Links from August and September
Shorter than usual.
Hey sorry I was off for a bit. I was visiting some family and doing vacation things. Hopefully I will be posting more things soon, so stay posted.
1. Biofuels are bad and PVs are good!
The US uses a UK-sized amount of land to grow biofuels. In return, it accounts for around 10% of the country’s motor gasoline supply.
It accounts for a lower share of total transport fuels (including jet fuels etc.). Let’s put that land into context. Solar PV needs about 20 m2 to generate one MWh of electricity per year. If you were to use the 25 million hectares that is currently used for biofuels, for solar instead, you’d produce 12,500 TWh.
2. The rise and fall of the mail order home. I generally recommend the Construction Physics blog.
3. Some of the most productive employees are productive by empowering others. This doesn't always show up in performance metrics - a story. A similar story exists for Bell Labs where the engineers tried to figure out who was the most productive, and more importantly, why. Here is a quote from “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner.
They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.
4. Norway's oil industry and how they avoided the resource curse - a Georgist perspective. On a related note, it might be possible to regulate Pharma companies the same way that Norway regulates its oil companies. Norways oil companies are provably way more efficient than any others by having a high tax on extraction, but supporting exploration and research. This greater efficiency would mean both lower prices and higher research output?
5. Don't get distracted by vacancy rates when talking about housing.
6. As in, high vacancy rates signal a healthy supply.
7. National Debt is not a problem, because it is measuring the wrong thing! Or rather, its measuring something different than what most people imagine. This boils down to Stocks v Flows.
8. I don't usually talk about products on here but I'm becoming more and more interested in paying for search. There are a couple cool options, but one that looks promising is Kagi. I have also been using their browser Orion for a while now, and its basically just like Safari with some extra perks.
9. I don't usually talk about technical research on here but this recent result by Nolin et al. is really impressive. In the field of statistical mechanics we try to approximate various physical phenomena by creating simplified versions and then making them really big. By really big I mean understanding what happens as the size of the system goes to infinity. As it turns out there are these handful of numbers that fully determine the behavior in that limit state. These are known as scaling exponents. They are very hard to calculate in many scenarios. This paper gives an explicit calculation for an important exponent.
10. As someone who wants to get better at writing I enjoyed this post by Noah Smith. I usually share a post by him every month, which is a difficult restriction because the man just writes so much! He also has great guest posts!
11. Some interesting ideas about redesigning a CLI from the ground up. CLIs have really been stuck in the past, making them inefficient and dangerous. I just wish I had access!
13. iPhone 15 Pro teardown. A marvelously well put together piece of technology! Also nice to see the small steps Apple is taking towards repairability.:
14. Computer mascots are a very odd sort of branding. A lot of these did not need to exists. I’m happy they do though!
15. The Irish Logarithm. Multiplication tables engineered to be used by mechanical systems by being "more linear".:
16. A cool, mathematically pretty, purely theoretical analysis of what transformers do (with pretty images).