ReadGlobe · morning brief · archive
Saturday 24 October
1 · The text
Jabberwocky
The nonsense poem everyone half-remembers, whole, and then Alice admitting she has no idea what it means.
1 min · Lewis Carroll · Through the Looking-Glass · 1871 · public domain
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—”
2 · One idea · Information theory & statistics
Signal vs noise
Two pigeons nearly took the blame for the Big Bang.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were listening to the sky with a large antenna, and a faint hiss would not go away. They treated it as a fault and went hunting for the cause.
Two pigeons had moved into the antenna, and the droppings were a suspect. The birds were trapped and the equipment cleaned. The hiss stayed.
It was radiation left over from the young universe, and in 1978 it earned the two men the Nobel Prize in Physics. Sometimes the thing you keep scrubbing off the instrument is the only message worth receiving.
In one line. The signal-to-noise model distinguishes meaningful information (signal) from random, irrelevant fluctuation (noise). Most data is mostly noise, and the core skill of good judgement is separating the few signals that matter from the overwhelming static around them.
Worked example
A daily-checked stock portfolio looks alarmingly volatile — up 2%, down 3%, up 1% — almost all noise. Zoom out to years and a clear upward signal emerges. The investor who reacts to the daily static trades badly; the one who waits for the signal does not.
How to use it, and where it fails3 · One number
Children who die before their fifth birthday, world
195024.7%
20243.7%
6.6 times lower than in 1950.
For most of history this was the single largest cause of grief in an ordinary family.
Source: Our World in Data, world estimates, read 2026-09-24.