Caricature of a Nerd | Sanika S. Khadkikar

Energy Saving Time

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I missed more meetings than I would like to admit last week. Europe turned its clocks back on October 25, but the US only did it on November 1, so for one whole week every transatlantic meeting was an hour off from where my brain thought it was. While I was busy apologising to collaborators, I started wondering which countries even bother with daylight saving time, and I found out something strange. Egypt is the only country in Africa that does it.

Countries that observe daylight saving time, as of October 2023. Spot the one dark blue country in Africa. Pew Research Center.

Why would Egypt need to save daylight?

At first this sounds completely unnecessary. Daylight saving time exists because places far from the equator have very long summer days and very short winter ones, so shifting the clock moves some of that extra summer light into the evening. Egypt has plenty of light all year round. And why would it be the only one in all of Africa?

The geography backs up my confusion. Look at how much the length of the day changes over a year in three cities.

London’s day swings by almost 9 hours between winter and summer, Cairo’s by under 4, and Nairobi’s barely moves at all. Chart by me, computed from each city's latitude.

London gets less than 8 hours of daylight in December and more than 16 in June, so moving an hour of light around actually makes a difference there. Cairo only swings between about 10 and 14 hours, and near the equator in Nairobi, the day is basically 12 hours long all year. Most of Africa sits close to the equator, which is why almost nobody there bothers. The countries outside Europe and North America that still change their clocks, like Chile, New Zealand, southern Australia and Israel, all sit further from the equator, and Egypt sits right at the edge of where it starts to make sense.

There is always a colonial connection

My next thought was that the British ruled Egypt, so maybe there was a connection. And there was. The British first introduced summer time in Egypt in 1940, during the Second World War, when Egypt was a key British military base. It stopped after the war, came back in 1957, and then Egypt spent the next several decades switching it on and off.

After the 2011 revolution, the transitional government abolished it. It came back in 2014, was cancelled again in 2015 after the electricity ministry said the savings were not of “any tangible effect”, and in 2016 the government famously cancelled it just three days before the clocks were supposed to change. Then, in 2023, it came back again.

Energy Saving Time

Here is the twist. Egypt does not use daylight saving time to save daylight at all. It should honestly be called energy saving time. When the government restored it in 2023, the stated reason was to save energy at a time when fuel had become expensive after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The less natural gas Egypt burns in its own power plants, the more it can sell to Europe for much-needed foreign currency. Egypt had exported around $600 million of gas to Europe the year before and was hoping to reach $1 billion, and the electricity ministry estimated the clock change would save about $25 million worth of gas.

This doesn’t completely make sense to me though, because the heat is the same no matter what the clock says. In a hot country, the biggest demand on the power grid is not lights, it’s air conditioning. Shifting the clock means people are home and awake during the hottest part of the evening, possibly running their air conditioners even more. And there is research suggesting exactly that. When parts of Indiana adopted daylight saving time, economists used it as a natural experiment and found that it actually increased household electricity use by about 1%, mostly because the savings on lighting were wiped out by extra heating and cooling. Egypt’s own electricity ministry reached a similar conclusion back in 2015, which might explain why the country keeps switching it on and off.

So why only Egypt?

Put it all together and Egypt is an odd mix. It sits just far enough from the equator for daylight saving time to be possible, it inherited the habit from the British during the war, and today it keeps it mostly as an economic bet on exporting gas rather than anything to do with sunlight. Morocco, the other North African country with complicated clocks, used to permanently run an hour ahead and briefly switch back during Ramadan, but it returned to plain GMT this September, leaving Egypt truly alone.

As for me, I have now put every collaborator’s time zone into my calendar, so hopefully next spring goes better than this autumn did.

The Weirdly Interesting Life of Sea Cucumbers

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Picture an animal that walks on hundreds of tiny hydraulic legs, can shoot toxic silly string at you, throws its own guts at predators and grows them back, breathes through its butt, and quietly keeps the sand on coral reefs clean. Now picture it looking like a pickle. That is a sea cucumber.

