Max Plank, who looked at thermodynamics, and it took him 20 years to reach his conclusions, that, that matter was, was quantized. (Donald Braben) Max Planck got his PhD around 1879, and it wouldn't be until ~1900 when he published the key papers postulating the quantization of energy, which he used to explain black body radiation (See here for some context). The 1879-1900 gap are probably those 20 years that Braben has in mind. It's interestingly hard to find anything published by Planck prior to this. Hi…

Econ The wars over the minimum wage literature continue Anton Howes on how innovation spreads and can be fostered; he points to getting people in contact with inventors and innovators broadly is key. This seems right from my own experience. Matt Clancy on the Applied Turn in economics Does education improve health? Those two things are correlated, but the correlation is probably not causal. Eli Dourado on environmental review slowing things down Excessive use of professional licensing make US healthcare mor…

Back in 2016 I wrote a Nintil classic, No great technological stagnation where I argued that, as far as we could see from public data, improvements in various technologies do not seem to be slowing down. If I were to rewrite it now I would note that trends in batteries and solar panels have continued, and I would add some new trends like for single cell sequencing (A whole new category that didn't exist until 2009). There is one problem with my analysis there that I left open, Are there less 'really innova…

Having a lot of tabs open seems to be so widespread that it has transcended being a Dawkinsian meme (Just a habit that people have and notice, and perhaps gets normalized and spreads) to become a regular meme1 where people are amused at the phenomenon. This state of affairs is generally not liked by those that suffer from chronic tabitis, citing various reasons like Makes the computer slow A crash can make them disappear, losing those bookmarks forever Their sheer number makes it hard to even read them any…

One of the hottest topics right now in the world of meta-science is using lotteries to fund research. In a nutshell, the rationale is that it's hard to tell who or what will be successful, and it is very costly to try to do so as well. A system that relies on peer review demands of researchers time to write grants and to review them. I have reviewed before the effectiveness of peer review at figuring out "what's good" in the context of grant awards, finding that peer review as currently practiced …

In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following situation: Imagine that only a handful of scientists at every point in time are able to –if given the time and means–lead revolutions on par with the work of Darwin, Einstein, or Galileo (This is an extreme case admittedly because most of science does not look like this; most of science is more incremental and less memorable). I recently found two au…