Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss

Payday

It is difficult to track or even imagine all the ways in which a cycle of steady, progressive depletion of funds shaped Americans’ experiences of labor and leisure in towns and cities at the moment when this cycle first took root. The reverberations were undoubtedly broad. For starters, the combination of weekly reckonings and diminishing resources could be felt in the workplace. It may well have induced workers to accept more overtime work (when the choice was theirs) later in the week, which might have contributed to the weekly rise in textile output after Thursday. Labor records from a Massachusetts mill in the early 1850s show a decided spike in overtime pay at the end of a week, and especially on Saturdays. But the weekly pay system had an even greater impact beyond the walls of the workshop and the factory, in the proliferating commercial venues where wage earners spent their money. Pay weeks, rent weeks, and the different Sabbath observances of Christians and Jews all shaped the urban lending industry and in turn structured the microfinances of ordinary life. Although interest rates were calculated by the month, borrowers had to repay the full interest on a loan even when they redeemed pledges after a week, as they often did. More generally, the rhythms of the pawning week, in tandem with the pay period on which it depended, became a feature of the urban timescape, determining when working people had money to spend and when they could gain access to their valued possessions. Like taverns and boardinghouses, pawnshops registered this calendar with special sensitivity, but the pay week shaped more than just business cycles; it shaped urban experience.

Haber-Bosch

50% of the nitrogen in our bodies came from the Haber–Bosch process. It’s in every protein and every strand of DNA. Ponder that — “50% of the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.” The Haber-Bosch process catalyzes the production of ammonia (NH3) from N2 and H2 gas. We need “fixed nitrogen”, available to our organic chemistries as atomic nitrogen. It is the limiting factor for the growth of all food. While nitrogen gas is about 80% of our atmosphere, not one atom of it is available for our use when tightly bound by the triple bond of N2 gas, the strongest chemical bond in nature. It is sequestered all around us. In nature, N2 is liberated to atomic nitrogen in small amounts by lightning strikes (it needs 1000°C) and slowly by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. Hager argues that if we reverted to relying on just those natural sources, 3b people would die of starvation in short order — our soils simply could not produce enough food for the mouths now on Earth. The Haber process consumes 4% of the world’s natural-gas production and 1.5% of the world’s energy supply.

2021-11-30: There’s a potential replacement:

The process is as clean as the electricity used to power it, and produces around 53 nanomoles of ammonia per second, at Faradaic efficiencies around 69%. The highest reported previous efficiencies for ammonia electrolysis sat around 60%, with the exception of 1 other lithium cycling approach that managed 88%, but required high temperatures of 450 °C. The team says it’s massively scalable, capable of operating either at industrial scale, or in extremely small on-site operations. “They can be as small as a thick iPad, and that could make a small amount of ammonia continuously to run a commercial greenhouse or hydroponics setup, for example.” This kind of distributed production model, as we explored looking at FuelPositive’s modular, container-sized ammonia production units, would have additional benefits in that it would eliminate the distribution and transport that contribute significantly to the financial and emissions costs of the current ammonia model.

2022-05-04: What happens when you think you can do without Haber-Bosch.
2022-07-22: The same team was able to improve ammonia electrolysis further, with 3x yield and nearly 100% energy efficiency.

We investigate the role of the electrolyte in this reaction and present a high-efficiency, robust process enabled by compact ionic layering in the electrode-electrolyte interfacial region. The interface is generated by a high-concentration imide-based lithium salt electrolyte, enabling stabilized ammonia yield rates of 150±20 nmol s-1 cm-2 and current-to-ammonia efficiency closely approaching 100%.