The prediction markets turned out to be right, by the way. Kalshi’s favourite won 479 of 487 races, and after a week of politics, gambling and data science I needed to switch sciences entirely. So today’s randomest of random things I learnt about is the weirdly interesting life of sea cucumbers.

Black sea cucumbers (Holothuria atra) doing what most people assume is all sea cucumbers do, lying on the sand. Photo by Tim Parkinson, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Not just logs on the sea floor

I genuinely thought sea cucumbers were just logs lying around on the sea floor. It turns out they are echinoderms, the same group of animals as starfish and sea urchins, with their own class called Holothuroidea. There are roughly 1,700 to 1,800 known species, and they look so different from each other that it is hard to believe they are all the same kind of animal.

The pineapple sea cucumber (Thelenota ananas) in the Red Sea. Same class of animal as the pickles above. Photo by Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

They walk, and some of them swim

They also move. Many sea cucumbers walk on rows of tiny tube feet, little fluid-filled legs powered by a hydraulic system inside their bodies, and the black sea cucumber uses three rows of them for walking and climbing. Others barely use their feet and instead crawl like a slow wave, squeezing the muscles of their body from one end to the other.

And some of them swim. Deep in the ocean lives Enypniastes eximia, nicknamed the headless chicken monster, which pulses fin-like flaps to lift off the sea floor and swim away from danger or towards food.

The headless chicken monster (Enypniastes eximia) swimming off Puerto Rico. You can see its gut through its see-through body. Photo by NOAA Okeanos Explorer, public domain.

Then there is Pelagothuria natatrix, shaped like an umbrella, which drifts through open water almost like a jellyfish. It is the only sea cucumber known to spend its whole life floating, and in fact the only echinoderm known to do so.

Pelagothuria natatrix, the sea cucumber that thinks it is a jellyfish, photographed near the Galápagos. Photo by NOAA Okeanos Explorer, public domain.

The ocean’s Roomba

Most sea cucumbers are the clean-up crew of the ocean. They swallow sand and sediment, digest the dead and decaying matter and bacteria mixed into it, and poop out cleaner sand. Imagine the floor of your room covered in chip crumbs, and your whole job is to hoover them up while chilling. A giant ocean Roomba.

So whose sand are they cleaning? Not the quartz sand on many beaches, which mostly comes from rocks and mountains worn down over millions of years and carried to the coast by rivers. But on coral reefs, the soft white sand is largely made by animals. Parrotfish scrape coral with their beaks and grind it down, and up to 70% of the sand on white beaches in Hawaiʻi and the Caribbean may have passed through a parrotfish. Then the sea cucumbers take over. On a reef at Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef, just two species were estimated to swallow more than 46 tonnes of sediment per hectare each year, enough to rework the top 5 mm of the entire reef’s sand every single year. In other words, parrotfish make the sand and sea cucumbers clean it.

The scale is wild. On a single reef, researchers used drones to count sea cucumbers and estimated that they process over 64,000 tonnes of sediment every year, with one common species getting through about 14 kg each. Churning the sand like this aerates it and releases nutrients back into the water, where the rest of the reef can use them, and a 2024 study even found that removing sea cucumbers from reefs increased coral disease.

Their defences are unhinged

When a predator gets too close, some sea cucumbers shoot out Cuvierian tubules, thin white threads that stretch to many times their length and become incredibly sticky on contact, like toxic silly string. They are laced with a toxin called holothurin, and a small animal that gets tangled up in them can be trapped for good.

Holothuria sanctori after firing its sticky Cuvierian tubules. Photo by EOL Learning and Education Group, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Others go even further and push their own guts out, often through their rear end, in a process called evisceration. The predator gets something to chew on while the sea cucumber slowly crawls away. And then it simply regrows the missing organs, usually within a few weeks.

