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science · the day's top 10 · june 11th
storyflo · science
Jun 11, 2026 · 15 min listen
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science · the day's top 10 · june 11th
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Hello, Here is your weekly dose of wisdom for smarter living. If you are new here, check out the archive for all the essays and tools for learning. To support my work, you can upgrade to a paid subscription for $9 per month or $60 for an entire year. There’s so much more for paid subscribers in 2026. Life is finite. Learning is for life. “As long as you live, keep learning how to live,” Seneca, a Roman philosopher, statesman, and playwright said. He believed seeking knowledge and wisdom were key to living a fulfilling and meaningful existence. Lifelong learning, the process of acquiring knowledge and skills throughout one’s life, is a mindset that emphasises the importance of continuous learning and growing, not just in our formal education but also in our personal and professional lives. It can take many forms: reading, listening to a great podcast, watching reality-altering videos, taking courses, attending meaningful events, or simply experimenting with new things. The important thing is to be open to learning and never to stop growing. The beauty of lifelong learning is that it’s an infinite game you can never lose. The more you learn, the more you grow, and the more you grow, the more you learn. It’s a never-ending cycle of growth that can lead to a more fulfilling and satisfying life. It is an infinite game you can’t lose because you will stack wisdom for life. From acquiring new skills to staying updated with emerging knowledge, and trends, lifelong learning is a continuous process that keeps you ahead of the game of life. It helps you adapt to new situations, challenges, and opportunities and enables you to make better decisions in all aspects of your life. “The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live, author Mortimer Adler said. In a finite game, a definite outcome means an end in site. In contrast, an infinite game has no specific endpoint or winner, and the goal is to keep playing and continuing the game. In the lifelong learning game, there is no losing; you will keep winning for life — the focus is on the learning journey itself. You become a self-directed learner for life. Self-directed learners take responsibility for their learning, setting goals, and developing strategies for acquiring knowledge and skills. They proactively seek learning opportunities rather than waiting for someone else to provide them. Self-directed learners tend to be more adaptable and resilient in the face of change. They can quickly acquire new skills and knowledge to meet the demands of their changing environment. This adaptability is particularly important right now. “All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.” — Naval Ravikant “I have what I call an ‘iron prescription’ that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I’m qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state… “That is probably too tough for most people, although I hope it won’t ever become too tough for me… This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is very, very important in life. If you want to end up wise, heavy ideology is very likely to prevent that outcome.” Source: Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger Scout mindset We tend to approach discourse with a “soldier mindset”; an intention to defend our own beliefs and defeat opponents’. A more useful approach is to adopt a “scout mindset“ by Julia Galef. A scout isn’t trying to win. A scout is trying to understand. Galef says “The goal is not to defend your position—it’s to see the world as accurately as possible.” The scout mindset is “the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course.” It applies to everything—work, relationships, even how I see myself. If I’m stuck in the soldier mindset, I hold onto decisions because I don’t want to look stupid. But if I switch to the scout mindset, I can adjust without shame. “Oh, that didn’t work? No worries. Let’s try something else.” It’s choosing curiosity over ego. Truth over comfort. Growth over winning. It takes practice. But it’s worth it. Author Paul Millerd on the pathless path to a great life “On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing. This is one of the most important secrets of the pathless path. With this approach, it doesn’t make sense to chase any financial opportunity if you can’t be sure that you will like the work.
The author recounts a recent reunion with a close friend, noting how the shift from a cold, barren winter to a warm, buzzing summer mirrors his own sense of routine: work, sleep, creative projects, and the occasional distraction. He acknowledges his relative privilege yet feels trapped in a monotonous cycle, likening his existence to a hamster on a wheel or Sisyphus pushing a boulder, and wonders whether life is truly absurd.
He points out that many people, including himself, reduce Albert Camus to a figure of bleak absurdity—a lone thinker with a cigarette, resigned to meaninglessness. This narrow view, he suggests, captures only an early, immature stage of Camus’s thought and overlooks the richer dimensions of his philosophy.
In a paid Mini Philosophy interview, guest Joe Folley challenges that limited interpretation. Folley argues that Camus’s work is not a celebration of nihilism but a call to confront the absurd while still affirming freedom, rebellion, and the creation of personal meaning. He emphasizes that Camus sees the absurd as a starting point for ethical engagement, not an endpoint of despair.
The article promises an hour‑long conversation with Folley, alongside the author’s own reflections, to unpack Camus’s more nuanced ideas about how we can live authentically despite life’s inherent contradictions. It invites listeners to reconsider the philosopher’s legacy beyond the cliché of pointless suffering.
