Announcements

• PARPA is raising money on Gitcoin (via @Ben_Reinhardt)
• Virginia Postrel is running a contest for positive visions of the future
• Stanford’s Intro to Bioengineering offered for free online to high school students (via @DrewEndy)

Links

• The advantages of the Gutenberg movable type system over Asian predecessors
• Larry Summers gives strong praise to Superabundance (video)
• “In science, consequences for wrongdoing seem rare”
• The Transit Costs Project reports on how Stockholm builds cheaply
• You Will Go to the Moon, a children’s book from 1959 (see my thread)

Queries

• Where is there long-term data for the Bell Labs research budget? (@michael_nielsen)
• Good histories of strain improvement for increasing industrial fermentation output? (@_brianpotter)
• What’s your favorite essay/blog post of all time? (@packyM)

Tweets

• We don’t have a lot of clinical applications of the human genome 20 years after it was sequenced… but couldn’t the same have been said of the germ theory?
• Key points to remember about tradeoffs
• On wartime military R&D around WW1
• Luck and the entrepreneur (or scientist, or inventor)

Retweets

• Cruise robotaxis soon going live in Phoenix and Austin (@olivercameron)
• Can you spot which images are made by AI? (@MichaelTrazzi). I got 17/20, see the clues I used
• Figma (just acquired for $20B) and Ethereum (market cap $180B) are both from Thiel Fellows (@regardthefrost)
• On “closely-knit multi-generational communities” (@made_in_cosmos)

Pics

• Me speaking at the Foresight Institute meetup (via @foresightinst, @thesfcommons, and @StephenGHubbard)