One more thing

Sea cucumbers breathe through their butts. They pump water in through the anus into a pair of internal tubes called respiratory trees, which pull out the oxygen. And because there is a steady flow of water going in and out, a fish called the pearlfish has figured out it can just move in and live there, with one leopard sea cucumber found hosting 15 of them at once.

A pearlfish leaving its sea cucumber home, in a century-old engraving by the naturalist David Starr Jordan. Via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The next time you walk on white sand at a beach, remember that a parrotfish probably made it and a sea cucumber probably cleaned it. Honestly, I will never look at a sea cucumber the same way again.

Betting on Everything

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With the midterm election results coming in tomorrow, I got into predictive modelling. People like Nate Silver put a percentage on each candidate’s chance of winning, built from polls, surveys, historical data and past win rates. I am just a gravitational wave data analyst, but I do work with time series and forecasting every day, so it made me wonder whether I, or really anyone who knows some probability, could do the same.

A bazillion ads

That rabbit hole led me to prediction markets, specifically Kalshi and Polymarket, mostly because of the bazillion Kalshi ads I kept getting on YouTube. There are plenty of memes about the ridiculous things people bet on there, like whether the US government will confirm that aliens exist, or whether Jesus Christ will return before GTA VI comes out, both on Polymarket, the platform founded by Shayne Coplan. Kalshi, co-founded by Tarek Mansour, has its own endless list, and both have an entire section for the midterms.

What I am actually interested in is whether these platforms should exist at all. Billions of dollars are being traded on them, billions of dollars are being made, and Google Finance now shows their odds right next to stock prices.

Why now?

I kept coming back to three questions. Why do these markets exist now and not twenty years ago? Why are they allowed to operate with so little transparency about who is betting and how much, when we already struggle with that in places like hedge funds? And most of all, how is any of this legal?

The idea itself is not new. In 1988, faculty at the University of Iowa set up the Iowa Electronic Markets, small real-money markets to study how people predict presidential elections. Of course the odds depend on who is betting, how much money they have and how many of them there are. But when researchers compared the market with 964 polls across five presidential elections, the market was closer to the final result 74% of the time. Polymarket made a similar point in 2024, when it strongly favoured Donald Trump while most poll-based models called the race a toss-up.

How the internet saw Polymarket's 2024 forecast. Image via smartcontract.tips.

The catch is that Iowa was only allowed to run because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal regulator for futures markets, agreed not to step in as long as the markets were used for academic research, run not-for-profit and capped at $500 per person. So what changed? Mostly the courts. Kalshi sued the CFTC, and in September 2024 a federal judge ruled that Kalshi could list contracts on US elections. When the CFTC dropped its appeal in May 2025, the floodgates opened.

Not gambling, apparently

Let’s be honest about what these are. Launching a gambling business in the US means getting a licence in every state you operate in, which is slow and expensive, and that is exactly why sports betting companies spend so much on lawyers. Prediction markets found a shortcut by calling themselves something else. Their bets are structured as event contracts, a kind of financial derivative in the same family as futures and options, which means they answer to the CFTC instead of state gambling regulators. Tarek Mansour has argued that every new financial product gets called gambling at first, going all the way back to grain futures in the 1800s, and told Axios that “if we are gambling, then I think you’re basically calling the entire financial market gambling.”

But then how is “Will Jesus return before GTA VI” a financial derivative? This is regulatory drift. You start somewhere legal that follows the rules and makes sense, and then, one market at a time, you drift. And for platforms that insist they are completely different from sportsbooks, about 89% of Kalshi’s 2025 fee revenue came from sports, rising above 90% by the end of the year. The courts can’t agree on it either. Appeals courts have split on whether states can regulate Kalshi’s sports contracts as gambling, and the question may end up at the Supreme Court.

