Month: January 2021

COVID-19 bifurcation

The result is that the amount of cash households have in the bank has absolutely exploded. I don’t even know if that word does justice. American households have $1 trillion more in checking accounts today than they did 1 year ago. For perspective, they held $800B in checking accounts a year ago. So it’s more than doubled. In 1 year. in many ways the American consumer is in the best financial shape in modern history, with minimal debt burdens and eager to spend their record savings.

Metaverse value chain

It’s possible to imagine a world in which a whole economy of creators make patterns and new materials for DIGITALAX’s digital fashion, and get paid every time a new skin using their work is sold. Or that by truly owning their own data, people can get paid to view ads, to submit their data to medical studies, and more. One of the features of Web3 companies is that there are often mechanisms to turn users into owners; people may be able to generate real wealth just by using products they’re excited about.

If done correctly, the Metaverse becomes more than the escape from a bleak reality that it is in Ready Player One, but a new way to earn a middle class income while pursuing your passions with ever-growing and more profitable niches of your people, around the globe.

Light sphere argument

If we’re to have an experience remotely like the human one, then we have to be relatively close to the beginning of time—since 100s of billions of years from now, the universe will likely be dominated by near-light-speed expanding spheres of intelligence, and a little upstart civilization like ours would no longer stand a chance. I.e., even though our existence is down to some lucky accidents, and even though those same accidents probably recur throughout the cosmos, we shouldn’t yet see any of the other accidents, since if we did see them, it would already be nearly too late for us.

if we want human-originated sentience to spread across the universe, then the sooner we get started the better! Just like Bill Gates in 1975, we should expect that there will soon be competitors out there. Indeed, there are likely competitors out there “already” (where “already” means, let’s say, in the rest frame of the cosmic microwave background)—it’s just that the light from them hasn’t yet reached us. So if we want to determine our own cosmic destiny, rather than having post-singularity extraterrestrials determine it for us, then it’s way past time to get our act together as a species. We might have only a few 100M more years to do so.

and here’s the preprint

First New Blue in 200 years

for the first time in 2 centuries, a new shade of the celebrated color is available for artists — YInMn Blue. It’s named after its components — Yttrium, Indium, and Manganese — and its luminous, vivid pigment never fades, even if mixed with oil and water. Blue pigments, which date back 6000 years, have been traditionally toxic and prone to fading. That’s no longer the case with YInMn, which reflects heat and absorbs UV radiation, making it cooler and more durable than pigments like cobalt blue.

Libertarians in a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had barely taken hold in the United States when principled libertarianism was reported to be among the early fatalities. “There are no libertarians in a pandemic,” Atlantic writer Derek Thompson quipped on Twitter on March 3. But that doesn’t mean libertarians haven’t made valuable contributions to the discourse surrounding COVID.

Paul Romer argued early on that government investment in massively expanded testing would be a bargain compared to the costs of letting the pandemic rage unabated. And this is one subsidy that many libertarian public voices eagerly endorsed. Yet the government is doing worse than nothing about these tests. Not only has the government neglected to subsidize them, it has put up obstacles so citizens can’t pay for them. Regulations are actively denying individuals access to valuable information about their own bodies that would help them avoid unknowingly spreading the disease.

More than 800 regulations were waived in response to COVID. While some of these will eventually come back into force, the pandemic has revealed how we’re better off without them.

Is there anything specifically libertarian about different dosing strategies? Not inherently. But the ideas owe much of their currency to the advocacy of George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok, and the debate centers on whether the bureaucratic decision-making processes of the FDA are adequate for responding to the current crisis. FDA procedures are designed for drug development and the certainty provided by time-consuming randomized control trials. As with early advice on masks and current restrictions on at-home testing, these standards may not serve us well in a rapidly progressing pandemic.

Rome in 3D

a good amount of progress since we last looked at this

History in 3D lives up to its name. The virtual recreations of ancient temples, cities, palaces and fortresses are vividly rendered in granular detail with realistic lighting effects and animated fly-ins. They’ve built models of everything from Sevastopol in 1914 to the flooding of Titanic’s grand staircase to Corinth in the 2nd century.

4 years ago, their most ambitious project, a reconstruction of Rome’s city center as it was in 320 Rome in 3D, made its debut on their YouTube channel. They had already been working on it for years and had enough of it ready to make a riveting trailer, a few tantalizing minutes of what promised to be the most comprehensive virtual recreation of ancient Rome ever made. The aim was to integrate it into a game engine, building a fully realized city based on the latest, most accurate information to provide an immersive experience of walking its streets.

Last month, History in 3D released their latest Rome in 3D video. They assured followers that the project was still ongoing, that they had encountered challenges and obstacles but were surmounting them and coming back better than ever, deploying new technological tools to redesign buildings and objects. The new trailer showcases the Forum, the beating heart of Roman society, and it is a huge leap forward in quality.

When will prefab take over?

Striking a balance between pragmatism and experimentalism, the firm develops prefabricated solutions in order to respond to a driving challenge of contemporary architecture—to speed up and simplify the construction process.

At first, we believed that the most interesting aspect of prefabrication was speed. Today we find other advantages in this type of architecture. The lack of labor is felt throughout Europe prefabrication allows us to “build without builders”. Traditional construction is doomed to disappear.