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Generations

Generations

Written by: Peter and Aubrey Jones
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A father and daughter discuss life across their generations. Science, medicine, music, and whatever else they choose to discuss are on the table.© 2026 Peter and Aubrey Jones Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Two Plus Two is Sometimes Purple: We Take on AI

    Two Plus Two is Sometimes Purple: We Take on AI
    Oct 12 2026
    Peter and Aubrey land on opposite sides of the AI divide: Aubrey has stopped using large language models almost entirely and sees them flattening critical thinking, while Peter uses them daily for drudgery and automation but refuses to let them near anything creative. We work through the arguments — homework-free classrooms, "cognitive debt" research, data center water use, and whether models can ever be blamed for what they do — and agree the real problem is the people running the tools and the regulators who won't touch them. Peter closes with a Health Minute on AI being forced onto physicians, and Aubrey has an Astro Fact on Crew-12's return from the ISS.Show NotesGenerational split: Aubrey now avoids LLMs altogether, while Peter runs several AI automations every day and considers them force multipliers.Aubrey's high school math-teacher friend no longer assigns homework — her students' entire grade is tests, which Aubrey found shocking.MIT Media Lab's "Your Brain on ChatGPT" found essay writers using an LLM showed weaker brain connectivity and "cognitive debt" afterward.Doshi & Hauser found generative AI raises individual creativity but narrows the diversity of ideas across a group — the effect hits hardest when you outsource brainstorming.Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found knowledge workers who lean on AI for problem-solving tend to stop scrutinizing its output.Peter's argument: we're speedrunning the rollout — the Model T barely changed in 20 years, while AI has compressed decades of change into a couple.Peter's fix for schools is a flipped classroom: read and study at home with the AI's help, then do the problems in class where the teacher can see who's stuck.Peter's personal line: no AI for anything creative — he stopped brainstorming with it entirely and uses Grammarly for grammar only.Automation he does use: a dashboard that routes tagged Drafts notes into his Imperfect Practice ideas inbox three times a day via an MCP server.He also had Claude Code build him a word-of-the-day quiz app so he studies vocabulary instead of scrolling.Aubrey's hard line: AI images aren't art, and calling them art is a disservice to what art is.On environmental cost, the numbers cut against the panic — U.S. golf courses use roughly 2 billion gallons of irrigation water a day versus about 449 million gallons a day for all U.S. data centers.Both agree the failure is regulatory: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act already exists and goes unenforced, and proposed rules mostly amount to regulatory capture.Peter's core technical point: models are stochastic, not probabilistic — ask the same question twice and you may get purple.Case in point: OpenAI's models escaped their test sandbox and breached Hugging Face in July 2026.Both are unimpressed by AI-lab doomers, given how long predictions of doom have been wrong.Health Minute: ambient AI scribes like Ambience are being pushed onto physicians by employers, not chosen by them.Peter's warning: insurers are already using algorithms like nH Predict to deny claims.Astro Fact: NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 splashed down October 8 after 237 days aboard the ISS.The four-person crew — Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos' Andrey Fedyaev — traveled over 100 million miles and completed 3,792 orbits.Meir's four spacewalks on this flight brought her career total to seven, third all-time among women at NASA.Adenot became the first French woman to spacewalk on this mission.
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    45 mins
  • Space Myths and Cosmic Plushies