A lopsided game

Betting can be fun, and I think adults should be allowed to do it. My problem is with how lopsided these markets are. In a New York Times op-ed, Kyla Scanlon argued that big traders have outsized influence and could be profiting from insider information, and ahead of the midterms Polymarket itself reportedly investigated dozens of trades for insider trading and manipulation. The more money or information you have, the more the market bends towards you. In 2024, a single French trader known as Théo bet tens of millions of dollars on Trump and walked away with an estimated $85 million.

That becomes dangerous once people start treating the odds as truth. A powerful person could quietly put money behind an outcome to test the waters, or to make it look more likely than it is, and the market would report it as consensus. It does not help that the news is now part of the loop. CNN has had a data partnership with Kalshi since December 2025, and ahead of the midterms CBS, CNBC and Dow Jones all signed deals with Kalshi or Polymarket.

And then there is the moral side, which bothers me the most. When the US and Israel struck Iran this year, Reuters found hundreds of millions of dollars riding on contracts about the timing of the attacks and on Ayatollah Khamenei’s removal, and Polymarket paid out to the people who bet he would be gone. Critics started calling these death markets, and Polymarket only pulled a bet on whether a nuclear weapon would be detonated after a huge backlash. When a war becomes something you can win or lose money on, people’s attention shifts from the people dying to their own profit and loss. It reminds me of the crowds at the Colosseum, paying to watch fatal fights. That kind of desensitisation is a moral disaster waiting to happen.

So am I betting?

Whatever these markets are, with the rules this up in the air, and with me being far more informed about JWST observing cycles than about world politics, I am not taking part right now. Betting with half the knowledge is how you end up on the wrong side of the people who have all of it. Regardless, the markets are giving Democrats a 78% chance of taking the Senate and 95% for the House, so they are calling a blue wave tomorrow, and I cannot wait to see if they are right.

Fifty Shades of Data Center Gray

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When you think about who is making money from the AI boom, you probably think of GPUs, chipmakers, power companies and maybe the people building the giant data centers themselves. What you probably don’t think of is paint. But it turns out that every one of those data centers needs to be coated, floor to ceiling, and two very old-school paint companies have quietly walked into the most futuristic industry on the planet.

Why does a data center need paint?

Not for the looks. Almost all of it is gray, and the color is mostly incidental, since tech companies are basically painting gray concrete and gray steel with more gray in buildings that hardly anyone ever walks into. PPG apparently offers its data center customers shades called light gray, gray and dark gray.

What matters is what the paint does. The biggest job is fire protection. Structural steel loses its strength in a fire, so it gets coated with special paints that swell up into an insulating layer when they heat up, buying the building time before the steel gives way. PPG’s Steelguard 951 is one of these. On top of that there are coatings that protect against corrosion, floors that can take heavy equipment, coatings that stop static electricity and electromagnetic interference from messing with the servers, electrically insulating coatings, and even heat-reflective coatings that reduce how much cooling the building needs. For a building full of very expensive, very hot computers, all of this adds up quickly, and coatings can cost somewhere between $3 million and $8 million for a single building.

Who is selling it?

The two names that keep coming up are PPG and Sherwin-Williams. Coverage of a New York Times report says PPG expects its data center paint sales to triple in 2026 compared with last year. Sherwin-Williams released a whole guide for data center construction in May 2026 and now pitches itself as a one-stop partner for the big cloud companies. When its protective coatings sales grew in the mid-teens this summer, its stock had its biggest one-day jump in over four years.

They are not the only companies that can make this kind of coating. Hempel, a Danish coatings company, markets fire protection coatings specifically for data centers, and companies like AkzoNobel and Jotun make similar fire protection products. But PPG and Sherwin-Williams are the two big paint companies openly racing for the data center market right now.

So did I buy the stock?

I did. When I found out about this about a month ago, I bought some PPG shares, and I can already see it rising. To be completely honest though, the recent jump came after a strong quarter that was driven mostly by aerospace and regular architectural paint, not data centers. Data center paint is still a small slice of a company that sells over $4 billion worth of coatings every quarter. So I was right about the trend, but whether it is what actually moves the stock is a different question. Let’s see how it goes.

