Even More Links for July

links, once again

1. fun short video on Magpie, which recall is pursuing longer-distance electric aviation using a system of aerial towing. it's a wild idea, but perhaps not completely insane

2. good post about advancements in weather forecasting. the importance for wind & solar is obvious, but interesting to see other random firms using more targeted weather data, such as food delivery (Economist)

3. two good pieces on artificial gravity. Vast is pursuing it. and gravityLab as well. an important step for humanity

4. the Otamatone, a Japanese musical toy. computers have given us the ability to fully dematerialize music creation, which is great. but it’s still fun to see experimentation in distinctive physical devices. Launchpad is amazing of course. ReacTable is perhaps the most fascinating, shame it never took off. & let us not forget the all the experimental DIY people out there, god bless ‘em

5. amusingly, three days after my previous links post needled Fervo about its meager technical progress despite being super-successful in media, it announced a "breakthrough" that garnered multiple big media hits. Latimer thread here. article here. really excellent David Roberts interview with Latimer here. & interesting Jesse Jenkins commentary on Eavor (closed-loop) vs Fervo (fracking). i'm not actually sure whether this announcement cuts against my point, or reinforces it. Fervo completed a demonstration run of a pilot project with apparently very good results, which i suppose is important. but it remains the case that they're not in commercial production yet (though their pilot project will ultimately serve a Google data center with ~4MW capacity). don't get me wrong, i am very supportive of Fervo & think geothermal is extremely promising. of course it takes a long time to get new technologies to market; this is part of why energy is such a brutal business. but as with the constant "announcements" from SMR nuclear firms, the signal-to-noise ratio in media coverage tends to be low. what really matters in the end is official legal offtake contracts and energized projects delivering electrons

6. somewhat related, Robert Bryce had a great interview with the CEO of NET Power (utility-scale natural gas with carbon capture). i’ve posted about this before as a potential “nuclear killer”, & if anything this podcast made me more bullish. they’re moving steadily towards commercialization, & the economics sound great. in the longer run i’d still bet on nuclear & geothermal & perhaps long-duration storage having big roles in many power systems, with fossil fuels almost completely going away. but at least for a solid few decades & probably longer, this seems like the most promising form of rapidly-deployable ‘clean firm’ generation by far, in part because the cost profile of gas lends itself to pairing flexibility with intermittent wind & solar. stock ticker NPWR, by the way.. gotta buy some of this as a hedge against NuScale going to zero 🥺

7. nice brief article on why US offshore wind is struggling. anti-wind ppl are loving it, but most of this stuff seems temporary, & i think long term it’s still going to happen in a reasonably big way & be clearly beneficial in terms of cost, reliability, pollution reduction etc (Heatmap). also i enjoyed this post from Michael Goff running through some of the downsides of (onshore) wind power

8. good Misha Saul book review on the history of precision engineering (jet engines etc)

9. US fedgov might require AM radio in new cars. i truly hate this kind of heavy-handed technology protection regulation. the public safety pretext seems very weak

10. update on Google Robotics, which is using recent LLM stuff to improve their tech ("vision-language-action" model). extremely cool. i post about it frequently, but cheap reliable effective robotic arms would be massively productivity-enhancing in so many domains. Moravec's paradox will be dissolved within our lifetimes (NYT). see also this post going into more details

11. enjoyed this profile of Umbra, which is pursuing high-resolution space imagery

12. and an update on Ambri, liquid metal energy storage. promising

13. Koloma, pursuing geologic hydrogen extraction (lol). we love our weird energy company names don’t we folks?

14. widely covered, but NASA & DARPA are moving the ball forward a bit on space nuclear propulsion. awesome. & on a related note, Zeno Power also won some money from NASA to develop its radioisotope power system for moon base applications

15. Future of Life Institute released a new fictional video depicting an AI-driven military escalation. it’s a real issue, but seems super unlikely to result in strategic weapons exchange. more likely is just a regional or limited fuckup with smaller-scale weapons. their classic Slaughterbots video was better imo

16. these reader letters responding to the Economist article advocating for seabed mining that i posted last edition were interesting (Economist). most were critical, & weak. but The Metals Company CEO response was good. his final sentence is spot-on:

There is a better way and the answer is clear. For the energy transition to succeed with the least impact on the environment and human lives, we need to source metals from where there is the least life, not the most.

unfortunately the ISA delayed its exploitation regulations (NYT). Catalyst podcast had an excellent episode with the CEO of Impossible Metals

17. not unrelated, BLM revoked a previously-granted approval to do some lithium exploration at a site in Nevada, citing the Endangered Species Act. this is frustrating for all the normal reasons. but i want to call out two additional dysfunctions. one is regulatory uncertainty. it's bad enough that opening new mines in the US is nigh-impossible & takes decades & involves endless lawsuits. but we see here that the thicket of overlapping legal & administrative tests that must be traversed aren’t even monotonic— everything is up for potential renegotiation & nothing is ever really settled. this is just death for business & financing (& can't be good for company morale & talent acquisition/retention: who wants to be an economic geologist if you have to wait 10+ years to see your work get translated into commercial results (if you're lucky!)). the other thing i'll note is a similar dysfunction wrt land. in this case the exploration site is near a national wildlife refuge (one of [too] many different categories of federally protected land), but not actually within it. when courts block land use activities on account of this mere proximity, they effectively extend the protection level into adjacent land. this is highly dysfunctional. regulatory protection/enforcement should be more clearly defined and more certain

