Links and tweets, 2022-08-17
by Jason Crawford · August 17, 2022 · 2 min read
Opportunities
- Long Now is looking for a Development Director (via @nicholaspaul26)
- Open Phil is hiring global health R&D Program Officers (via @JacobTref)
Links
- “ARIA will be ambitious in everything it does. We will fund nothing incremental or cosmetic” (Ilan Gur and Matt Clifford in The Economist)
- Peter Higgs (of the Higgs boson) believes that in academia today “he would not be considered ‘productive’ enough” (The Guardian, 2013)
- Dietrich Vollrath on the “additive growth” paper. See also my take
- Gov. Newsom proposes keeping Diablo Canyon open through 2035 (LA Times)
- “For why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and mountain tops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest miracle of all—a man who is both great and good?” (Will Durant)
Queries
- Has anybody compiled a timeline of greatest global concerns? (@Ben_Reinhardt)
- What’s the best way to reduce operations and maintenance costs for nuclear reactors? (@GovNuclear)
Quotes
- Is the decline of the independent inventor part of “ideas getting harder to find?”
- The reactionary or “stasist” mindset according to Virginia Postrel
- To produce a single book in the middle ages took a whole team of specialist craftsmen
- By horse and carriage, the ~100 miles between London and Birmingham took almost 8 hours. (In a reply, @timleunig says the greater speed of trains was worth more than 10% of GDP by 1914)
- People were ecstatic upon the completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable
- Elevators, conveyors, chutes and tubes—Amazon in 2022? Nope, Sears in 1906
- Heny Ford explains how electricity revolutionized manufacturing
- The importance of research freedom to Alexander Graham Bell
- God gave us Maxwell’s equations. Edison made the light bulb
- China adopted elements of German civil law to create a market economy
- Exports as an “unfortunate sacrifice”
- Women’s suffrage in the US was a very close vote
- Physics envy
Tweets and retweets
- This Venn diagram may be the best way to understand the FRO concept
- There isn’t a modern world without mining (@Leigh_Phillips)
- RIP David McCullough (@curiouswavefn)
- “When am I ever going to need history?” (@BretDevereaux)
- NEPA reform is not mainly about Environmental Impact Statements (@elidourado)
- Environmentalism is the main obstacle to infill housing in CA (@CSElmendorf)
- Mistakes become very hard to fix once they’re embodied in jobs (@paulg)
- How do you decide what to build? It’s about what are you best in the world at & can’t tolerate not building (@celinehalioua)
- My advice on the “train to crazy town”
Charts
