OceanMade has announced pre sales of its Kelp Pots. These seed starter pots use kelp pulp to retain water instead of the traditional peat. The kelp pulp used in these pots is a byproduct of Macro Oceans beauty ingredient, Big Kelp Hydration. I’ve gotten a chance to see some of these up close and I’m really excited to see them coming together. It’s a small example of a big dream: using traceable, ocean farmed kelp products as an alternative to higher impact terrestrial sources. Due check them out if you’re a gardener.
Worth your time
Michael Lewis’s story about Chris Marks, a public servant who “led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States”, is fantastic. Some gems:
At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.)
And
People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.
And
Roof bolts were indeed more efficient and effective than timber supports in preventing chunks of roof from wounding miners. But they were expensive to install. The coal mine companies had, in effect, figured out how few roof bolts they needed to use to maintain the same level of risk their miners had endured before their invention
Noah Smith on Japaneseurbanism. Having zones that restrict certain activities rather than prescribe what can be done seems like a small change with a big impact.
The first awesome conclusion of the model does the eval is that we will achieve every evaluation we can state. Recall that evaluations must be legible, fast, and either a good approximation of a wanted capability or useful itself.
And:
Two years ago, ~Demis Hassabis enumerated~ three properties of problems suitable for AI: a massive combinatorial search space, a clear objective function to optimize against, and lots of data or an efficient simulator.
All of the world’s gold is estimated to fit in one 20 meter cube — BBC
There are more people under the age of 25 today in Africa than there are in all of Europe — Stephen Kotkin
Musings
All large scale changes should be presented as a return to the past.
I wonder what it would look like to restructure local government around an escalating set of reviews. Imagine filing for a building permit where:
The first level of the form is evaluated by AI with the ability to appeal
The second level goes to a human
The third level goes to a supervisor
The second and third levels become new evaluation cases. This already happens today at places like YouTube, but imagine bringing it to your local government.
Many wonderful public servants made valiant efforts and scored some great wins, but Democratic leadership did not make it a top priority to clear out the underbrush that jams the gears of government.
Every second for the viewer is just that viral video where the person picks between two pop stars. You’re always deciding what to pay attention to. The relationship between person-who-makes and person-who-consumes is paramount to long-term success, because if you are winning that game then you will be able to survive.
Things I learned
Eyes have evolved more than 50 times - Salon via Rohit
Musings
You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas. — Paul Graham
Product market fit provides a business with gravity
- It lets you know up from down — this helps
- But it also weighs on you; it’s tough to take the business in a direction that your current product / market / customer isn’t pulling you
A key skill for the future is going to be how to work with something that is:
1. smarter than you in many / most domains
2. sometimes wrong
A surprising amount of life is figuring out the right words to say in order to get what you want
A surprising number of pregnant women—about 1 in 2,500— are in denial about their pregnancy until birth
Fascinating, but extremely hard to read, especially as my infant daughter slept on my chest.
From my friend Oriana: The more males and females of a bird species look alike (e.g. cranes), the more likely they are to mate for life. The more males and females of a bird species look dissimilar (e.g. mallards), the more likely they are to be promiscuous.
The oldest bond in the world dates from December 10, 1624; pays €13.61 of interest a year. From the FT via The Browser.
Worth your time
Ben James on Fusion. Can’t wait to read the rest of his guides.
Some thinking on how companies get penalized for trying to be more sustainable by the Green Beauty Community. I do think that one reaction to the backlash on greenwashing has been some companies pulling back from talking about what they’re doing.
Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”
Reduce the bureaucracy to almost zero. Ideally, one person should have almost complete authority over day-to-day decision-making.
Keep the team ruthlessly small.
Whenever possible, only take on contracts where there is enough mutual trust with funders and subcontractors to work with them with a minimum amount of bureaucracy. If funder decisions cannot be made swiftly, the project is probably not worth pursuing.
I’d add: Build ambitious things on short timelines. And a bonus quote from Kelly Johnson: “The theory of the Skunk Works is to learn how to do things quickly and cheaply and to tailor the systems to the degree of risk. There is no one good way to build all airplanes.”
