September 2024

2024-09-12

📖 Normal People

Sally Rooney's novel of relationships, self discovery and inner turmoil -- it was great
I listened to it on Libby, performed by Aoife McMahon
I found it very moving in parts
The podcast Good Scribes Only has a short review, as does the NYT which links Rooney's novels to Rachel Cusk's Outline series, and I think I agree with that

🐛 David Hillis's Tree of Life

in 2003, this UT Austin lab mapped rRNA similarity between ~3k species to produce this graphic; his original pdf is here

his description:
- "This tree is from an analysis of small subunit rRNA sequences sampled from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life. The species were chosen based on their availability, but we attempted to include most of the major groups, sampled very roughly in proportion to the number of known species in each group (although many groups remain over- or under-represented). The number of species represented is approximately the square-root of the number of species thought to exist on Earth (i.e., three thousand out of an estimated nine million species), or about 0.18% of the 1.7 million species that have been formally described and named."
Wikipedia links some more recent visualizations which are equally cool

❄️ Quantum Navigation

I saw this video from Ben Miles on creating quantum nav devices, basically hyper-precise IMUs. Another source said they were four orders of magnitude more sensitive than traditional IMUs and thus less susceptible to drift.
they create a Bose-Einstein condensate (matter near absolute zero) and then I believe they split the system, it acts as a wave and interferes with itself, and you can measure some acceleration-dependent patterns. From there you back out velocity/position.
This company in the video, Infleqtion, has already done some test flights with the technology, so cool..

🎶 fron2

This instrument from Fron Reilly is so cool, bow on rotating strings + resonator, amazing

🌆 Make Sunsets

here's an article on these guys in the NYT -- they are sort of renegade solar geoengineers, releasing small amounts of sulfur dioxide via balloons, and funding it all by selling "cooling credits"
SO2 forms aerosols which block sunlight. This stack exchange post goes into much more detail on the pros/cons of such an idea
- In fact they review a paper that used an atmospheric model to examine the idea of large-scale SO2 release (and some other particulates). The article posits it could be done (balancing warming by GHG with cooling by aerosols/particulates) but there are of course side effects including human health impacts from these particulates and changes in rainfall. Hard to say if it's worse than runaway climate change or if these effects are just less-studied.
back to this company -- I admire the intent and drive and of course wish they could scale it up responsibly and with more careful study, but they seem to have a good time launching their one-off balloons .. more power to them