P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #397
Book
my story 🚀
fun facts 🙌
Europe faces an unusual problem: ultra-cheap energy. Solar production peaks during the day, causing very low or even negative energy prices in some countries. It’d be best to send that energy elsewhere to meet demand, but the grid infrastructure is lacking. Building it takes time, and also faces some opposition because… “When a connection is established, the market with lower electricity prices will inevitably export power to the one with higher prices. Even if both sides benefit from the transaction overall, on one side the beneficiary may be electricity producers and on the other side it may be consumers, with the other group losing out in both places.” ~ learn more
Why did humans keep mules around when they already had horses? “Hi, cool question. It says there are 30 comments on here but for some reason I can't see any of them, so I'll answer because I'm a historian working on my PhD dissertation focused on the mule trains of colonial Panama, and I am very very interested in the global history of mules! … ” ~ learn more
United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster. This was a federal court case in 1962. “As the rooster was made of solid gold, the United States Treasury seized it on the grounds that it was illegal under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 which prohibited private ownership of more than 50 ozt (1.6 kg) of gold in the United States.” ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
Fake cop guy wins in court. “Acting as his own lawyer, Robert Ellis persuaded a Cook County judge to throw out the evidence in his 2021 police-impersonation case that accused him of faking that he was a cop outside Sox park.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Finally, robots that can fold messy laundry. “To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent “easy” problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived.” To make this robot, they made an AI system that can acquire “physical intelligence” with a general-purpose robot foundation model called π0 (pi-zero). ~ learn more
Embeddings are underrated. This is a fun nerdy explanation of embeddings, a sort of math function that’s behind our favorite new LLM technology. ~ learn more
LLMD for interpreting longitudinal medical records. “LLMD – an LLM trained like an MD – is our AI model for interpreting a patient’s medical records.” From the look of this performance chart, this thing crushes. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Proximity is power. An advice-seeker wrote to Shaan Puri asking for one step he could take to unlock his potential. “Well Abram, I’ll give you an answer in 1-word… “move”. The funny thing about self improvement is this: sometimes the easiest thing to do is change your surroundings.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school. Earlier this year I thought it seemed admirable when sharing a related link. A reader replied with the contrarian view that predicted free tuition wouldn’t achieve the sponsor’s goals. Seems that it’s not working… “Perhaps most alarming of all, doing away with tuition appears to have made the student body wealthier: The percentage of incoming students categorized as “financially disadvantaged” fell from 12 percent in 2017 to 3 percent in 2019.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
An emulation target trial on semaglutide and Alzheimer’s. I had to look up this type of trial, where researchers use a large dataset to put together a hypothetical trial to try and glean causality from correlations. “Semaglutide was associated with 40% to 70% reduced risks of first-time [Alzheimer’s] diagnosis in [diabetes] patients compared to other antidiabetic medications, including other GLP-1RAs.” This study is getting lots of publicity, so hopefully someone like Peter Attia does a deep dive on it to help us judge its quality. ~ learn more
Giving yourself brain zaps at home can safely treat depression. This study was published in Nature Medicine and funded by Flow Neuroscience, a company that makes a $500 brain stimulation headset. It, “aimed to prove the efficacy of a non-invasive technology called transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). A weak current (under 2 mA) is delivered to the scalp via two electrodes.” With these results, I suspect marketing to follow. ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
We can terraform the American west. Casey Handmer has not yet run out of big ideas. Bravo! “The western US is a parched opportunity to create millions of acres of prime land for the next billion Americans to live on. Only one ingredient is missing – water. … The answer is to flex our industrial might and finish what the irrigators began a century ago, and bring water in vast quantities to the high desert, to terraform a few select valleys in Nevada, and build a 21st century aesthetic vision.” ~ learn more
Here’s to a future where products can grow from—and reincarnate into—plant matter. “Meet O° – a collection of shoes and textiles whose creation and reincarnation starts and ends with biology. 100% biodegradable. 0% petrochemicals. 0% microplastics. 0% forever chemicals. No assemblies. No glues.” Product 1 seems to be 3D printed shoes made from biomatter. They do not look super comfortable, but I don’t think we should hold that against the creators! ~ learn more
Hereticon II: Apocalypse Ball. This “conference for thoughtcrime” happened last week, and this link will take you to a sample of speakers and ideas. Here’s one wild thing that happened there: “Hereticon attendees genetically modified frogs, and that’s not clickbait. This frog embryo workstation by Los Angeles Project took participants into a future where any living organism could be biologically changed in a multitude of ways.” ~ learn more