Disclosure: I own PPG stock. This is not financial advice, and please take financial talk from a PhD student with a gigantic boulder of salt.

Fire Together, Wire Together

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For a long time I believed humans can function just fine without emoting. Somewhere along the way it became hard for me to do, so I decided it wasn’t important. Then someone who meant the world to me asked me for exactly that, and I realised that if I want to have a fulfilling personal life, I need to learn how to emote. As a scientist, I will always favour research-backed science to help me improve. If I could understand how emotions actually work in the brain and the body, maybe I could use that to show up better for myself and for the people I love. That’s how I found neuroplasticity.

What is neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change itself. Every time you learn something, the connections between your neurons physically change, whether you are remembering the names of your new coworkers, getting better at a video game or learning a new route home.

Neuroscientists like to sum up how it works with the phrase “neurons that fire together, wire together”. When two connected neurons keep firing at the same time, the connection between them gets stronger. The receiving neuron adds more receptors, so the same signal has a bigger effect the next time, and the pathway becomes the one your brain is most likely to use. This is called long-term potentiation. It also works the other way round, and connections that are rarely used together get weaker, which is called long-term depression (which has nothing to do with the mood).

Synaptic plasticity. A connection that is used a lot gains receptors and passes on a stronger signal, while one that is rarely used loses them.

That is the synaptic side of things. There is also a structural side, where the neurons literally change shape. They grow tiny new bumps on their branches called dendritic spines, which is where new connections form, and they can branch out more. Connections that are not used get removed altogether in a process called synaptic pruning.

Can adults still change?

Children’s brains are plastic almost by default. They go through sensitive periods where they learn just by being around something, which is why a kid can pick up a language from playing with friends while I am on day 400 of Duolingo. A lot of what we learn passively as children stays with us for life, the good and the bad.

Adults can still change, but we have to work harder for it. Adult plasticity needs alertness and focused attention to switch on, small and incremental steps rather than giant leaps, and a lot of repetition. Sleep matters too, because that is when a lot of the strengthening actually gets locked in. It is harder at 26 than it was at 6, but it is very much possible.

What does this have to do with emotions?

It turns out a lot. Emotional regulation runs on the same kind of wiring as everything else, and one of the key connections is between the amygdala, a small region that reacts quickly to threats and strong feelings, and the prefrontal cortex, the part behind your forehead that helps calm those reactions down. That connection changes with experience too. In studies on rats, chronic stress made neurons in the amygdala grow more branches while neurons in the prefrontal cortex shrank theirs, so the alarm got louder and the brakes got weaker. Three weeks after the stress ended, the prefrontal neurons had grown back, although the amygdala changes lasted longer. A 2026 study in Nature is a reminder that this two-region story is a simplification, since there is no single “regulation centre” in the brain, but the direction of the evidence is the same.

A schematic of what chronic stress did to the rat brains, not to scale. Based on Vyas et al. (2002) and Radley et al. (2005).

What surprised me most was the research on holding emotions in. Psychologist James Gross and his colleagues found that when people suppress the outward expression of their emotions, the feeling does not go away and their bodies show more stress, even though they look calm on the outside. People who habitually suppress also feel less close to others, and in one study, even the person they were talking to had a rise in blood pressure. So not emoting does not just affect me, it affects the people I love too, and the chest ache and foggy thoughts I have been feeling suddenly made a lot more sense.

Practices that actually rewire

Everyone feels things, even if they don’t emote. I might not show my stress, talk about it, or tell someone I love that I appreciate them, but the feelings are still there inside, and my chest ache was proof of that. Giving those feelings an outlet is where emotional regulation comes in, and the part that got me really excited is that it can be trained like any other skill.