Universal Tick Vaccine

Over 10 diseases can be transmitted by tick bites. The most well-known is Lyme disease, caused by a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi. In the past, vaccines have successfully been developed to specifically target this Lyme disease bacterium. However, this new vaccine candidate takes a different approach, using mRNA technology to target the tick itself. This particular vaccine directs cells to produce a number of proteins found in the saliva of the black-legged tick Ixodes scapularis. This vaccine is unique in the way it targets a carrier of a pathogen rather than the pathogen itself. This means it should offer a broad-based protection from all kinds of tick-induced disease and not just a single pathogen. “When you feel a mosquito bite, you swat it. With the vaccine, there is redness and likely an itch so you can recognize that you have been bitten and can pull the tick off quickly, before it has the ability to transmit B. burgdorferi.”

2022-02-24: A gene drive might be an alternative:

This approach is already being applied to malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, but scientists have run into a wall trying to use CRISPR to prevent tick-borne diseases — or, more accurately, a hard shell. The problem is that scientists need to be able to insert their CRISPR system into ticks when they’re at the embryo stage. But ticks grow in eggs coated in a hard wax, which can literally shatter the glass needles used for injections. “Previously, no lab has demonstrated genome modification is possible in ticks. Some considered this too technically difficult to accomplish.” They have now demonstrated 2 different techniques that make gene editing a viable option for fighting tick-borne diseases. So far, all we know is that it’s possible to get a CRISPR system into ticks — we still don’t know what edits, if any, can prevent the spread of tick-borne diseases.

Spinlaunch

It is great to see alternatives to Rockets becoming feasible, both for pollution reasons, as well as for the Moon, where it would be much easier to build this than to produce fuel.

it’s a 100 meter diameter chamber they are rotating at 450 rpm. This is about 10k g at peak loading. They pointed out that even unmodified smartphones and action cameras are within the tolerances needed to handle this and that might be hard to believe if you’ve ever dropped your phone and broken its screen but the screen breaks because you’re putting a whole lot of force on a very small point if you spread that amount of force over the entire device it’s not unrealistic that these things can handle that. So while they’re not going to get customers that just decide to switch their satellite from falcon 9 to this rocket they might well be able to get customers who are interested in the complete ecosystem who can build their satellites to the specs required in exchange for having a much cheaper launch system

RNAi pesticides

If you could introduce dsRNA into a pesky pathogen—a particularly irritating fungus, for example—you could instruct that pathogen’s cells to destroy its own mRNA and stop it from making crucial proteins. In essence, they could switch off genes within pathogens at will. RNA crop sprays could have some major advantages over the current toolbox of chemical-based pesticides. Microbes break down RNA in the soil within a couple of days, which lessens the problem of environmental buildup. And because RNA sprays would target genes specific to individual species, there is—at least theoretically—a much lower chance that other organisms would get caught in the crossfire. Even 2 very similar species have enough genetic differences that it’s possible to make RNA sprays that target one bug while leaving the other one alone. Resistance is always a concern. “It’s unavoidable. But we will do everything we can to make sure that growers use the products the way we believe minimizes that risk.” Growers might be directed to use dsRNA only at certain times of the year, and that since RNA breaks down so quickly in the environment it’s less likely that pests will be exposed enough to develop resistance. RNA sprays will likely be mixed with existing pesticides—attacking pests from several angles rather than taking a single one-spray-to-kill-them-all approach. “It’s [reducing] the number of ag chemicals that are used, but not full replacement of them”.

Economics Nobel

should go to Ryan Petersen for unclogging the port of LA:

A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to

  • Understand what happened
  • Make sure everyone knows it happened
  • Understand how and why it happened
  • Understand how we might cause it to happen again
  • Update our models and actions
  • Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization

That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial benefits and no defenders and scrapping it, certainly not within a day. If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 2021. That initial tweet got 16k retweets and 33k likes, and even the others got 1000s of likes as well, so this successfully got many people’s attention. It’s worth paying attention to the details here, as this was crafted in order to spread and be persuasive, and also crafted to make people angry or to blame anyone. It’s a call to positive action. In particular, I notice these characteristics:

