Favorites February 15th 2024
Nvidia shot past Amazon and Alphabet to become the #3 US company by market cap.
Pretty striking difference!
He recommended this half hour Veritasium video on the invention of the Blue LED.
Longer Reads
• Excellent thread from a CEO of a new advanced Geothermal company about their recent advancements. Included a pointer to an older thread about the history of mining drill bits and how that would help geothermal advance in the near future. My favorite was this pair of graphs, note that the X and Y axes on these are very different. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A thought for how to focus general writing: figure out who your audience, think of it as an email to that person. (src)
– New meme template with Travis Kelce, but it's basically just the shouting girlfriend meme (src)
– More EV ads at the Superbowl than ICE ads, for the third year in a row (src)(cached)
– Election in Pakistan doesn't go the way their military wanted, showing why most authoritarians hold full on fake elections or don't do any elections. (src)(cached)
– It shouldn't be surprising, but VMT and GDP in the US have long since diverged, but also it's interesting that VMT per capita has flatlined (src)(cached)
– A thread about sex differences in toy preferences. Argues that it probably isn't entirely socialization that leads boys and girls to like different toys. (src)(cached)
– Tucker Carlson now arguing that there's no inflation in Russia, which is pretty obviously false. (src)(cached)
– Minnesota is looking at some of the strongest single-stair legislation in the US. (src)(cached)
– The Population Bomb did real damage to people's lives (src)(cached)
– Ukraine is using networked microphones to detect incoming drones (src)(cached)
– George R.R. Martin complains that Tolkien didn't get into the details of Aragorn's governance policies, but that's a bit rich, given that LOTR appears to pay much better attention to agriculture and logistics than ASOIAF. And he also doesn't really depict the day-to-day life of peasants, nor how they're impacted by the story (src)(cached)
– There's plenty of polling indicating that Haley outperforms Trump, but no other Democrat outperforms Biden (src)(cached)
– Building small modular nuclear reactors in a factory has lead to a process that previously took 6 months down to a couple of hours. (src)(cached)
– Chevron is working on enhanced geothermal (src)(cached)