links for July
happy Independence Day my fellow USians
1. intriguing promo vid of a competition billing itself as an Olympic Games without drug testing, & perhaps allowing other kinds of technological enhancement. awesome. hope it’s real & can get some sponsor money to execute well. i don’t follow it as much these days, but i’m still philosophically committed to transhumanism. Zoltan Istvan suggested this idea years ago. see also his more recent piece (NYT)
2. 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy dropped. good writeup from Michael Goff. Robert Bryce seems like a bit of a hack, but his post is a worthwhile perspective i suppose, emphasizing the continued dominance of fossil fuels in absolute terms
3. pessimistic update on ITER. unsurprising. (SciAm)
4. Whisper Aero revealed some details about its engine, which hopes to be very quiet & put to rest one big concern about eVTOLs. see also this good piece on the general state of eVTOL (FT)
5. good War on the Rocks podcast discussing air superiority in Ukraine. listening to it i kept thinking about The Kill Chain. that (fantastic) book opens with a vignette of Russia's performance in Syria, describing western militaries' surprise at the advanced state of Russia's 'reconnaissance strike complex'. in light of Ukraine, this overestimation of Russia's military capability was a big failing. but the podcast gets into some of the differences between the two conflicts. good stuff
6. amusing article about a fuel cell company that actually made a profit— apparently the first one (lol)
7. good Daniel Herriges piece about the often-overlooked subtleties surrounding the relationship between density & housing prices
8. excellent Charles Fain Lehman article on the US drug crisis
9. good blog post on the economics of Varda, which recall is pursuing in-space drug manufacturing. one of the wackier space businesses out there
10. nice overview of the possibility for a near-term US nuclear renaissance. if NuScale's Idaho project fails... it's over (Economist)
11. amusing video of an art house in Joshua Tree. i enjoy the architecture & art culture of the southwest US. you have Earthships, Arcosanti, Biosphere 2... desert frontier mindset is just fun. & in the near future, advances in 3d-printing will likely result in much more architectural experimentation of this sort
12. Contoro, pursuing remote human-assisted control for autonomous robotic arms. the possibilities for safe, effective & affordable autonomous robotic arms + machine vision are mind-boggling. their example of loading & unloading boxes from trucks is great— a staggering amount of global labor-hours is surely spent moving stuff around. i've often thought about airport ground operations as a sensible place for rapid automation, once the capability & economics get there: autonomous tugs driving carts of bags & cargo to aircraft, robotic arms reaching into aircraft bins to stack bags... a large share of commercial airlines' labor force is baggage handlers, & a large share of the tasks those workers perform are on the cusp of automation. seeing firms like this emerge to pursue solutions to intermediate challenges (e.g the ability to have a human operator step in & solve issues when autonomy fails) is a very good sign. it suggests that deployment is going to happen early, with tech improving incrementally over time
13. regular reminder that we're not prepared for a big solar storm. i tend to worry most about energy systems, but this piece focuses on internet infrastructure, which is also a concern. in both domains the solution is a mix of both large-scale hardening & preparation/stockpiling, & increased use of small-scale decentralized systems (solar etc microgrids for energy, meshnets for internet) (WaPo)
14. good overview of the current state of consciousness science/philosophy
15. Institute for Progress report on indoor air pollution. not super related to the report, but i would love to see a detailed treatment organizing various technology, design & lifestyle/behavioural tradeoffs across three dimensions: indoor vs outdoor air quality, indoor vs outdoor sound quality, & heating/cooling. you could throw in light, smell & micromaterial pollution dimensions also if you wanted. basically, how does one think about the decision to keep one’s windows open vs closed, in different housing locations & building typologies?
