A ride with Andy Byford

He may not have gotten the real sense of trying to get somewhere on a tight timeline, waiting for slow elevators, or encountering broken elevators. I think he still got some good insights and learned a few new things. For instance, auto-gates, the emergency exits that double as a wheelchair entrances, only accept reduced-fare MetroCards. This was brand new information for him. The card reader was not working where we met at Times Square, and April pointed out that she wants to pay the full fare like everyone else. He also noticed that the signage to elevators also needs work and that there weren’t enough accessible areas on the train cars themselves. We were able to deliver our wishlist, and hope to continue the conversation. I believe he will continue to listen to people with disabilities

Heirloom Beans

Then 1 day, in 2003, Thomas Keller came by. His restaurant, the French Laundry, which would later earn 3 Michelin stars, happened to be in Yountville. “I remember, he had probably 10 different beans on the table. To get something that freshly dried was a revelation.” The bean that caught Keller’s eye was a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover. Called the Vallarta, it was on the verge of extinction when Sando found it, but it had a dense, fudgy texture and gave a good broth. “Steve had taken something that used to be just a dried bean and raised it to a new level, where the flavor was really intense and it cooked so much more consistently”. Within 1 month, it was a staple of the French Laundry. Within 1 year, every chef in California seemed to be serving beans.

2022-03-10: A huge bean collection

We have 36k different types of bean collected. Every single one has a story to tell and could be the solution to so many of our planetary challenges out there. Many of these beans have been collected over the last hundred years from around the world. And what’s really fascinating is most of these beans have never been characterized. The researchers don’t know how these beans grow what they look like, what environments they would thrive in. So, we’ve partnered with them to use our technology to understand those beans’ capabilities for the first time. It took us 30 years to produce a drought-tolerant bean where we found the trait for drought tolerance in one of these beans in the collection. With the technology of Mineral, we can move into absolute precision in finding these types of traits much quicker, much cheaper and much more efficiently.

Petawatt proton beams

NIF is the world’s only facility capable of achieving conditions like those in the interiors of stars and giant planets. Using ARC short-pulse generated proton beams for ultrafast heating of matter to extreme states will enable opacity and equation-of-state measurements at unprecedented energy-density states. In addition, “protons deposit their energy very specifically. That’s why protons are promising for applications such as tumor therapy. You can send a beam of protons toward a tumor and get it to deposit all of its energy exactly where you want it to without damaging other areas of the body. Likewise with a solid material. The proton beam deposits its energy where you want it to very quickly, so you can heat up a material really fast before it has time to hydrodynamically expand — your material stays dense, and that’s the name of the game — high energy, high density.”

A leg up in the afterlife

Archaeologists can only speculate about the motivation behind the unusual Virú burials. 1 suggestion is that the extra limbs may have served as a sacrificial offering to accompany the dead to the afterlife. Additional lab work will determine if there was any sort of relation between the individuals buried and the owners of the additional body parts.

Antifragile

Antifragility seems an odd concept at first. Our experience is that unexpected events usually make things worse, and that the inexorable increase in entropy causes things to degrade with time: plants and animals age and eventually die; machines wear out and break; cultures and societies become decadent, corrupt, and eventually collapse. And yet if you look at nature, antifragility is everywhere—it is the mechanism which drives biological evolution, technological progress, the unreasonable effectiveness of free market systems in efficiently meeting the needs of their participants, and just about everything else that changes over time, from trends in art, literature, and music, to political systems, and human cultures. In fact, antifragility is a property of most natural, organic systems, while fragility (or at best, some degree of robustness) tends to characterize those which were designed from the top down by humans. And one of the paradoxical characteristics of antifragile systems is that they tend to be made up of fragile components.

Bloomberg against coal

As the only person not representing a country, Bloomberg, in his new role as the U.N.’s special envoy for climate action, seemed like a substitute for American leadership—an alternative to the climate-denying Trump Administration, which Bloomberg called “a meshuggener.” But he immediately brushed aside the idea that the federal government, in this country, at least, can have a major impact on fuel sources or climate policy. “Coal will go away in any place where there’s a free market, for sure, because the market just forces that, the economics force it. OK, the federal government can change some environmental regulations, but companies are going to put in the environmental safeguards anyway. Their stockholders are insisting on it, their employees are insisting on it, their customers are insisting on it, and, at the state level, they’re insisting on it.” Of greater concern are countries in which “the government has set the price for coal or whatever and is subsidizing it.” Last fall, McKenna and Perry founded the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which aims, in part, to help these countries adopt cleaner fuels. 60 nations, states, cities, and companies have so far joined its polyglot roster.

FB rent extraction

the Facebook hearings are easily understood. Facebook is a very profitable monopoly that doesn’t benefit politicians very much. Although consumers aren’t upset by high prices (since Facebook is free), they can be made to be upset about loss of privacy or other such scandal. That’s enough to threaten regulation. The regulatory outcome will be that Facebook diverts some of its profits to campaign funds and to subsidize important political constituents.

Who will be subsidized? Be sure to watch the key players as there is plenty to go around and the money has only begun to flow but aside from campaign funds look for rules, especially in the political sphere, that will raise the costs of advertising to challengers relative to incumbents. Incumbents love incumbency advantage. Also watch out for a deal where the government limits profit regulation in return for greater government access to Facebook data including by the NSA, ICE, local and even foreign police. Keep in mind that politicians don’t really want privacy–remember that in 2016 Congress also held hearings on privacy and technology. Only those hearings were about how technology companies kept their user data too private.