What blew my mind is how fast the brain responds. In a 2026 study from the University of Illinois, college students practised steering their attention to neutral details of an upsetting scene, like the trees and the sky in a photo of a car accident, and looking at difficult situations from a different angle. After just five weeks, they felt less distressed even about hard events from their own lives, and their brain scans had actually changed, with the prefrontal cortex more connected and the regions linked to negative emotions less sensitive. Five weeks! Slowing your breath down to around six breaths a minute every day for five weeks strengthened the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in another trial, and even practising looking at a painful situation from the outside, like a fly on the wall, changed the brain’s negative emotion patterns in just two weeks in a small study. These are early results, but they are real changes in real brains, in weeks, not years.

I have seen a small version of this in myself too. The less I use social media, the less impulsive I am all the time. And the more I have been journalling over the last few months, the more I think before speaking and the better I understand myself.

When we were young, our brains learnt whatever they could just by being around things, but as adults they need deliberate training. Some of us, for various reasons, have had certain mechanisms locked in place for a long time because that is what we learnt. But it is not too late. Neuroplasticity gives me the courage and the strength to keep going. It is hard, but no matter who you are, if you want to live a secure, happy and content life, the science says we can get there. I am 26, and science says I can do it!

“We are seeing that resilience is about flexibility. The key to resilience is not avoiding negative emotions or just simply trying to feel positive all the time; it’s more about developing the flexibility to respond to emotions in ways that fit the situation.”

Prof. Sanda Dolcos, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Underdog of Central Asia

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was doing my daily Worldle (amazing daily geography puzzles, by the way!) and the country of the day was Turkmenistan. One of the best parts of Worldle is not just guessing the country but also guessing the GDP (gross domestic product) of the neighbours and the country itself. Intuition told me Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are near two much bigger countries, India and China, so maybe there is a lot of outflux of people and they won’t have much GDP.

My best guess for the highest GDP was Uzbekistan, because it has one of the highest cotton productions in the world, grown in the very, very rich Fergana Valley. My next best guess would be Iran, with Afghanistan being the last, Turkmenistan somewhere in the middle and Kazakhstan somewhere at the bottom, assuming most of it would be unoccupied.

But BOY was I surprised. Kazakhstan had the highest GDP per person, and then came Turkmenistan.

GDP per capita, 2025. Deeper red means richer per person. Boundaries from Natural Earth, figures from the IMF.

#	Country	GDP per capita ($)
1	Kazakhstan	15,006
2	China	13,970
3	Turkmenistan	11,587
4	Iran	4,263
5	Uzbekistan	3,846
6	Kyrgyzstan	3,131
7	Tajikistan	1,693
8	Afghanistan	450

2025 figures, current US dollars. Source: IMF World Economic Outlook.

Let’s get into it.

Oil, oil, oil

Let’s get the boring answer out of the way first, because it is also the biggest one. Kazakhstan sits on a ridiculous amount of oil. Three giant fields, Tengiz, Kashagan and Karachaganak, do most of the heavy lifting, and in 2024 crude oil alone brought in about $43 billion. That is more than half of everything Kazakhstan sold to the rest of the world that year.

Here’s the part that broke my brain a little. Russia obviously has way more oil than Kazakhstan. But Russia also has about seven times more people. Per person, Kazakhstan actually pumps more oil than Russia does. So the oil money gets split between far fewer people.

And the neighbours? Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have basically no oil or gas at all. Uzbekistan has some gas, but nowhere near enough to carry 37 million people.

Uranium (and basically the whole periodic table)

This one I genuinely did not know. Kazakhstan is the largest uranium producer in the world, and not by a little. In 2024 it mined about 39% of all the uranium on Earth. Most of it is mined by pumping a solution into the ground, dissolving the uranium and pumping it back up, which is a lot cheaper than digging giant pits.

Now, to be fair, uranium is not what makes Kazakhstan rich. It was about $4.6 billion of exports in 2024, which is only around 1.6% of GDP. What it does is make Kazakhstan matter. A huge chunk of the world’s nuclear power plants run on fuel that started in the Kazakh steppe, and most of it heads to China.