  1. Starts with a relatable physical story of a boat ride, and a friendly tone.
  2. Tells a (mostly manufactured) story that implies (without saying anything false) how the ride led him to figure these things out, which gives rhetorical cover to everyone else for not knowing about or talking about the problem. We can all decide to pretend this was discovered today.
  3. Then he invokes social consensus by saying that ‘everyone agrees‘ that the bottleneck is yard space. Which is true, as far as I can tell, everyone did agree on that. Which of course implies that everyone also knows there is a bottleneck, and that the port is backed up, and why this is happening. The hidden question of why no one is doing much about this is deflected by starting off pretending (to pretend?) that the boat ride uncovered the problem.
  4. Describes a clear physical problem that everyone can understand, in simple terms that everyone can understand but that doesn’t talk down to anyone. He makes this look easy. It is not easy, it is hard.
  5. Makes clear that the problem will only get worse on its own, not better, for reasons that are easy to understand.
  6. Makes clear the scope of the problem. The port of Los Angeles effectively shuts down, we can’t ship stuff, potential global economic collapse. Not clear that it would be anything like that bad, but it could be.
  7. Gives a decision principle that’s simple, a good slogan and again can be understood by everyone, and that doesn’t have any obvious objections: Overwhelm the bottleneck.
  8. Gives a shovel-ready solution on how to begin to overwhelm the bottleneck, at 0 cost, by allowing containers to stack more.
  9. Gives more shovel-ready solutions on top of that, so that (A) someone might go and do some of those as well, (B) someone can do the first easy thing and look like it’s some sort of compromise because they didn’t do the other things, (C) encourage others to come up with more ideas and have a conversation and actually physically think about the problem and (D) make it clear the focus is on finding solutions and solving problems, and not on which monkey gets the credit banana.
  10. Makes it clear solutions are non-rivalrous. We can do all of them, and should, but also do any one of them now.
  11. Gives a sense of urgency, and also a promise of things getting better right away. Not only can you act today, Sir, you are blameworthy tomorrow if you do not act, and you will see results and rewards tomorrow if you do act. Not only reactions to the announcements, physical results on the ground. That’s powerful stuff.
  12. Ends by noting that leadership is what is missing. You could be leadership and demonstrate you’re a good leader, or you can not do that and demonstrate the opposite. Whoever solves this is the leader.

All of it is due to zoning. Zoning kills.
2021-11-05: Things are better, but far from resolved, and of course the story is more nuanced than it first appeared:

it seems clear that Ryan noticeably improved the situation, but the situation is far from solved. Solving it will be a long term process, and we’ll be playing bottleneck tennis as solving one problem highlights others and makes them worse. There’s still lots of low-hanging fruit on the logistics front, starting with Ryan’s change only being implemented in Long Beach and not Los Angeles. There’s also signs of other solutions starting to come online, and that could be helped along in terms of making it shovel-ready and finding the right physical solutions.

2022-02-15: This profile makes the case that things are much more complicated, and Ryan doesn’t understand things as well as he should. Or perhaps they’re just jealous that Flexport has a much nicer UI:

For most everyone else in the logistics business, it was exasperating. “When Ryan Petersen does his interviews, people in the industry typically get upset because he tends to simplify things a lot. He appears sometimes uninformed”. Container stacking had limited impact. Petersen’s bolder proposals, such as the creation of a government-sponsored railhead depot, remain untouched. “There isn’t a silver bullet for this.”

2022-10-06: Flexport also stepped up for Masks in a huge way

When the pandemic hit and we saw there are not enough masks in our hospitals, I found that to be totally unacceptable at a civilization level. We owe this to our first responders, to our doctors. If you asked me to go in there without a mask with some weird disease that might kill me and that no one knows anything about, to serve these patients, I don’t know if I could. These are real heroes that were willing to do it. If you don’t have masks and the doctors don’t show up for work, civilization collapses pretty soon after that. That was very unacceptable to me. I rallied a team at Flexport and we stepped up.

