Moore's law is relentless - Jim Keller
In its original formulation, Moore's law1 was about cramming more transistors in ever decreasing surfaces; by that metric Moore's law continues unabated. However that's not the most interesting thing. As much of a feat of engineering it is, most people are interested in the end-product of the semiconductor world: performance.
Before moving onto that, here are some charts that show progress in the original Moore's law sense (ht Sam Zeloof for the data). Of note here i…
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You might remember a post I wrote in 2016, No Great Technological Stagnation where I argued various things that are worth repeating and valid today: Technology is not the same as productivity growth, and there is no great stagnation in technology; rather there are localized slowdowns, accelerations, and stagnations1, and of course TFP is more than technology. Also last year I wrote on whether WWII was good for growth, and I linked to some evidence that the rate of growth of population could be behind a stag…
So I just published the Longevity FAQ. This represents my first blogging foray into molecular biology. So it happens, I hadn't really studied biology since high school, so here's how -and why- I went from zero to writing a FAQ on a complex topic.
Why write about it, in the first place? An original motivation is that I've said a bunch of times that I see more progress in the future coming from the life sciences rather than physics, yet my knowledge in biology was very, very lacking, not having ever seriously…
NOTE: This was written in 2020, and if I were to write it again I would probably do differently, add more structure, add some more sections. I also don't have that much time to update this FAQ, so there are other papers worth checking out written post-2020 that will not be here.
Inasmuch as one enjoys being alive, waiting longer until the signs of frailty and old age occur seems an appealing proposition, and so there is an entire field of research dedicated to understand the aging process. A recent summary …