And it doesn’t stop at uranium. Copper, zinc, chromium, coal, gold. If it is in the periodic table and you can dig it up, Kazakhstan probably has it.

Letting the world in

Having stuff in the ground is one thing. Getting it out and selling it is another. Right after independence in the 1990s, Kazakhstan invited the big oil companies in. Chevron went into Tengiz, and a whole consortium including ExxonMobil, Shell and Eni went into Kashagan. That meant foreign money and foreign technology from very early on.

Uzbekistan went the other way. It stayed largely closed off until around 2016, when a new president started opening up the economy and freed the currency. Turkmenistan is still one of the most closed countries in the world. Same region, same Soviet starting point, very different choices.

Saving for a rainy day

In 2000, Kazakhstan set up the National Fund, a sovereign wealth fund where a big chunk of the oil money gets parked instead of spent. By the start of 2026 it held around $78 billion, more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. So when oil prices crash, and they do, the whole economy doesn’t fall off a cliff.

So what about the neighbours?

This is where my intuition was half right. I thought people leave Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and they do, a lot. They just mostly go to Russia, not India or China, and send money back home. In 2024, money sent home from abroad was around 45% of Tajikistan’s entire GDP, the highest share of any country in the world. For Kyrgyzstan it was about 24%, and even Uzbekistan was at 14%. That money keeps families afloat, but it means a lot of the work that powers these economies happens somewhere else.

And my Fergana Valley theory? The valley is genuinely one of the most fertile places in Central Asia, and Uzbekistan really is one of the world’s big cotton producers. But fertile land feeds people, it doesn’t make a country rich the way oil does. Also, plot twist, almost none of the Fergana Valley is in Kazakhstan. It is split between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which all sit in the bottom half of the table.

Turkmenistan, the gas giant nobody talks about

Turkmenistan coming in right behind China makes a lot more sense once you know it has some of the largest natural gas reserves on the planet. Depending on who you ask, the country as a whole ranks fourth or fifth in the world for gas reserves. But one single field, Galkynysh, is so big that it is the second-largest gas field anywhere on Earth. Most of that gas goes through a pipeline straight to China.

Why China comes in below Kazakhstan

This was the most surprising row for me, and it turns out it is not even a permanent thing. Kazakhstan and China have been swapping places for decades. In 2013 Kazakhstan was almost twice as rich per person. Then oil prices crashed in 2014 and 2015, Kazakhstan let its currency float, the tenge lost about half its value, and suddenly China was ahead. Kazakhstan only overtook China again in 2023.

The other part is that China is not one economy, it is many. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai are way richer per person than Kazakhstan. But China also has hundreds of millions of people in poorer inland and rural provinces, and when you average over 1.4 billion people, they pull the number down. Kazakhstan has 20 million people and a lot of oil. China has 1.4 billion people and has to import most of its oil. Per person, that math was always going to be close.

So, was I wrong?

Very. Kazakhstan is not empty steppe with nothing happening on it. It is empty steppe sitting on top of oil, uranium and half the periodic table, with few people to share it, a government that let investors in early and a fund that saved the money for when things go bad. Turkmenistan has the gas but keeps the doors shut. And Uzbekistan, my confident pick, has the people, the cotton and the fertile valley, but not the stuff underground that turns into dollars.

Next time Worldle asks me about Central Asia, I’m going straight for Kazakhstan.

Update, November 5, 2026. Today’s Worldle country was Venezuela, and the SAME thing happened. Guyana, its tiny neighbour, has a GDP per capita of about [$26,100](https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/GUY/BRA/VEN), roughly 2.5 times Brazil's (about $10,700) and more than seven times Venezuela’s (about $3,600). Guess why. Oil, oil, oil. ExxonMobil found huge offshore oil fields off Guyana in 2015, production started at the end of 2019, and the country’s GDP per person has more than quadrupled since then. The twist is that Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, which says a lot about the other half of the Kazakhstan story. Having oil is not enough, you also have to let people get it out of the ground and not waste the money.