A big part of why there were not enough masks is because all the world’s airplanes were grounded during the pandemic. They were not really flying to China. 50% of the world’s air freight flies in the belly of passenger planes. If those passenger planes are grounded, there is no air freight capacity. We found there were lots of masks available in China. They have ramped up production, but we don’t have air freight to get them in. The rest of the world, as far as I can tell, looked at that problem, put their hands up, and said, “Eh, fuck. I guess our doctors are going to suffer. Let’s watch this on TV and see what the people are saying.”

If you listen to the problem statement, 50% of the world’s plane flies in the belly of passenger planes and those are grounded right now. The solution is so obvious. Look at all the planes that are grounded. I managed through investor networks and connections that I have been fortunate enough to build over the years. I called the airline CEOs and I was like, “Hey, can we use your planes? We are going to go get some masks to save America’s hospitals.” One hundred percent of them said yes. United Airlines gave us free flights. Atlas Airlines gave us a 747 for free. We were getting Dreamliners for a 200k round trip. Ask your super-rich friends if that is a good deal on a private plane, a round trip to China on a Dreamliner. We flew 83 planes, completely full. We filled the overhead bins and the seats. In the end, we shipped 500m masks to America’s hospitals.

It was like, “Wait a minute. Why are we the ones doing that? We’re not supposed to be in that industry.” The value in that lesson for the whole world is naïve optimism. Try it. Let’s see if we can solve the problem. You can do more than you think you can. It was very inspiring for everybody at Flexport to see, “Whoa, this is working. We actually made this happen.”

Web Photoshop

This has to be some kind of high water mark for web capabilities. Pretty late in the game, unclear that it matters much? For example, will WebAssembly take full advantage of Apple custom silicon?

Over the last 3 years, Chrome has been working to empower web applications that want to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the browser. 1 such web application has been Photoshop. The idea of running software as complex as Photoshop directly in the browser would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. However, by using various new standardized web technologies, Adobe has now brought a public beta of Photoshop to the web.

1021

New research pinpoints an exact date Vikings from Europe were in North America: 1021 (1000 years ago this year), 430 years before Christopher Columbus was even born. How was this determination possible? Because the Sun erupted in an immense series of storms that altered Earth’s atmosphere, leaving measurable changes in tree rings at the time. A team of scientists looked at wood found at the L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site. In 3 cases the trees had been physically cut down, and moreover, they were clearly cut with metal tools — Vikings had metal implements at the time, but indigenous people did not. The wood was all from different trees (one was fir, and another juniper, for example). The key parts here are that the wood was all from trees that had been alive for many decades, and all had their waney edge intact as well.

Blinking Tubes

You’ve probably seen it: a dual-tubed generator console that’s appeared in movies and TV shows like Star Trek (all of them, pretty much), Knight Rider, V, Austin Powers, The Last Starfighter, and even Airplane II. This prop was originally built in the 70s and in the decades since has been placed in scenes requiring an impressive piece of high-tech equipment. The video above is a compilation of scenes in which the console has appeared

Wavelets

Built upon the ubiquitous Fourier transform, the mathematical tools known as wavelets allow unprecedented analysis and understanding of continuous signals.

Fourier transforms have a major limitation: They only supply information about the frequencies present in a signal, saying nothing about their timing or quantity. It’s as if you had a process for determining what kinds of bills are in a pile of cash, but not how many of each there actually were. “Wavelets definitely solved this problem, and this is why they are so interesting” A signal could thus be cut up into smaller areas, each centered around a specific wavelength and analyzed by being paired with the matching wavelet. Now faced with a pile of cash, to return to the earlier example, we’d know how many of each kind of bill it contained. Part of what makes wavelets so useful is their versatility, which allow them to decode almost any kind of data. “There are many kinds of wavelets, and you can squish them, stretch them, you can adapt them to the actual image you are looking at”. The wave patterns in digitized images can differ in many aspects, but wavelets can always be stretched or compressed to match sections of the signal with lower or higher frequencies. The shapes of wave patterns can also change drastically, but mathematicians have developed different types, or “families,” of wavelets with different wavelength scales and shapes to match this variability.