Tag: documentaries

Elon Musk

He is the real life tony stark and is not doing silly things with power suits, but changing the world.

2013-03-19: When will the valley produce more entrepreneurs like this?

2015-11-07: More on the secret sauce

The dude is a steel-bending industrial giant in America in a time when there aren’t supposed to be steel-bending industrial giants in America, igniting revolutions in huge, old industries that aren’t supposed to be revolutionable. After emerging from the 1990s dotcom party with $180m, instead of sitting back in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entrepreneurs, he decided to start a brawl with a group of 400 kg sumo wrestlers—the auto industry, the oil industry, the aerospace industry, the military-industrial complex, the energy utilities—and he might actually be winning. And all of this, it really seems, for the purpose of giving our species a better future.

Pretty Kool-Aid worthy. But someone being exceptionally rad isn’t Kool-Aid worthy enough to warrant 90k words over a string of months on a blog that’s supposed to be about a wide range of topics.

During the first post, I laid out the 2 objectives for the series:

1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing.
2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing.

2017-04-30: An interview for TED

2017-05-03: Plus a later TED talk, nice summary of the Musk master plan.

2017-09-03: Accelerate or die

Technological disruptors like Elon Musk, Google and Amazon will force industries and companies to accelerate or die. Companies will have to accelerate innovation and move to bolder innovation and attempt to shift to technological leapfrogging and shoot for far more aggressive productivity gains.

2019-10-01: Forget sunk costs

Elon reiterated that he changed to steel construction for the rocket when carbon fiber was taking too long. Carbon fiber was a standard in the rocket industry.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy use of composites for the fairing (payload nosecone cover). The interstage, which connects the upper and lower stages of the rockets, is a composite structure with an aluminum honeycomb core and carbon fiber face sheets.

In December 2018, 9 months after starting construction of some parts of the first test article carbon composite Starship low-altitude test vehicle, Musk announced a “counterintuitive new design approach” would be taken by the company. SpaceX switched to stainless steel construction.

2021-02-02: This is quite good, done by Sandy Munroe

2023-04-04: Master Plan 3.0, sustainable global energy economy

A sustainable energy economy is technically feasible and requires less investment and less material extraction than continuing today’s unsustainable energy economy. While many prior studies have come to a similar conclusion, this study seeks to push the thinking forward related to material intensity, manufacturing capacity, and manufacturing investment required for a transition across all energy sectors worldwide.

240TWh Storage
$10T Manufacturing Investment
0.21% Land Area Required
ZERO Insurmountable Resource Challenges
30TW Renewable Power
50% The Energy Required
10% 2022 World GDP

Planet Earth

5 years ago, the BBC started broadcasting one of the most extraordinary documentaries ever to grace television: Planet Earth. The culmination of 5 years of field work, it employed the most cutting-edge of techniques in order to capture life in all its forms, from sweeping spaceborne vistas to shockingly intimate close-ups — including many sights rarely glimpsed by human eyes. Visually spectacular, it showcased footage shot in 204 locations in 62 countries, thoroughly documenting every biome from the snowy peaks of the Himalayas to the lifegiving waters of the Okavango Delta, a rich narrative tapestry backed by a stirring orchestral score from the BBC Concert Orchestra.

planet earth is the best nature documentary of all time.

Di Fara

Fame has come late for Domenico DeMarco, who for 40 years has operated Di Fara Pizza on Avenue J in Midwood, Brooklyn. Since 1999, the year that a favorable review in a city guidebook put his pies on the map, Mr. DeMarco has graced the cover of The Village Voice (the ”Best Italian Restaurants” issue in June), and his restaurant has topped the Zagat list of the city’s best pizzerias in 2004 and countless other guides to slice-related nirvana.

Through it all, Mr. DeMarco has changed very little. With his hair slicked back and flour on his shoes, he has continued to make each pizza personally as 3 of his 7 children labor in the back. He maintains beds of basil and rosemary on the windowsill, and imports nearly every ingredient from such faraway lands as Israel and the Netherlands. The man insists on no less than 3 different cheeses on each pizza, and chowhounds line up, sometimes for more than 1 hour to buy a regular slice for $2.50 or the Sicilian for $2.75. The city’s reigning pizza deity is pleased by this sort of success, but he is hardly surprised.

2010-10-25: man, i still haven’t been 😦

2018-06-12:

Longtime customers have noted fresh cows’-milk mozzarella in and out of rotation with the firmer, low-moisture variety. Grana Padano, once a fixture of Di Fara, stopped making appearances after the countertop-mounted rotary grater broke. Parmigiano and Pecorino replaced it for a while. There was even a short-lived era where the crusts were enigmatically burnt, seemingly by design, and that’s where things turn philosophical. “Dom’s pizza is a flowing river in that the only thing you can really count on is perpetual change, and that’s part of what’s interesting about it. He hasn’t stuck to the same method for 50 years.”

El Bulli

On the whole El Bulli is much less formal than what one would expect from a Michelin 3 star restaurant of any sort, let alone one as famous as this. Service is incredibly busy, the wait staff have a large role in presentation of dishes, they’re running around the whole time rather frenetically. Service is still good of course – there’s someone there to help you with your chair when you return from the restroom (and your napkin has been discretely replaced while you’re gone). But given the rush silverware isn’t placed perfectly and symmetrically. But then silverware is changed at least 12 times during service.

Whenever food arrived at a table, everyone would go silent – awaiting instructions on how to eat the course just presented. Each dish is presented and then explained. In most cases all the ingredients are detailed, although in one case (the gorgonzola shell) things were left a bit of a mystery as we weren’t told what was underneath and left to discover the surprise. ~50% of the dishes also have a distinct order in which you’re supposed to eat each piece. Some might find this pretentious … but it’s executed in a fairly down-to-earth way, it’s hard to describe. It’s not “you must follow our instructions” rather it’s a description of how the chef believes, after much scientific testing, that the combination and ordering of flavors will be most interesting or fulfilling or demonstrate something about the ingredients that you might not have thought of before.


2011-08-30: amazing.