More typically, among today’s ~U.S. high school students~, 60 percent say they have considered killing themselves, and 14 percent have thought about it seriously in the past year.
Panda related merchandise made up half of all Atlanta Zoo merchandise sales — AJC
Between 1986 and 2018, 12.3M hectares of cropland in the United States was abandoned. Note that this figure does not include urbanization or development. Environmental Research Letters.
Musings
“It wasn’t that Dario had the best ideas, although he had plenty… he just ran 10 to 100 times as many experiments as anyone else. That’s when I knew he would do amazing things.”
My latest AI hack for getting out writing more quickly (company project docs, blog posts):
* Record an audio file where I dictate as much as I can about a project
* Add that + any other relevant documentation to NotebookLM
* Ask NotebookLM to write a first draft for me
* Edit that into the shape I want it
I still end up editing out ~50-75% but it gets me passed the empty page as quickly as possible. I estimate I turn a ~half day writing block into something I can do on a 15-20 minute walk + a little computer organization.
People only decide to buy something when they really, really care about it. Otherwise it’s not worth the friction of getting out your wallet.
“The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.” — Marshall McLuhan via Gordon
“If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space.” — Stephen Hunt via Ade Oshineye
Pisgah National Forrest, North Carolina, USA. My favorite place I visited in 2024.
I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. You can read his 2024 version here. I didn’t make it to 52 things this year, but I stayed curious.
Transplant recipients can inherit memories from their donors — Adaobi Adibe
The March 2011 earthquake in Japan was so strong that it shortened the length of a day — Earth Sky via my friend Graham
Plants probably have memories. “On one plant, the touch-me-not, feathery leaves normally fold and wilt when touched (a defense mechanism against being eaten), but when a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience.” — Scientific American via The Browser
US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years — Melissa Lott
A banana contains the same amount of radiation that a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year — New York Times via Jim Pethokoukis
Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkenness — Upworthy
Lebron and Bronny James are the highest scoring father and son duo in NBA history without Bronny ever scoring a point — @georgemikan
There are more deaths from alcohol in the US each year than all illicit drugs combined — Charles Fain Lehman
France last used the guillotine to put someone to death in 1977 — The Rest Is History
The Barnum effect is when people give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their own personality that are in fact general enough to apply to a wide range of people — Simon Wilson
Predator-prey models have two stable equilibria: one where predator and prey are in approximate balance and the other where both are extinct — Paul Kedrosky
A correction from my 2023 things I learned: working moms today probably do not spend as much time with their children as stay at home moms did in 1960 — Lyman Stone
“Soccer” as a word for the game of football came from the English, not Americans — Duolingo
Quantity precedes quality. Students graded on the quantity of the art they produce make higher quality art than students graded on the quality of art they produce — Perhaps apocryphal via Austin Kleon
Jalapeño peppers are getting less spicy over time —D Magazine via my friend Mark
Electrons within gold atoms are moving at 58% the speed of light — Will Kinney
Lake Superior is about the size of the state of Alabama — Wikipedia
The Milky Way builds between two and six sun-size stars a year — Quanta Magazine
The increase in driving due to 9/11 led to ~1600 more traffic deaths than otherwise would’ve been expected — David Epstein
A correction to my 2022 list: Men whose wives are diagnosed with a terminal illness are not significantly more likely to get divorced — Retraction Watch
In 1990, 5% of Americans had a passport; today that number is 48% — Devon Zuegel
Fernet Branca uses 75% of the world’s saffron — Eater
Making TB medicine sweet rather than bitter reduced a child’s risk of developing multi-drug resistant TB by over 50% — Bloomberg via News Minimalist
More than 50% of US couples now meet each online — Eric Klineberg
The Eiffel Tower’s lighting is protected by copyright — Tour Eiffel
If you think we’d have an interesting conversation about kelp, local news, our anything else, send me an email (jdilla.xyz@gmail.com). I’d love to meet you!
