Last week I worked up this one-liner: "Great Britain extracted the wealth of a vast empire, far less wealth than might have been created, pissed most of it away through bad domestic policy, and transferred the rest to the USA to pay for one-and-a-half world wars."

A failure to reinvest in domestic industrial tech; a painfully high-value currency; and low-mobility economic stratification. History does love its rhyming slams.

Pollen grains are 10's of um, H2Os are 0.3 nm - 10^5 smaller. 10's of ng, vs 3e-14 ng - (10^5)^3 lighter. H2Os moving 600 m/s.

Imagine your body jerking around under a bombardment of relativistic bacteria.

The nanoscale mosh pit from hell.

Years back, a leading MEMS engineer giving a survey talk paused, and said with a deep deep well of feeling, "Brownian motion is the devil. The DEVIL."

I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.

Similarly, someone (with no family connection to China) learned Chinese, later married into a family from/in China, and would describe "Chinese" culture. Someone else from China glossed their insights with a dismissive 'their friends are criminals [sic], and they're over generalizing from that subculture'.

So amidst country-level cultural themes, and regional variations, and generational differences (and gender, hukou, ethnicity, etc), and subcultural diversity, it's sometimes a challenge to tell what is which.

[1] https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/the-gap-by-ira-glass-9651...

Or HMDs. Upcoming high-resolution PICO Space Pro is said to be ~45 pixels/degree max. Versus ~50 ppd for a 1080p laptop. Formerly known as Project Swan, its September global release announcement was postponed until... unclear.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGxsGnbyJ4&t=2150s (I started the clip a few seconds early as teaser for rest of talk)

From https://akkartik.name/code : Mu[1], a safe, hackable computing stack that builds up from raw machine code (guided tour[2]; paper '20[3]; talk '20[4]; sample app[5])

[1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu [2] tour https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/tutorial/index.md [3] paper https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.pdf [4] talk https://vimeo.com/416363066 [5] sample app https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-2021-08-15

External/policy-based throttling for temperature control. Unthrottled, my laptop bottom goes skin-burn hot. But fixed compute caps can have non-linearly dreadful performance impacts in particular cases. Plan is a runtime knob, to replace manual limits-kludgery.

I'll use models which barely fit in VRAM+RAM, and are order-1 tok/s slow. So tool call step overhead can be painful - a world where `ls` costs tens of seconds. Plan is blending harness plugins with inference loop, for "no, don't stop - I already have the call result for you - just keep going" (and also some logit games).

Bug: ISO DEB at 17 min/s looked normal, but at 2.8 h/s it became a solid-ish (lots of crossing lines) red ellipsoid on the opposite side of the Earth. Upon returning to 17 min/s, it snapped back, after some delay. Current-ish Chromium on linux/X11.

Feat: Pressing ESC deselects.

Feat: Perhaps spacebar could pause/unpause time? To avoid fiddly "note current time ratio by counting arrows or hovering, then click pause. Afterward, click the right place to restore time ratio".

UX: Would you believe I wrote a Feat for 'add a "Now" button to date popup', not "seeing" the current button? Hmm, perhaps move it between date and time ratio?

UX: Just now for me, upon page load, nothing is moving and the Earth seems a black ball (night over Africa, with night lights obscured by satellite dots). So I could spend several minutes exploring, without being both close enough and oriented to notice there's a texture map. Perhaps start positioned over the terminator (interestingly pretty) and with scaled time (interestingly moving; demos motion; draws attention to time zoom. Maybe 17 min/s?).

Issue: The planets maps are true-ish color, modulo intensity and shadow. The Sun is... not. Given that "the Sun is some color other than white" is so pervasive a misconception, reinforcing it seems... sigh. Can I interest you in a white field with a few pretty sunspots? Perhaps with limb darkening and tint?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858513

Maps.[1][2]

Too far south for an ice bridge - Newfoundland is south like modern Florida - tropical. And it's the Jurassic, hot with high sea levels, so even though its continental shelf extends out towards Spain, there are no ice ages to bare it (as was the Eastern US shelf a mere 12k years ago). But Pangea is ripping apart, it's a mess with crust blocks variously uplifted and tilted, massive weathering and sediment fluxes, so...

