VirtualThinking

02/10/2026

27/09/2026

On September 16, 2011, an anonymous user posted a math question to the "/sci/" board of 4chan about The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, an anime series originally broadcast in nonlinear order, which had led fans to develop a habit of rewatching its 14 episodes in every possible sequence.

The question was simple to state and brutally hard to solve: what's the shortest possible string of episodes you'd need to watch to see the first season in every conceivable order? In mathematical terms, this is called a superpermutation, and finding a general formula for the shortest possible superpermutation of any size had stumped mathematicians for at least 25 years.

In under an hour, another anonymous poster replied with an answer, not a full solution, but a rigorous proof establishing a new lower bound. The proof showed that for a set of any size, and specifically for Haruhi's 14 episodes, a viewer would need to watch at least 93,884,313,611 episodes to see every possible ordering, roughly 4.3 million years of continuous viewing.

The post sat largely unnoticed outside anime fan circles for seven years. That changed in October 2018, when mathematician Robin Houston stumbled across the proof on a fan wiki and realized its significance, tweeting that the best known lower bound for this decades-old problem had been established by an anonymous poster on a board "mainly devoted to anime."

Houston, along with mathematicians Jay Pantone of Marquette University and Vince Vatter of the University of Florida, independently verified the anonymous proof and confirmed it held up to rigorous scrutiny. The timing lined up with a separate breakthrough from science fiction writer Greg Egan, who had just published a new upper bound for the same problem, drawing renewed attention to the puzzle as a whole.

When Houston, Pantone, and Vatter formally published their refined version of the proof, first in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences and later in an academic paper, they credited the original source exactly as it had appeared: listed as first author, "Anonymous 4chan Poster."

25/09/2026

20/09/2026

Congratulations to Toronto’s SickKids Hospital: the world’s best children’s hospital for the second year in a row.

Canada’s health care system is one of our greatest strengths. It’s a reflection of our values — powered by the incredible nurses, doctors, researchers, and staff who deliver world-class, life-saving care every day.

18/09/2026

Our hunter-gatherer forebears weren’t the carnivorous cavemen we once thought. That’s a misplaced narrative based on outdated archaeology.

18/09/2026

A week ago, apparently giving Australians the ability to turn off an algorithm was “Chinese Communist Party-style censorship”.

Now we’ve got polling.

And, awkwardly for the people currently hyperventilating into their keyboards, 66% of Australians support the proposal. Just 13% oppose it, the rest don't know.

The idea is still incredibly simple... social media platforms would have to let you choose between an algorithmically curated feed and a feed made up of accounts you actually chose to follow. If you like the algorithm, keep it. If you don’t, turn it off. The government’s draft Digital Duty of Care proposal is explicitly built around that user choice.

Which is why I still cannot quite get over the hysteria from a small but extremely loud section of the far right.

These are people who spend all day talking about freedom, choice, government overreach and personal responsibility.

Then you offer them a literal choice button and suddenly they’re clutching the curtains screaming about communism.

If you love being spoon-fed outrage by an engagement algorithm, nobody is stopping you.

Keep it on.

Let platforms decide that because you paused for three seconds on a video about immigration, you now require forty-seven more clips involving crime, betrayal, civilisational collapse and a bloke in Oakleys whispering “they don’t want you to know this”.

Live your truth.

But why should we all have to use the same system?

And if the algorithms are genuinely brilliant, useful and beloved, won’t people simply choose to keep them switched on?

That is the part the opponents can't answer very convincingly.

Instagram’s boss has already warned that people may have a “much worse user experience” without the algorithm. Fine. Let people discover that themselves. That is usually how choice works.

I’ll give the algorithm some credit.

It has brought a lot of you into this ridiculous pickle jar, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. Plenty of good conversations, interesting people and unexpected opportunities have come from recommendation systems.

So no, algorithms are not automatically evil. They are tools. But tools this powerful should not be mandatory.

The broader Digital Duty of Care has real questions about ministerial powers, definitions of harm and how enforcement would work, and those should be argued properly. Even the opposition’s free-speech concerns are worth examining on those broader provisions.

But the algorithm toggle itself?

Come on.

Algorithm on. Algorithm off. Your choice.

If that sends you into a constitutional panic, I’m beginning to suspect it isn’t freedom you’re worried about.

It’s losing the machine that keeps your audience angry.

17/09/2026

This is the bit of Australia worth defending.

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is one of those quiet pieces of public infrastructure most people barely think about until they need it.

A cystic fibrosis drug that can cost around $250,000 a year privately can be reduced to a maximum $25 per script through the PBS. A leukaemia treatment that might otherwise cost about $229,000 per course can also come down to the PBS co-payment. Expanded listings this year have covered severe migraine treatments, multiple cancers, rare diseases and more.

And from January this year, the maximum general PBS co-payment dropped from $31.60 to $25, while concession card holders remain capped at $7.70. The scheme now subsidises more than 900 medicines.

This isn’t charity.

It is Australians pooling risk so that getting cancer, cystic fibrosis, MS or some obscure genetic condition doesn’t also mean selling your house to stay alive.

And it is worth remembering that systems like this are never automatically safe forever.

The PBS works partly because Australia bargains hard with pharmaceutical companies over what medicines are worth and what taxpayers should pay. Unsurprisingly, some multinational drug companies would prefer Australia paid more. The Health Minister has openly said US pharmaceutical interests have pushed against the PBS pricing model.

There are serious commercial and political pressures that can weaken the PBS' bargaining power, push prices up, hollow out public provision, or turn universal systems into increasingly private ones.

That’s how these things usually disappear.

A little bit gets outsourced. A little bit gets marketised. A little bit gets underfunded. People get told the private sector can do it better. Then twenty years later everyone wonders why ordinary people are paying more.

The PBS is boring. It is bureaucratic. It involves committees, cost-effectiveness calculations and people arguing over spreadsheets. And occasionally the result is that a medicine worth a quarter of a million dollars becomes something an ordinary Australian can actually obtain.

That is what functioning government looks like.

Protect the boring machinery. It’s often the bit keeping people alive.