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)