Link Nexus for April pt. 2
some more links for April. i waited too long to post & nearly 30 links piled up 😰
i am always in the market for wacky energy storage technologies. this is a good profile of Antora, which stores thermal energy using graphite bricks
US charter flight company JSX is switching to Starlink for its on-board internet. notable, both for the aviation industry and also for SpaceX, which is presumably getting some revenue & a learning experience providing reliable service to a business. it wouldn't surprise me to see Starlink gain traction as a b2b product first, rather than a direct-to-consumer ISP. the potential market of orgs doing remote operations is (probably?) bigger than the rural residential market (aviation, but also shipping, fire crews, search & rescue, military, mining, oil/gas etc)
quite good Economist article about next-gen US space suits. NASA's progress has been slow and dysfunctional. & apparently the Orbital Reef private space station folks are hoping to scrap space suits altogether for most tasks, & use small one-person spacecraft instead. seems neat
Zipline's blood drone delivery operation in rural Rwanda seems to be working well
US drone delivery on the other hand isn't progressing very rapidly, largely due to bad FAA regulations. but it is still progressing. Walmart & Google are beating Amazon, which is surprising
Austin Vernon post on solar costs & general economics of solar. good as always. last newsletter i joked about Erthos, but Vernon takes it really seriously :D
Zeno Power raised more money. recall this is the company pursuing radioisotope power systems (small nuclear decay batteries) initially for drones & various tasks in extreme environments (space, undersea etc). idk how mass-efficient these will ultimately be but i say again that the killer app is to support perpetual-flight drones that combine RPS, solar & perhaps wireless power beaming & conventional batteries
James McGinniss continues his great big-think series on the energy transition. this one sprawls across global trade & finance, china & geopolitics, & crypto. much to argue with, but much to ponder
Jeffrey Mason reflects on Honduras' repeal of its landmark charter cities legislation. seems quite bad for Prospera & the general movement
overview of Mainspring Energy, a company pursuing a radically different gas generator design supposedly cleaner than traditional fossil-fuelled turbines. they're targeting the mid-size distributed gas generation market initially
long profile of Beta Technologies, a VT-based company pursuing small eVTOL aircraft for cargo. not the meatiest article in the world, but still interesting
i always love this total US energy consumption sankey chart from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, now updated for 2021. the main takeaway is just that combustion is massively wasteful & inefficient, thermodynamically. this isn't a decisive argument for total electrification— combustion fuels have many important advantages, which is why we use them (& why some ppl see hydrogen playing a big role in future, despite massive conversion inefficiencies). but as electric technologies & infrastructure improve & scale up, it will allow us to enjoy the efficiency benefits more and more. this is a nontrivial countervailing factor that offsets certain added costs of the energy transition
good WSJ article [archive link] on new lithium brine extraction tech. i don't really share the pessimism some ppl have about lithium supply being a massive problem for clean energy, and it's partly because of technologies like this. sure, in the near-term the price has gone way up which makes everything more expensive. but "the cure for high prices is high prices", as they say. in the longer run new supply comes online (e.g), & new substitute technologies using other materials will be developed & deployed. there's not really an absolute shortage of the metal on earth, or a lack of good potential alternatives in many domains. if the price is persistently high, the economy will just get smarter about how it prioritizes the use of lithium (mostly EV batteries, less stationary/grid storage i assume)
relatedly, Catalyst podcast had a good episode about battery metals & mining. actually it was mediocre. but near the end the guest made an interesting point, which is basically that a clean energy economy (in principle) allows recycling to a degree that the single-use fossil fuel economy does not. i'd always expected recycling of batteries & solar panels etc to grow alongside the overall industry buildout. but i'd never directly considered what a possible end-state industrial ecology would look like. and it could look something like a circular economy, which has some nice properties. if you're recycling most of the materials required to run your energy system, it could make nations more self-sufficient. material replacement schedules & supply/demand dynamics could be more predictable. & eventually, it could allow everyone to mine much less. i don't really have a problem with endless mining. but if the energy system eventually becomes a mostly closed loop, it would allow newly mined materials to be used for other things like building space elevators and Dyson spheres and so on
new Cameron Harwick paper, about money and finance. always read Cameron Harwick
interesting exercise looking at how newspaper coverage of mass shootings varies according to the race of the suspected perpetrator. i'm appropriately skeptical because this site is extremely ideological & biased, & it doesn't seem like the methodology is public. but Lehman isn't a total hack, so there's probably something there
long article about US nuclear waste storage policy. continuing the gridlock here won't doom our potential 2030s nuclear resurgence, but it definitely doesn't help. given the precarious economic situation of the industry, it would really be good to sort something out. Finland did it, come on
amusing Justin Murphy rant against 'personal knowledge management' & Roam. i started using Roam quite heavily when it first appeared & have been pretty pleased. but this is not bc Roam or its associated lifestyle memes are so special. i previously just had a big jumble of local & cloud documents, & switching to a single thing was a huge improvement. so Roam has been a definite upgrade, but probably any other notes app would be just as good, & the main value for me isn't the special features or any kind of improoover cult
New Science released a big report on the NIH
many ppl shared this SciTech piece about a new super-strong super-lightweight material. it's cool of course. but i basically tune out all articles in this genre, of which there is a constant supply. the road to commercialization is long and hard, and it's a truism that most new 'breakthrough' materials & technologies end up going nowhere or causing merely incremental improvements. regularly reading about this stuff before it exits the lab has a very low signal-to-noise ratio, & it doesn't justify its time & attention cost. i'm probably losing some small degree of alpha, but you got to prioritize
new ctrlcreep essay, with AI art
eigenrobot on tolerance
thought-provoking post from Riva Tez about all the infectious pathogens floating out there, which probably have effects that we don't fully appreciate, especially wrt chronic conditions
new Thinkwert twitter game, Oregon Trail theme. masterful as always
LA Times hit piece on the seabed mining authority, for industry capture. i hate this shit. i mean, journalism is fine & good, whatever. but maybe can we at least try out some actual undersea mining before we start condemning the idea & demanding it be crushed by endless regulation & accountability proceduralism? there's a massive amount of seafloor area, in no possible world can initial forays into undersea mining cause significant ecological damage. it's obvious that the underlying sentiment here is one of abstract ideological opposition; concern about violating the purity & sacredness of nature, etc.