16. fun Connor Tabarrok post on undersea cables. see too this piece on the geopolitics of cable networks, with some great maps & visualizations (FT)
17. quite interesting piece about cost-efficiencies in western military spending ("Lockheed's Law", related to Baumol's cost disease) (Economist)
18. Tanner Greer is doing a book club on cybernetics, Soviet Russia & China
19. underground tunnels for power distribution in Stockholm. tunnels are always fun. but mainly this is a good example of how electrification, especially for heating, is tough & requires lots of new physical infrastructure (Bloomberg)
20. Casey Handmer's Terraform Industries released a diagram of its initial machine to create net-zero natural gas using direct air capture carbon & electrolysis hydrogen, all powered by off-grid solar. i want to believe, but the economics & technical challenges are daunting. i’m also somewhat discouraged by Handmer's online presence, which seems mostly focused on other hobbies & interests (recall that he gained prominence via his blogging on Starship & space stuff). my presumption is that the ambitiousness of this Terraform project is such that in order to succeed, it basically requires maximal commitment of resources & attention by its founder, leaving no time for hobbies. but who knows, maybe Handmer is one of these people who can just do it all
21. new issue of Asterisk Magazine, focused on AI. every piece is good but can't say any truly grabbed me
22. hardware critique of Apple Vision Pro. who knows
23. MP Materials, pursuing an effort to do US processing of rare earth metals. we must support. their talk of adding a recycling input to the process sounds like bullshit, but hey whatever gets the investment dollars in & environmentalist vultures off your back amirite?
24. UVA’s politics shop released their initial 2024 electoral college ratings. one of the funniest & most dysfunctional things about USia is the sheer quantity & frequency of elections. we like to think of ourselves as having a libertarian, anti-govt streak. yet elections are constantly happening, & presidential cycles comprise 50% of all calendar years. it drives everyone into an insane zero-sum mindset. idk what you could do about the presidential thing, but i would move House elections to 4-year cycles (senate too), eliminate off-year local elections, merge county/city govts, & move tons of random local offices from elected to appointed or civil service positions
25. interesting piece about towns in Arizona using water markets to secure resources (typically from farms) to keep growing. markets, uh, find a way (Bloomberg)
26. good article on the amusing success of Hokas, those big-cushion running shoes (WSJ)
27. & this funny piece on the Mormon Church's global real estate empire (WSJ)
28. Augmedics, pursuing AR tools for spinal surgery. love the name
29. several good food/ag pieces:
Canary on vertical/indoor farming, responding to AeroFarms’ bankruptcy. tfw no AI-powered lettuce
but also lab-grown chicken just got FDA approval
fascinating piece on why chicken is crushing beef in US market. one reason is the highly fractured landscape of beef companies. once again, big business wins (Bloomberg)
30. some amusing excel sleuthing showing academic fraud
31. good piece on Charm, pursuing carbon removal by converting farm waste to bio-oil & injecting it into the ground. the piece explicitly says that bio-oil is not very energy dense or useful as a fuel. but part of me does wonder if there could be a side benefit of this approach for longrun civilizational resilience. people talk about how humanity has extracted all the most-accessible hydrocarbons, & restarting industrial civilization after a global catastrophe couldn’t happen (i.e solar & nuclear are great but they involve massively complex supply chains & intermediate technologies compared to “burn rocks & goo that you find on the ground”). but maybe you could tweak things so that Charm can replenishing humanity's stock of easily-accessible liquid fuels, which could be used in extreme circumstances? idk just spitballing here. i generally think direct-air capture is the best carbon removal tech, because its value is highly certain & measurable. but things won’t be settled in this market for a long time, if ever, since it’s totally reliant on govt subsidies & corporate charity
32. amusing Matt Bruenig post on Connecticut's bizarre 'baby bond' program
33. interesting data on the geography of young children in USA. suburbs stay winning. also from EIG, this report on the spatial distribution of persistently high poverty. their map of typologies was particularly interesting. Wyoming Idaho Vermont minimax best states confirmed. also this on the recent economic success of the southeast (Bloomberg)
34. Modelo recently overtook Bud Light as the biggest-selling beer in USA. notable quote: "If America’s Latinos were their own country, they would have had the third-fastest-growing economy after China and India during the past decade." (Economist)
books
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. pretty good. perhaps the first gothic horror novel. takes place in medieval Italy, though written in 1764. i liked The Monk & its bizarre comedy better. not really much horror or supernatural stuff; most of the book is just elite families scheming about relationships & control of the eponymous castle. of the several "classics" i've read these last few years, this was my least favourite
Ascension by Nicholas Binge. a quite enjoyable pulpy scifi mystery horror thriller novel about the appearance of a paranormal mountain in the Pacific ocean, involving govt research teams & ppl going insane and so on. it’s fairly derivative, with many influences like House of Leaves, Annihilation, Lost etc. i saw it on some lists of best books but wouldn’t say it’s good enough to deserve these accolades. but a fun read
