Retron Library Recombineering

RLR generates up to millions of mutations simultaneously, and “barcodes” mutant cells so that the entire pool can be screened at once, enabling massive amounts of data to be easily generated and analyzed. “RLR enabled us to do something that’s impossible to do with CRISPR: we randomly chopped up a bacterial genome, turned those genetic fragments into single-stranded DNA in situ, and used them to screen millions of sequences simultaneously. RLR is a simpler, more flexible gene editing tool that can be used for highly multiplexed experiments, which eliminates the toxicity often observed with CRISPR and improves researchers’ ability to explore mutations at the genome level.”

COVID Civilizational Shift

What we have learned — what we were forced to learn — during the COVID lockdowns has permanently shattered these assumptions. It turns out many of the best jobs really can be performed from anywhere, through screens and the internet. It turns out people really can live in a smaller city or a small town or in rural nowhere and still be just as productive as if they lived in a tiny one-room walk-up in a big city. It turns out companies really are capable of organizing and sustaining remote work even — perhaps especially — in the most sophisticated and complex fields. This is, I believe, a permanent civilizational shift. It is perhaps the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that’s maybe even more important than the internet. Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. We may, at long last, shatter the geographic lottery, opening up opportunity to countless people who weren’t lucky enough to be born in the right place. And people are leaping at the opportunities this shift is already creating, moving both homes and jobs at furious rates. It will take years to understand where this leads, but I am extremely optimistic.

Dengue Progress

Her team released Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes in parts of Yogyakarta as part of a randomized controlled trial. Wolbachia rapidly spread among the local mosquitoes, and reduced the incidence of dengue by 77%. “That provides the gold standard of evidence that Wolbachia is a highly effective intervention against dengue. It has the potential to revolutionize mosquito control.”

La Villa Pizzeria

Brooklyn is the true homeland of pizza. It offers the broadest range of styles, fuels, and toppings, and in Brooklyn, one can still be astonished by a pizza, as I recently was at the rather grand-looking, but little known, La Villa Pizzeria in Park Slope, where I encountered a stuffed-crust pie from Abruzzo. It was a stuffed crust pie but not like the ones at Domino’s. When it arrived at the table, it was rectangular and had achieved a beautiful shade of brown on the top crust, with a bottom crust twice as thick, nicely charred underneath here and there. The pie was sealed on the sides, boxing the ingredients, and when cut into 10 square pieces, the cheese seductively oozed out.

K/T extinction event

66 ma ago, maybe on a Tuesday afternoon, life was the same as it had been the day before or 1 ka before or pretty much 1 ma before. Things were good for our feathered dinosaur buddies. Until a tiny, tiny detail in the sky changed.

2021-04-06: Chicxulub created rainforest

the dinosaur extinction was also a massive reset event for neotropical ecosystems, putting their evolution on an entirely new path leading directly to the extraordinary, diverse, spectacular and gravely threatened rainforests in the region today.

2022-10-05: The Chicxulub Impact Produced a Powerful Global Tsunami

The Chicxulub asteroid impact produced a global tsunami 30k times more energetic than any modern-day tsunami produced by earthquakes. Here we model the first 10 min of the event with a crater impact model, and the subsequent propagation throughout the world oceans using 2 different global tsunami models. The Chicxulub tsunami approached most coastlines of the North Atlantic and South Pacific with waves of 10m high and flow velocities of 1 m/s offshore. The tsunami was strong enough to scour the seafloor in these regions, thus removing the sedimentary records of conditions before and during this cataclysmic event in Earth history and leaving either a gap in these records or a jumble of highly disturbed older sediments.

Representational Drift

Neurons that represented the smell of an apple in May and those that represented the same smell in June were as different from each other as those that represent the smells of apples and grass at any one time. Representational drift occurs in a variety of brain regions besides the piriform cortex. Its existence is clear; everything else is a mystery. How can animals possibly make any lasting sense of the world if their neural responses to that world are constantly in flux? If such flux is common, “there must be mechanisms in the brain that are undiscovered and even unimagined that allow it to keep up.”

Galactic Settlement

The simulation depicts the expansion of a technological civilization through the Milky Way, created along lines previously described in the literature. What we are looking at is the transition between a Kardashev Type II civilization, and a Type III, which has spread throughout the galaxy. This might be a fast process considering the motions of stars themselves, which would overcome the inertia of slower growing settlements and boost expansion rates. Issues like starship capabilities and the lifetime of colonies come into play, but the striking thing is how fast galactic settlement occurs and how the motions of stars factor into the settlement wave. The parameters are everything, and they’re interesting:

  • Ships are launched no more frequently than every 100 ka;
  • Technology persists in a given settlement for 100 ma before dying out;
  • Ship range is 10 light years.
  • Ship speeds are 10 km/s; Voyager-class speeds.
  • The simulation covers 1 ga

No Financial System

As much as 50% of all unemployment monies, or $400b might have been stolen. Unemployment fraud is now offered as a service, much like ransomware. States without fraud-detection services are targeted the most.

This may be scare mongering by interested parties like the id “theft” cottage industry, but seems directionally correct. Terrible identity and financial infrastructure has consequences.

The Circles of Friendship

The innermost layer of 1.5 is the most intimate; clearly that has to do with your romantic relationships. The next layer of 5 is your shoulders-to-cry-on friendships. They are the ones who will drop everything to support us when our world falls apart. The 15 layer includes the previous 5, and your core social partners. They are our main social companions, so they provide the context for having fun times. The next layer up, at 50, is your big-weekend-barbecue people. And the 150 layer is your weddings and funerals group who would come to your once-in-a-lifetime event. The layers come about primarily because the time we have for social interaction is not infinite. You have to decide how to invest that time, bearing in mind that the strength of relationships is directly correlated with how much time and effort we give them.


While I quibble with the names and sizes of these circles, it still seems directionally correct.