The return of the US Aerospace industry Simulating a biological neuron requires an entire 5-8 layer neural network (1000 artificial neurons per neuron) ARM China goes rogue and becomes its own company Tesla's new AI chips When Elizabeth Holmes tries to hire you When we observe something that has changed in someone that is ill, we quickly assume that those changes are bad. This is in general a good heuristic. But sometimes those changes can be a protective response (as with moderate inflammation). Could this…

One day we will have cured all diseases, cut transcontinental travel times by more than half, and enjoy cheap, sustainable, plentiful energy. That day is not tomorrow. But why not? The act of posing that question may seem preposterous and impatient: hard feats demand hard work and long time horizons. But asking it is completely reasonable if it helps us find reasons for those long timelines and ways to shorten them. Sometimes we know we want to solve a problem but the way to get there is unclear, as the mul…

By most available criteria, the United States is still the undisputed leader in the performance of basic and applied research (National Academy of Sciences, 2007) Since 1969, US-based scientists have won more (Science) Nobel Prizes than the rest of countries put together. While this metric is one among and others, especially those measured more recently, don't show such an overwhelming dominance of American science, the general story is clear. A book I just finished reading, Markets, Minds, and Money trie…

Lenghty (ongoing) series of posts on the US obesity epidemic. According to the author(s), it's not the calories, it's not the sugar, it's not the exercise. Tunnels are our transportation future How are doses from mice studies supposed to be translated to humans? It's complicated and there's as of today a clear answer. Two papers on that. The FDA approved an ineffective drug for Alzheimer's, aducanumab. Scott Alexander has a post on it, including a broader discussion on whether the FDA is too lax or too cons…

Google Scholar is one of the marvels of the modern science ecosystem. Reportedly run by only a dozen of people and started a decade ago by Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya, it's the most comprehensive and easier to use search engine there is to find scientific works including non-journal publications like preprints or even personal blogs. Whereas competitors come and go, Scholar remains. But it remains, to some extent unchanged. Sure it has added some features in recent years, described in the team's blog bu…

In the previous post I introduced some key aspects of the wildfire situation in California. This followup offers some suggestions for what to do about it. We can think of firefighting as a multi-stage process that starts with a source of ignition that then progresses all the way into containment of large scale fires and evacuation of entire settlements. Accordingly at each stage there are multiple things one could do. Importantly there is no silver bullet against wildfires, and moreover there is no clever t…