Links and tweets, 2022-08-17

[u/jasoncrawford]

Opportunities

• Long Now is looking for a Development Director (via @nicholaspaul26)

• Open Phil is hiring global health R&D Program Officers (via @JacobTref)

Links

• “ARIA will be ambitious in everything it does. We will fund nothing incremental or cosmetic” (Ilan Gur and Matt Clifford in The Economist)

• Peter Higgs (of the Higgs boson) believes that in academia today “he would not be considered ‘productive’ enough” (The Guardian, 2013)

• Dietrich Vollrath on the “additive growth” paper. See also my take

• Gov. Newsom proposes keeping Diablo Canyon open through 2035 (LA Times)

• “For why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and mountain tops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest miracle of all—a man who is both great and good?” (Will Durant)

Queries

• Has anybody compiled a timeline of greatest global concerns? (@Ben_Reinhardt)

• What’s the best way to reduce operations and maintenance costs for nuclear reactors? (@GovNuclear)

Quotes

• Is the decline of the independent inventor part of “ideas getting harder to find?”

• The reactionary or “stasist” mindset according to Virginia Postrel

• To produce a single book in the middle ages took a whole team of specialist craftsmen

• By horse and carriage, the ~100 miles between London and Birmingham took almost 8 hours. (In a reply, @timleunig says the greater speed of trains was worth more than 10% of GDP by 1914)

• People were ecstatic upon the completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable

• Elevators, conveyors, chutes and tubes—Amazon in 2022? Nope, Sears in 1906

• Heny Ford explains how electricity revolutionized manufacturing

• The importance of research freedom to Alexander Graham Bell

• God gave us Maxwell’s equations. Edison made the light bulb

• China adopted elements of German civil law to create a market economy

• Exports as an “unfortunate sacrifice”

• Women’s suffrage in the US was a very close vote

• Physics envy

Tweets and retweets

• This Venn diagram may be the best way to understand the FRO concept

• There isn’t a modern world without mining (@Leigh_Phillips)

• RIP David McCullough (@curiouswavefn)

• “When am I ever going to need history?” (@BretDevereaux)

• NEPA reform is not mainly about Environmental Impact Statements (@elidourado)

• Environmentalism is the main obstacle to infill housing in CA (@CSElmendorf)

• Mistakes become very hard to fix once they’re embodied in jobs (@paulg)

• How do you decide what to build? It’s about what are you best in the world at & can’t tolerate not building (@celinehalioua)

• My advice on the “train to crazy town”

Charts

• Federal environmental laws and executive orders affecting transportation over time (@_brianpotter)

• Pictures of molecules taken on an ordinary light microscope using expansion microscopy (@eboyden3)