Progress links and tweets, 2022-09-20

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Announcements

• PARPA is raising money on Gitcoin (via @Ben_Reinhardt)

• Virginia Postrel is running a contest for positive visions of the future

• Stanford’s Intro to Bioengineering offered for free online to high school students (via @DrewEndy)

Links

• The advantages of the Gutenberg movable type system over Asian predecessors

• Larry Summers gives strong praise to Superabundance (video)

• “In science, consequences for wrongdoing seem rare”

• The Transit Costs Project reports on how Stockholm builds cheaply

• You Will Go to the Moon, a children’s book from 1959 (see my thread)

Queries

• Where is there long-term data for the Bell Labs research budget? (@michael_nielsen)

• Good histories of strain improvement for increasing industrial fermentation output? (@_brianpotter)

• What’s your favorite essay/​blog post of all time? (@packyM)

Tweets

• We don’t have a lot of clinical applications of the human genome 20 years after it was sequenced… but couldn’t the same have been said of the germ theory?

• Key points to remember about tradeoffs

• On wartime military R&D around WW1

• Luck and the entrepreneur (or scientist, or inventor)

Retweets

• Cruise robotaxis soon going live in Phoenix and Austin (@olivercameron)

• Can you spot which images are made by AI? (@MichaelTrazzi). I got ¹⁷⁄₂₀, see the clues I used

• Figma (just acquired for $20B) and Ethereum (market cap $180B) are both from Thiel Fellows (@regardthefrost)

• On “closely-knit multi-generational communities” (@made_in_cosmos)

Pics

• Me speaking at the Foresight Institute meetup (via @foresightinst, @thesfcommons, and @StephenGHubbard)

[ChristianKl]

The advantages of the Gutenberg movable type system over Asian predecessors

I think the author underrates Ulman Stromer. Stromer didn’t just bring paper-making to Germany in 1390. Stromer managed to produce paper with a paper mill which is a lot cheaper than producing it without a paper mill.

The Chinese mostly produced paper manually. Their paper was more expensive.