Texas spent five years rebuilding its electrical grid based on the lessons of Winter Storm Uri. Now regulators face a harder question: who pays for the surge of large new customers trying to connect? The projections for electricity demand run far above what will actually get built, and hyperscalers want to power their data centers within 18 months, a pace much faster than the three-to-five years large industrial loads once took. ERCOT has run out of spare capacity, and the cost of building more lands squarely on residential and small-business customers if the projected load never arrives. The state’s answer is to make new load prove its intention and viability to build and pay for the grid it requires. On this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, Matt Boms talks with Thomas Gleeson, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the regulator who must write the rules to make that principle work. Gleeson’s North Star is SB6, the 2025 law that rewrote how large loads connect. He explains the trade-offs behind the decisions commissioners are weighing, from financial gates that screen speculative projects to a December deadline to overhaul who pays for transmission. Gleeson returns over and over again to the demand side, arguing that “the megawatt we don’t use is just as important as the megawatt that we generate.” The conversation works through: Batch zero, ERCOT’s first round of committing firm capacity and the financial security and fee requirements, recently set at $50,000 per megawatt and meant to screen out projects that are purely speculative. 4CP to 12CP, the proposed overhaul of transmission cost allocation, with a minimum demand charge so that large customers cannot zero-out their shares by curtailing at a few predicted peaks. The reliability standard, a new three-part measure of how often, how long, and how large an outage Texas will tolerate. Demand-side resources, the aggregated distributed energy resource pilot, virtual power plants and a $1.8 billion backup-power program funded through the Texas Energy Fund. How Gleeson and the commission write these rules will set how much cost current ratepayers must shoulder and which projects ever get built. 00:00 - Introduction and Chairman Gleeson’s PUC background 00:48 - A new chapter for the Texas grid: from Uri reform to implementation 04:19 - The core problem: interconnection capacity and speculative vs. real load 08:28 - SB6 and ERCOT’s Batch Zero process 15:10 - Large-load ride-through and performance standards 19:18 - The reliability standard and load modeling assumptions 23:39 - The ADER pilot: lessons and whether to scale it 25:01 - Virtual power plants and the NRG proof of concept 27:29 - Standardizing DER interconnection across the state 29:20 - The backup power package: resilience for critical facilities 32:33 - From 4CP to 12CP: reallocating transmission costs 39:30 - Closing: taking a breath, and what the era will be remembered for People & Organizations Matt Boms (LinkedIn) Thomas Gleeson (PUCT Biography) Public Utility Commission of Texas (Website) Other Orgs ERCOT (Website) Texas Energy Fund (PUCT Program Page) Company & Industry News Texas PUC Approves TEF Backup Power Program (RTO Insider) ERCOT’s Batch Zero Proposal and What It Means for Large-Load Projects in Texas (Seyfarth) ERCOT’s Proposed Batch Zero Process: What Developers Need to Know (Foley & Lardner) Related Podcasts by Energy Capital How Texas Decides Which Data Centers Connect (Tiffany Wu) (Listen) How Will Data Centers Pay for Power? (Travis Kavulla) (Listen) Related Posts by Texas Energy & Power Matt Boms: Today, we’re very pleased to welcome back Chairman Thomas Gleeson of the Public Utility Commission of Texas. Chairman Gleeson was appointed to the commission and named Chairman by Governor Abbott in January 2024, but his service to the state of Texas goes back much further than that. Over more than 15 years at the PUC, he has served in a number of important leadership roles, including Executive Director, Chief Operating Officer, Director of Finance Administration, and Fiscal Project Manager. That gives him an unusually deep understanding of the agency, the Texas electric market, and the work required to turn major policy decisions into real world implementation. Chairman Gleeson, thank you for your years of service to Texas and welcome back to the Energy Capital Podcast. Chairman Gleeson: Absolutely. Thank you for that introduction. Looking forward to the discussion. Matt Boms: Awesome. Well, thank you for your time. We know that you’re really busy. This interview happens in the middle of a million conversations that are happening right now around energy in Texas. We’re gonna try to hit on as many as we can. And you know, just to kind of set this up, Texas is growing fast. The commission is trying to separate real projects from speculative ones, protect existing customers, use flexibility and customer side resources more efficiently.
Electric vehicle sales have rebounded from a sharp decline at the end of last year, but the market still falls short of industry expectations. At a recent GM event in San Francisco, the automaker reaffirmed its commitment to an extensive EV lineup across its brands, while also unveiling new grid‑support initiatives.
GM announced that its GM Energy division will now support vehicle‑to‑grid (V2V) technology, expanding beyond the existing vehicle‑to‑home capability. The bidirectional charging system is designed to help balance the electrical grid by allowing EVs to feed power back during peak demand periods. The rollout will begin with utility partners PG&E in California and DTE Energy in Michigan, marking the first large‑scale collaborations for this technology.
In addition to V2V, GM introduced a partnership with Peak Energy to develop sodium‑ion batteries specifically for stationary energy storage. Sodium‑ion chemistry offers a lower‑cost alternative to lithium‑ion, aiming to provide scalable, long‑duration storage solutions for utilities and large‑scale renewable projects.
Together, the V2V program and the new sodium‑ion battery venture signal GM’s strategy to leverage its EV fleet as a flexible resource for the grid, addressing growing electricity demands from AI‑driven data centers and supporting broader renewable integration.
Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed.
You can tell Honda was trying to manage expectations when it emailed me to stress that "the Prelude is not a sports car." And I can understand why. On paper, the specs make the sleek coupe—technically a three-door hatch—seem underwhelming. Especially if you start comparing it to alternatives. A Mazda MX-5 or Subaru BRZ weighs hundreds of pounds less, and the Subaru packs more power than the Prelude's 200 hp (149 kW). A Volkswagen Golf GTI weighs about the same as the Prelude at 3,261 lbs (1,479 kg), but it delivers 20 percent more power and offers rear seats that actually accommodate adults.
For years, Valve's physical Steam gift cards have been the closest you could come to buying a Steam game at a brick-and-mortar store. Now, Valve says it is phasing out the production of new retail gift cards, citing a losing battle against scammers exploiting the hard-to-track payment method. PC Guide was among the first to note the end of Valve's retail gift card program, which was quietly announced in a recent update to a Steam support page.
For the first time, the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) has released its own recommendations for maternal vaccination, providing formal guidance that diverges from that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention amid unprecedented policy changes and meddling from anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F.
A US Army helicopter gunship was apparently struck by an Iranian Shahed drone before going down near the Strait of Hormuz—but it's unclear whether the one-way attack drone was deliberately aimed or achieved more of a lucky accidental strike. Axios correspondent Barak Ravid first reported an unnamed US government official’s comments that an Iranian drone had hit the US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter before the latter went down on June 8.
Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews. The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google's AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices.
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