Dailies - Observations (Page 9)

Urban Gilgamesh

From [https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/urban-gilgamesh]Lampham's Quaterly: > The centrality of the city in the Epic of Gilgamesh goes a long way toward explaining why it became so important in Mesopotamian culture. City-states of the kind that appeared in Sumer

Auctioneering

On how [https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/auctioneer-school-texas/] auctioneers are made.

How Vegetables Grow

How [https://www.boredpanda.com/how-fruits-vegetables-and-spices-grow/]various fruits and vegetables grow.

How DARPA Works

The Defence Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) is famous for having invented the internet, among other things. This [https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw]essay digs into how DARPA works. Lots of great detail on how to build a small, fast-paced, low budget organization that works

Long-Haul Trucking

An introduction to the current state of long-haul trucking.

Microfinance Scepticism

Microfinance platforms like Kiva were really popular for a while. The idea of doing good by simply lending money to budding third world entrepreneurs sounded exciting. The ambitious vision of microfinance lifting borrowers out of poverty while making modest profits for lenders doesn'

A New Kind Of Map

Here's a good way to spend 5 minutes: Someone has created a map [https://pic.blog.plover.com/geo/boundary-conditions/squares-map.png]of the world highlighting the most populous city in ever 10x10-degree rectangle. The ones in Western Europe are pretty predictable,

Venus Closeups

Back in 2015 Japan's Akatsuki orbiter managed to get a few fairly close up shots [https://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2018/0116-a-new-look-at-venus-with-akatsuki.html] of Venus. "Venus' nightside glow" by Damia Bouic, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 [https:

Over Abstraction

Joel Spolsky on 'architecture astronauts': [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/] > When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing,

AI Brings Portraits To Life

Using neural networks to generate realistic, animated faces from portraits. Not all of them are compelling but the Mona Lisa one is very believable.

What You Incentivize Is What You Get

This [http://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Motivation/Kerr_Folly_of_rewarding_A_while_hoping_for_B.pdf] 1975 paper shows why it is so important to have the right incentives in organizations. It's foolish to incentivize one

Ancient Board Games

A short but interesting article [https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-ancient-history-of-board-games] on ancient boardgames.

Micromort

Micromorts [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort]are a measure riskiness of activities. One micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death. Of course, someone has catalogued [https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/life-expectancy-by-activity-behavior/] a bunch of activities with the micromorts associated with each. Scuba

A Thousand Book Reviews

Michael Orthofer has written over two thousand book reviews over the years in his blog The Complete Review [http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html]. It's a great place to lose a few hours. I've bought The Thought Gang [http:

Newton's Notebooks

Cambridge has digitized [https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03996/]some Newton's notebooks from his time as a student in Trinity College. It's in mix of English, Latin, and Greek. Unfortunately no translation seems to be available and even

Sentient AI Is Coming / GPT-3

Scott Alexander covers [https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/10/the-obligatory-gpt-3-post/]OpenAI's latest NLP neural net, GPT-3. It's trained with a massive 175 billion parameters, and sometimes it's shocking how human-like the language it generates is: > PROMPT: UNITED

TempleOS

Probably the world's most interesting operating system. Some quotes from the CodersNotes blog [http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/]on the OS: > TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis, has spent

Radio Garden

Someone has created a website [http://radio.garden/]that let's you listen to radio stations from around the world.

When Does Incrementalism Not Work?

I'm generally a big fan of incremental improvements over major upheavals. Incrementalism seems to be the only way to affect change in complex systems. With big changes, you have no idea what the side effects will be. With smaller changes, you get

Learning Through Osmosis

I've increasingly become convinced that most useful knowledge can't be transmitted through written means, particularly for complex skills like engineering. You need to learn from your own mistakes. But even more importantly, from others mistakes. Find people who are better

PHP: Dying since 1995

'Dying since 1995', that's apparently the unofficial slogan for PHP. This year it turned 25, and it's more popular than ever. The JetBrains folks (developers of the PhpStorm IDE), have put together a timeline [https://www.jetbrains.com/

Reading Middle English

At some point I hope to read The Canterbury Tales in the original middle English. There is just something enchanting about the language – it feels comprehensible while being just out of reach: > Ther n’ is no werkman whatever he be, That may both

The Roton Rocket

The Roton rocket was an early (and hilarious) attempt at making re-usable rockets. From Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_Rocket]: > Rotary Rocket Company was a rocketry company that developed the Roton concept in the late 1990s as a fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit

How 5G Works

5G and Shannon's Law. [https://www.waveform.com/blogs/main/5g-and-shannons-law]

The Problems With Peer Review

Rodney Brooks on the state of the peer review process [rodneybrooks.com/peer-review/] for scientific papers: > My three most cited papers were either rejected under peer review or accepted with no peer review. So I am not exactly a poster child for peer