When Beane expanded the plot of Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella to a full Broadway play, he actually added a communist revolution subplot. One of Cinderella's stepsisters ends up marrying the revolutionary.
John Gregoriadis wired a live C. elegans connectome into the control loop of a Claude coding agent, then watched what the worm did when the code broke.
It’s C. elegans, a roundworm about a millimetre long. It has 302 neurons, and scientists mapped every single connection between them back in 1986 (the year I was born, which I’m choosing not to read anything into). It’s one of the only nervous systems we understand all the way down.
I took 14 of those neurons and ran them live in a simulation. Four of them do the heavy lifting. One is a salt sensor, and to a worm salt means food, so I wired it to reward. Its opposite I wired to bad results. One drives the worm forward, so I wired it to how much work is left. One throws it into reverse, so I wired it to errors.
I didn’t make any of that wiring up. It’s the published connectome. All I did was connect the worm’s senses to the agent’s situation and let it run.
When I was in college, I did a research fellowship one summer, and most of the researchers were doing work with C. elegans. So my professor decided to do his presentation on C. elegans too. We were in the computer science department.
If you thought Holden Caulfield was insufferable before, you’ll find that expulsion from prep school was a mere warm-up for the incessant grousing and myriad of beefs inherent in life as an English undergrad. Armed with the perceived moral high ground and loads of what he calls “lived experience,” this sequel sees the creative writing major crafting some pretty bad fiction while clashing with a dean intent on his demise.
Moby-Dick: The College Years
Having survived the sinking of the Pequod and documented the events in more detail than was necessary, Ishmael attempts to reinvent himself, trading in the high seas for higher ed, and asking classmates to call him “Ish.” Not unlike the jock who peaked in high school, our narrator struggles with navigating what comes next, constantly reliving his glory days with Captain Ahab, Queequeg, and the great white whale—much to his peers’ chagrin.
A Confederacy of Dunces: The College Years
Picking up precisely where the first book ended, this sequel sees Ignatius Reilly and Myrna Minkoff bound for NYC, where the two assume a bohemian lifestyle. Unfortunately, the big apple brings out the worst in Ignatius, who upon enrolling in a PhD program at Fordham, is swiftly booted for partying. What follows is a bacchanal of hot dogs, pastries, and an unconscionable amount of Dr. Nut.
Catch-22: The College Years
Yossarian, now stateside, enrolls in college and shares an off-campus apartment with a pacifist who steals his food. After attending his first American history course, Yossarian decides that “learning” history is foolhardy, since one must live through it to truly understand it, and asks his professor to fail him. Excitedly, the professor explains that this perspective is exactly what he wants students to draw from the course, and he refuses to fail Yossarian, whom he now believes to be his star pupil.
The Haunting of Hill House: The College Years
Playing out twenty years after the events of the first book, Hill House has become derelict and abandoned—a local legend. That is, until a few wacky fraternity boys from the local college use it as the setting for the biggest kegger of the year. Is the house haunted, or are the spirits a metaphor for male loneliness and substance abuse? In this one, it’s definitely haunted!
The Great Gatsby: The College Years
Nick Carraway, a little older and a lot more interested in waxing rhapsodically, heads back to school, quickly securing an invite to a tropical spring-break trip. Between games of beach volleyball, surf lessons, and burying buddies in the sand, Nick sparks romance with a local woman, only for her to quickly lose interest after hearing one too many of his stories about Gatsby’s jazz quartets and spiced baked hams.
Reminds me of the bit in Julius Caesar where Brutus persuades himself to join the conspiracy on the idea "Really I'm doing him a favor since after tomorrow, he'll never need to worry about dying again"
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