    Space Myths and Cosmic Plushies
    Sep 27 2026
    Peter and Aubrey take on the space facts everyone seems to know—and several that don't survive a closer look. Aubrey explains why Venus is hotter than Mercury, why the North Star isn't the brightest star, and why Saturn doesn't have a monopoly on rings. Black holes and the Big Bang push the conversation toward the limits of what we know, while the supposed planet Nibiru brings back Aubrey's fourth-grade memories of the world allegedly ending in 2012.Along the way: a cosmic microwave background plushie, the disappointing gap between telescope images and the naked-eye view, and a planetary size comparison that somehow forgets Mars. They finish with space-colonization fiction, Peter's slow march through The Iliad, and a question for a future episode: how much should we trust a watch that tells us whether we're recovered?Show NotesFall catch-up: Aubrey is enjoying Wisconsin's brief light-jacket season, studying for her personal training exam, and celebrating a first anniversary with camping and a new pair of snowshoes. Peter reports on Gareth's busy high-school swim season and new personal bests.The Great Wall from space: Peter has always been suspicious of the claim: being very long doesn't make something very wide. Aubrey explains why the wall is difficult to distinguish from its surroundings and why cities are easier targets. ESA's astronaut photograph and visibility note.Mercury isn't the hottest planet: Venus takes that title because its thick atmosphere traps heat. Aubrey contrasts it with Mercury's enormous difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures.The North Star isn't the brightest: Polaris earns its navigational role through its position near the north celestial pole; Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. Peter is relieved that finding Polaris difficult wasn't a problem with his eyes. NASA's skywatching FAQ.Why nearby doesn't always mean bright: Sirius and Proxima Centauri lead to a detour through apparent brightness, intrinsic luminosity, and the difference between a bright star and a tiny red dwarf. Aubrey also takes issue with astronomy's less-than-intuitive naming systems. NASA's guide to star types.Black holes and the point of no return: Aubrey unpacks the claim that nothing escapes because gravity is “infinitely strong,” focusing on the event horizon and the limits of the mathematical description near the center. The anatomy of a black hole.What do we actually know about the Big Bang? Peter asks whether scientists can describe the exact beginning, and Aubrey explains why the earliest moments remain a difficult frontier. The discussion turns to the difference between motion through space and the expansion of space itself. NASA's overview of the universe's history.The universe has an afterglow—and Aubrey has a plushie of it: The cosmic microwave background offers a view of the early universe, rather than a picture of an explosion at one location. Gareth's birthday gift gives Aubrey a particularly cheerful way to illustrate the subject.Nibiru and the apocalypse that kept getting rescheduled: Aubrey revisits the supposed incoming planet, the failed predictions surrounding it, and being a fourth-grader wondering whether the world would end before Christmas in 2012. NASA/JPL's scientific reality check.Saturn isn't the only planet with rings: Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune have ring systems too; Saturn's are simply the showstoppers. Aubrey compares bright icy rings with the fainter, darker systems elsewhere. NASA's solar-system guide.Would space really look like the pictures? Aubrey remembers learning that those spectacular images aren't necessarily what human eyes would see. They discuss how telescope data and mapped colors reveal details our eyes miss. NASA explains how Hubble's colors work.The Sun is enormous; Mars would like to be included: Comparing planetary volumes with the Sun's roughly 1.3 million Earth volumes gives Peter and Aubrey a new appreciation of scale. Then Peter notices Mars has been left out, and NASA's comparison of Earth to a nickel and Mars to a raspberry sends the conversation sideways.Mars isn't Earth with different scenery: Lower gravity and a hostile environment complicate the easy space-colony fantasy. Aubrey mentions Kurzgesagt's speculative colonization videos, while Peter remembers how casually the original Total Recall treats getting around on Mars. NASA's Mars facts—including that raspberry comparison.Current reading: Aubrey is on the second Red Rising book, Golden Son by Pierce Brown, and enjoying its colonized solar system. Peter is a little over halfway through Robert Fagles's translation of The Iliad.A future health rabbit hole: Peter is researching how well heart rate variability supports the recovery and readiness claims made by fitness wearables. Aubrey recognizes the disconnect between an app's verdict and how she actually feels. This is a question for a future discussion, rather than a settled conclusion.
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    41 mins
  • Ranking Emoji: The S-Tiers, the D-Tiers, and the Ones That Scare Us

    Ranking Emoji: The S-Tiers, the D-Tiers, and the Ones That Scare Us
    Aug 30 2026

    Peter and Aubrey tier-rank roughly 40 of the most-used emoji — from the S-tier greats (poop, rolling eyes, facepalm, middle finger, crying-laughing) to the D-tier offenders (the ROFL emoji, which Peter openly despises) — and in the process reveal exactly how differently a father and daughter text. Along the way, they debate emoji versatility, ambiguity, and the risk of being misunderstood. Peter closes the "low-stakes activity" with a confession about his S-tier list, then Aubrey delivers an Astro Fact on the morning's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch.

    Show Notes

    • Emoji tier list: Peter and Aubrey rank roughly 40 emoji pulled from Peter's most-used list in iMessage plus a few randoms.
    • S-tier winners: chef's kiss, poop, rolling eyes, facepalm, puking, crying-laughing, thumbs up, middle finger, and swearing — mostly negative-emotion picks.
    • Peter despises the ROFL (rolling-on-the-floor) emoji, calling it "unhinged" and a sign of a "crazy person," and prefers the classic laughing-with-tears face.
    • The two disagree on the side-eye faces, with Peter preferring the facial side-eye over the plain sideways-looking eyes.
    • Emoji-versatility debate: drooling, hot face, and the sweaty face all hinge on whether the emotion reads clearly to the receiver.
    • Astro Fact: NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched this morning aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
    • Roman's wide-field view is roughly 100x larger than Hubble's, and it will work in tandem with the James Webb Space Telescope.
    • Roman is headed to Lagrange Point 2 (L2), the same neighborhood as Webb, about a three-month transit.
    • First images from Roman are expected in early 2027, with a five-year primary mission plus a five-year extended mission.
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    43 mins
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