let's not forget the basic advantages of seabed mining, if it becomes economical. it eliminates nearly all direct human costs: pollution, impact on indigenous cultural sites, local social & economic effects. yes there could be issues around ecology, fishing & tourism economics. but there's just no question that mining in the middle of nowhere ocean is vastly less disruptive & damaging than mining on land closer to where people live & visit. get a grip
the actual details of this piece are also pretty weak. the gotcha quotes by the bad guy seem quite reasonable. corruption is bad of course. industry capture is generally bad. ideally you want regulators to be pretty impartial. but regulatory incentives can also fail in the other direction, causing excessive caution & bias towards blocking stuff, being dysfunctionally slow etc. at the end of the day though, undersea mining will happen one way or the other, because some small island nations are moving forward with projects within their sovereign territory
books
A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right by Matthew Rose. a short, well-written book profiling five thinkers who've influenced current rightwing anti-liberal theory & politics (Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, Samuel Francis). i really enjoyed this. the author is leftwing, but he does a great job being impartial & charitable, & mostly relegates his normative commentary to short bits at the end of each chapter (i think— i didn't know much about the subjects prior to reading the book, so i can't say for sure he's not totally butchering their depictions. but the style & mood of the book is calm & reasonable, it's not at all a 'takedown' of any of these figures). the final chapter also switches gears into an explicitly left-Christian theology deep-dive, which is odd but also pretty interesting. a core theme of the book is that many intellectual strands of anti-liberalism are avowedly anti-Christian, seeing liberalism as a thinly-veiled secularization of Christianity, with liberalism's most damaging effects (e.g universalism & equality obliterating traditional culture & hierarchy) growing directly out of Christianity
this book really deserves a proper, longer review. it's very rich & thought-provoking. i felt stupid not really knowing who Alain de Benoist was despite having read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed & it seemingly copying Benoist's entire argument. the book never really gets into contemporary anti-liberal thought or spends much time explicitly making connections from the profiled thinkers to today. & it's not comprehensive in covering the entire range of anti-liberal theory. but the author occasionally mentions ppl like Yarvin, so i hope we might see a second book at some point which takes this next logical step.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. someone i trust recommended this to me a few years ago, but it didn't really do it for me. at all. i have seen the movie, which maybe ruined it. but in general i just wasn't interested in any of the stories. i'm not a literary sophisticate, i need ideas & concepts to be very explicit if they are to reach me. & they definitely weren't here, if they existed at all. sci fi & dystopia are usually reliable in this respect, but the two stories in those genres were boring & generic. it was somewhat interesting to see the writing style shift as the stories jumped to different time periods, but overall i'd give Cloud Atlas a big thumbs down
The Last Man by Mary Shelley. i love Frankenstein, so i thought i'd check this out. it's considered one of the first dystopian novels, and it first got on my radar because it featured prominently in Thomas Moynihan's fantastic intellectual history of the concept of x-risk. it was good. the first half was pretty uninteresting, basically just following a group of English aristocrats in their political scheming & love triangles & emotional breakdowns. but around halfway through the global pandemic appears & the story picks up. the entire last third of the book is really great, depicting the human population gradually dying out & society collapsing into small well-provisioned groups & apocalypse cults & refugee raiders from USA. the first chapter in Part 3 is especially amazing, largely one long rumination about collapse culture & human extinction. the book is nominally set in the future, but functionally it takes place in early-1800s Europe, with no changes in technology, culture or political structure. not a must-read, but definitely recommended.