From the TFA paper[3]:

During the early Mesozoic, North America and Europe were connected to form the western and central part of the supercontinent Laurasia. With the opening of the North Atlantic during the Late Jurassic and earliest Cretaceous, the region fragmented into smaller tectonic units55–58 that might have periodically formed contiguous land masses57,58 during sea level low-stands, characterized by exposure of continental margins and draining of continental interior seaways55–58. The presence of a land bridge between North America and Europe during the late Kimmeridgian-earliest Tithonian13 might explain similarities in some dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus59 and Allosaurus60. However, the absence of turiasaurs in the Morrison Formation suggests that this clade dispersed into western North America after the mid-Tithonian. Thus, unless we wish to argue that turiasaurs were actually present in the Morrison Formation but have not been found yet, a second later land connection between Europe and North America is required. Specifically, during the mid-Valanginian (c.137Ma), a dramatic drop in sea level7,55,56 potentially reconnected Europe and North America and so permitted a fi al exchange of vertebrate clades across the Atlantic. Th s Valanginian event could also explain apparent faunal exchanges between these continents proposed for the late Hauterivian-early Barremian13. Taxa that seem to disperse in the Hauterivian/ Barremian might actually have done so during the Valanginian lowstand, but gaps in the fossil record mean that the results of these dispersals might not be detected until we access better sampled post-Valanginian deposits.

58 is available with a plate.[4] 57 is old, with only low-res global plates, ggl books preview has 138 Ma on p42. 56 I skipped. 55 is available[5] but is temporally low res.

There's a 2016 paper Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges[6], Elsevier paywalled with excerpts, and on sci-hub.

And that's my time budget.

[1] https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=topo_recon [2] rocks: https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GeologyR key: https://portal.gplates.org/portal/geology/ [3] quote is on page 9: https://dinodata.de/bibliothek/pdf_d/2017/001_s41598-017-146... [4] paper ref 58, 150/136 Ma plates on page 31, key on page 29, 3 MB but downloads slowly: https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00117/22805/20913.pdf [5] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Golonka-Jan/publication... [6] Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges (2016). Available on sci-hub. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

Or do you mean professionally... Instead of merely searching for "ways to do X", one might translate the query into a couple of languages, and translate the results, to get a broader culture sampling. Hmm... That seems something an AI-based search could integrate smoothly - cross cultural insights as a normal part of search results?

While there's a lot of diversity in policy and culture among US regions and states, contrasting them isn't leveraged much. Perhaps failing a "that's analysis, not news" threshold for being part of public dialog? So maybe it's not "non-English cultures" neglected as much as comparative discussion in general?

One "criminally underutilized" which really struck me, was Japan having a far more sensible and powerful COVID safety one-liner than the US managed - "Three C's" (Closed spaces, Crowded places, and Close-range contact - poorly-ventilated / crowd / conversation-contact - avoid overlapping all three) vs "6-foot rule".

"Estimation" as a skill in US education, primary school on, is pervasively about point estimates - single numbers. Bounding, a range of safe/reasonable/likely/possible numbers, is very rare. In Fermi questions/problems also.

Even in such goodness as Sanjoy Mahajan's Art of Insight and Street-Fighting[1]... the only only "bound" mentioned is "Printed and bound in [USA]", and there is no "round".[2]

In contrast, IIUC, China is pervasively about "Da Gu" and "Xiao Gu", "round up" and "round down". Point estimates are secondary. Lower and upper bounds are apparently even a cultural concept: an individual's degree vs capability/fate; policy equity vs excellence; economic targets.

In education, my understanding is point estimates have much poorer conversational/collaborative dynamics than range estimates. Bounding lends itself to incremental collaboration. "Can anyone suggest another low or high bound?". Discussions around point estimates seem usually merely about the collection of individual estimates.

> NGSS

Ah, NGSS isn't bad particularly. I meant that discussion/mention of NGSS appears so very much in English training data, that AI chat on topics related to NGSS seem to draw regurgitations of NGSS. AI "slop" in the sense that "ignore NGSS, just reason from a superset of its underlying concepts"... isn't an LLM strength.

> hard to understand

Sorry - Thanks for asking!

[1] open access: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5345/The-Art-of-In... https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5339/Street-Fighti... [2] search "bound": https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Insight_in_S... https://www.google.com/books/edition/Street_Fighting_Mathema...