Links and tweets, 2022-07-27

by Jason Crawford · July 27, 2022 · 1 min read

Opportunities

• Arcadia Science launches an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program (thread from @ArcadiaScience)
• The Longevity Prize goes to “outstanding progress in longevity research” (announcement from @allisondman)
• Nicole Ruiz is making a list of opportunities in frontier tech (@nwilliams030)
• And don’t forget that The Roots of Progress is seeking a CEO! Thanks to Max Roser and Virginia Postrel, among others, for signal-boosting

Announcements

• UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) adds Matt Clifford as chairman and Ilan Gur as CEO. Gur will step down as CEO of Activate. See also threads from @matthewclifford and @ilangur. Congrats to all!
• Boom announces the new design for its supersonic airplane, Overture

Articles and talks

• Works in Progress Issue #8 with articles from Stewart Brand, Jason Collins, and more
• “Large changes in productivity are always widely shared” (Bryan Caplan)
• Can exponential growth occur if productivity is the best draw from a probability distribution? A talk by Chad Jones (fairly technical)
• A DNA origami rotary ratchet motor (Nature, h/t @s_r_constantin)

Quotes

• Maps were originally created through the blood, sweat and tears of field agents
• “Raise the social status of scientists”
• The importance of skilled mechanics to early locomotives
• Modern facilities added ~3x to the consumer value of housing
• Childhood in the 19th century

Queries

• What’s the best CO2 monitor? (@_brianpotter)

Threads

• Charles Mann calls for industrial literacy in high school (@CharlesCMann). See my take on “industrial literacy” and the high school progress course I created
• Some potential use-cases for crypto (@SBF_FTX)
• Software + web tech recapitulating the institutions and ideals of the Enlightenment (@arbesman)
• It turns out, nobody ever wanted to work (@paulisci)

Tweets & retweets

• RIP Dee Hock, creator of Visa (@patrickc)
• “The Roman Empire was not run out of offices” (Marc Andreessen on Conversations with Tyler)
• The reason we don’t have fusion is we never decided it was a priority (@tobi)

Comment: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit