Sapere Aude
Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss
The consequences of treating electricity as a right.
In poor countries the price of electricity is low, so low that “utilities lose money on every unit of electricity that they sell.” As a result, rationing and shortages are common.
as electricity generation decentralizes, who pays for the grid?
This machine has a gear reduction of 1 to 10 a 100 times. In order to get the last gear to turn once you’ll need to spin the first one a googol amount around. You’ll need more energy than the entire known universe has to do that. gears are probably the most magical device of basic physics. such profound implications from such a simple setup.
“I had it up in my kitchen window. I had a watering plan for it, if someone else tried to water my succulent I would get so defensive because I just wanted to keep good care of it. Today I decided it was time to transplant, I found the cutest vase that suited it perfectly. I go to pull it from the original plastic container it was purchased with to learn this plant was FAKE. It’s sitting on Styrofoam with sand glued to the top! I feel like these last 2 years have been a lie.”
this is super zen
30 seconds flat means you need to pack what’s needed and keep it where you can easily reach it and hit the road. Having the right stuff in the bag is key—a “go-bag” makes it easy because you’ve planned ahead of time and don’t have to think.
Where a standard car radar tells the computer, “object x meters ahead moving at y kmh,” Waymo’s tech provides the resolution to distinguish a car from a truck and a motorcyclist from a pedestrian.
For 100s of millions of years after the Big Bang, the entire universe was a thick soup of hydrogen atoms swimming in total blackness. So dense was this cosmic goulash that the first light from the first stars in existence couldn’t penetrate it — the hydrogen fog simply absorbed and scattered the starlight in circles, trapping the universe in a cosmic dark age as ever more stars, galaxies and black holes slowly smoldered to life. That all changed after 500 ma, when a grand cosmic makeover called the epoch of reionization began. As ancient galaxies grew ever larger and radiated more powerful energy, they began to burn away the cosmic fog that surrounded them by ionizing hydrogen atoms into a plasma of free protons and electrons. Suddenly, light could travel across the cosmos — first through “bubbles” of plasma surrounding large galaxies, then farther and farther as multiple bubbles began to expand and overlap. The galaxy group, named EGS77, dates to 680 ma after the Big Bang and appears to be surrounded by 3 overlapping bubbles of plasma — meaning these pioneering galaxies may have been caught in the act of reionizing their corner of the universe and bringing the cosmic dark ages to an end.
a wound dressing that contains an agent that promotes blood clotting. far more effective than traditional bandages.
this is a really unusual moment in drug discovery. We have simultaneously more new modes of action for therapy coming on in the clinic than I can ever recall, and some older ones are getting reworked to join the action.
Grocery stores have materially upped their game in the last 10 to 12 years. If I can go into Whole Foods or an upscale retailer and get a rotisserie chicken as good as any fast-casual establishment, I’m going to do that.
Hideo Kojima’s Strange, Unforgettable Video-Game Worlds
Strangely, I found, this labor made me empathize with Sam to a degree that I had never experienced with a video-game character.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 