PMs pull control away from directors by having only 1 official checkpoint before launching programs and pull control away from performers through their ability to move money around quickly. PMs design programs to be high-risk aggregations of lower-risk projects. Only 5–10 out of every 100 programs successfully produce transformative research, while only 10% of projects are terminated early. Shifting the risk from the performers to the program managers enables DARPA to tackle systemic problems where other models cannot.
Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss
Hobby Lobby Gospel
wherein the bible thumpers at hobby lobby get scammed.
A Decade of Sun
For the past 10 years, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been capturing an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. To celebrate, NASA created this 61-minute time lapse video of all 10 years, with each second representing 1 day in the Sun’s life.
Cave King
As far as anyone seems to know, he’s the largest private cave owner in the United States. Ackerman displayed an almost religious devotion to these fragile places and a certain sadness that far too few people seemed to share it, especially now that he’s getting old and the future of his domain is looking murky. His children have embarked on above-ground careers, with little interest in committing to the security, maintenance, and management of his below-ground assets. With no clear heir, and no one with the combined resources and dedication to preside over 64km of caves, Ackerman has considered putting the land in a trust, leaving it to his caving club, or even attempting to work something out with his longtime enemies at the DNR as a last-ditch option.
Foundation
looks promising, but sucks that it is on a little-known streaming platform.
Ettore Majorana
Today, this mathematical curiosity of 1932 still represents a powerful source of new ideas. In this paper there are the first hints for supersymmetry, spin-mass correlation and spontaneous symmetry breaking – 3 fundamental concepts underpinning the Standard Model and beyond. Our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature was already in Majorana’s attempts to describe particles with arbitrary spins in a relativistically invariant way.
Plasma market failure
Countries that follow the WHOs guidance to rely exclusively on voluntary, unpaid donors all have shortages of plasma. So what do these countries do? Import plasma from the paid-donor countries
Por-Bajin
In Mongolia, a mysterious island ruin Is giving up its secrets. It is now possible to combine tree rings with atmospheric carbon dating to get to yearly precision.
SETI Limits
there should be at least 36 civilizations within our Galaxy: this is a lower limit, based on the assumption that the average life-time, L, of a communicating civilization is 100 years. If spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy this would imply that the nearest CETI is at most 17K light-years away, and most likely hosted by a low-mass M-dwarf star, far surpassing our ability to detect it for the foreseeable future
The 5 Borough Bikeway
a plan for more bike lanes in nyc. doesn’t go far enough.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 