18. also see this good article about efforts underway to do direct lithium extraction in the 'smackover formation' in southern US, centering in Arkansas (WSJ)

19. Breakthrough essay about luxury consumption & the environment, using the issue of private jets as a hook. too long & a bit annoying at times, but i fundamentally agree that aviation travel abundance is a worthwhile goal in all its forms (eVTOL, supersonic etc), & environmentalist opponents are totally misguided. the solution is to reduce air travel’s environmental impacts via technology (electrofuels, quieter engines & airports etc). i am mostly fine with higher marginal tax rates to reduce wealth & income inequality, & i support carbon taxes & strong pollution regulations as well. but going after specific forms of luxury consumption rather than doing broad-based (ideally) technology-neutral pollution & economic policy is silly

20. amusing claim about a rebound effect in food waste regulation. plausible, but i doubt it’s the dominant effect in most contexts. a more intuitive dynamic to me is that food waste regulation increases prices due to compliance costs (different packaging/storage/transportation tech & practices etc), & probably reduces food variety & convenience as well. i tend to think high levels of food waste are in some sense a positive indicator of cheap & abundant food, which is good wrt food security/access. people who are terribly concerned with this issue often suffer from 'partial-equilibrium thinking', & don't seem to grok the idea that regulation can have unintended consequences. existing food waste flows cannot costlessly be diverted to poor people needing more food

21. interesting profile of Q-CTRL, an Australian/US firm pursuing military quantum technology (sensors, communication & encryption, computing). also discusses general international relations & policy wrt quantum (NYT)

22. Dan Wang post on China & technology

23. Brimstone (decarbonized cement) is chugging along

24. as are electrofuels for aviation: Startup Twelve is building a factory

25. the Odds Lots podcast did a great pair of episodes on water issues in Arizona

• water policy expert. hilarious (light-hearted) speculation that the anti-Phoenix meme you see from many environmentalists is actually unconscious Eurocentrist bias towards temperate climates, pointing out that some of the oldest cities on earth were in the desert. if you hate Phoenix you are RACIST!

• alfalfa farmer. most of my knowledge about water comes from reading libertarian economists who push more pricing & market mechanisms as something like a silver bullet for western water scarcity. i still do basically agree with that. freer water markets would result in less AZ agriculture & industry and more residential, which seems fine. but the guest made me a bit more positive about the value of ag in Arizona; it's not some obscene wasteful capitalist abomination— there are real & efficient reasons why AZ has lots of agriculture (great weather, most obviously)

26. this automated South Park generator is pretty incredible. article here (Forbes). this comment seems about right

27. one more podcast: interview with BNEF's Jenny Chase on solar manufacturing. just a good overview of the current state of things

28. two long articles on TVA clean energy stuff. one at Canary, one here from Atlantic

29. quite interesting post about how AI censorship & public opinion surveillance tools work in nondemocratic regimes like China, & how they affect regime resilience. preference falsification biasing input data is the big problem

30. good short piece about some firms pursuing next-gen electric heating systems, & enhancements to heat pump technology. if you consider how many different areas of HVAC are seeing innovation, it just becomes obvious that there's a tremendous amount of opportunity here (IoT & grid interactivity, materials, pandemic defense & general air filtration, geogrid & microgrid things etc) (Bloomberg)

31. worthwhile hard-to-summarize Emmet Penney post about the idea of the industrial revolution, & how it relates to techno-utopianism/optimism. might need to chew on this a bit more (the sign of a good piece!). i like the social constructivist point about how the industrial revolution is in certain ways a meme, because along many dimensions & at a micro level it was a slow, incremental process. ultimately though i'd say 'industrial revolution' is a useful concept to have, & don't see a super strong case for its pernicious social effects (though the thing itself obviously did have many negative consequences, even if it was massively beneficial for humanity overall). i'm not crazy about the idea of distinguishing between a sort of leftwing tech-optimism & rightwing tech-optimism. it is possible to slice the salami too thinly, & something i like about tech-optimism in general is how it cuts across the contemporary right/left ideological divide. rightwing tech-optimists finding increasingly sophisticated ways to attack leftwing tech-optimists (and vice-versa) seems like a good way to get clicks & drive culturewar, but is probably not great for actually forming coalitions to make positive change in policy & society. i think tech-optimism has more traction in left-policy circles in general, & this creates negative-polarization dynamics that can be quite silly (e.g nuclear maximalists (rightly) attacking anti/de-growth environmentalists while simultaneously adopting anti-tech, anti-progress degrowth memes)

books

There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster―Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jesse Singer. a pop-nonfiction book about accidental death, with an emphasis on workplace accidents & road safety (the author is an editor at Transportation Alternatives, an NYC advocacy nonprofit). the book is fairly ideological & takes a left-public choice theory approach to unsafe conditions, built environments etc (i.e profit incentives cause poor safety, underregulation). i did not agree with much of it, but it's a valuable perspective. i do think US cities & town centers are highly dysfunctional & unpleasant, because of their car-centric design. but overall the book’s framework wasn’t that sophisticated or interesting (“government can and should solve all safety problems, & is blocked merely by business interests”). skip it, go read the actual safety & complexity theorists like Sidney Dekker instead.