelist, like Dickens himself. With most of the others, the way they earn their living is very much in the background. Pip, for instance, ‘goes into business’ in Egypt; we are not told what business, and Pip's working life occupies about half a page of the  book. Clennam has been in some unspecified business in China, and later goes into another barely specified business with Doyce; Martin Chuzzlewit is an architect, but does not seem to get much time for practising. In no case do their adventures spring directly out of their work. Here the contrast between Dickens and, say, Trollope is startling. And one reason for this is undoubtedly that Dickens knows very little about the professions his characters are supposed to follow. What exactly went on in Gradgrind's factories? How did Podsnap make his money? How did Merdle work his swindles? One knows that Dickens could never follow up the details of Parliamentary elections and Stock Exchange rackets as Trollope could. As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance, industry or politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire. This is the case even with legal processes, about which actually he must have known a good deal. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit in Orley Farm, for instance. [George Orwell]
• First smoking went out of fashion, then daytime drinking. Negroni-drinkers were dying out, or reforming. Wine began to be drowned out by absurd fizzy water. Then the food itself was threatened, partly because business lunches were becoming more businesslike, partly because interviewees were becoming more self-conscious. “Even I have never managed a two-bottle lunch,” laments the FT’s arts writer Peter Aspden, who is thought to have conducted more Lunches than anyone else. “There’s such reluctance now to be seen to be pigging out in any shape or form, and hardly anyone drinks over lunch.” [Financial Times]
• The word embedding approach is able to capture multiple different degrees of similarity between words. Mikolov et al. (2013) found that semantic and syntactic patterns can be reproduced using vector arithmetic. Patterns such as "Man is to Woman as Brother is to Sister" can be generated through algebraic operations on the vector representations of these words such that the vector representation of "Brother" - "Man" + "Woman" produces a result which is closest to the vector representation of "Sister" in the model. Such relationships can be generated for a range of semantic relations (such as Country–Capital) as well as syntactic relations (e.g. present tense–past tense). [word2vec] 
• The distributional hypothesis in linguistics is derived from the semantic theory of language usage, i.e. words that are used and occur in the same contexts tend to purport similar meanings. The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth in the 1950s. The distributional hypothesis is the basis for statistical semantics. Although the distributional hypothesis originated in linguistics, it is now receiving attention in cognitive science especially regarding the context of word use. [Distributional semantics]