Mike Sowden

4 days ago | everythingisamazing.substack.com | Mike Sowden

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about distracting oddities in science, like weird sky smells and nasal hallucinations. This season, we’re looking at the world of wonders over our heads - and in researching a recent newsletter, I discovered the arresting notion that if all the air was squeezed out of a cloud and then what was left fell on you in one go, it would instantly kill you. The math: cumulus cloud density is estimated to be around 0.5 grams per cubic meter.

2 weeks ago | everythingisamazing.substack.com | Mike Sowden

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science and wonder and the timeless wisdom of not eating plutonium and other ridiculousness. Today’s edition is a very special one. (And it’s also a spectacularly long one - so you will need to click through to the Web version if you’re reading this in your email provider’s Inbox, because it’ll be cut off somewhere below.)First, a true story.

3 weeks ago | everythingisamazing.substack.com | Mike Sowden

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity, wonder, and how ancient people were only as daft as we are. The big international science headline of the last week was possible signs of life on another planet!Okay. We’ve been here before and seen statements this dramatic that turned out (for now) to be false alarms - and true to form, the word “possible” is doing a LOT of work here, as befitting analysis of a world that’s 700 trillion miles away.

1 month ago | botharetrue.substack.com | Mike Sowden

In Feb 2023, I made a request: can everyone kindly shut the fuck up about ai. In June 2024, I doubled down and once more asked: can everyone kindly shut the fuck up about ai. In Apri 2025, a mere week ago, I ignored my own plea and wrote about ai. The response was HOT and, in some instances, BOTHERED! Some were unhappy with me. Most reported wrestling with similar questions. Almost everyone assured me that they did not, in fact, hate me (I asked).

1 month ago | botharetrue.substack.com | Mike Sowden

I took the transcript for our convo and gave it to Claude AI and said, “give me a list of topics that we discussed here in the style of groucho marx.” here it is waggles eyebrows and twirls imaginary cigar TOPICS OF CONVERSATIONAL ODDITIES, or HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE SUBSTACK Knock-Knock Jokes That Would Make a Vulture Blush — And I've Seen Some Blushing Vultures in My Day! The Art of Asking for Money Without Actually Getting Any — A Specialty of Mine Since 1929! Finding...