Links, December 2022

December passed by in a blur, with our wedding, my birthday, a lot of travel, and more champagne than I care to mention. I had plenty of time to read and relax, and have found myself in January with a newfound sense of focus and purpose. I am a part of something bigger now. The boundaries of my responsibilities extend beyond myself. I now owe myself, my ambitions, my successes, fully to another person. A conspiracy of two.

Project Hail Mary was fun, although I think it tried to be too smart – the science was a little too complicated in a way that felt unbelievable – which made it a poorer book than the Martian. The Man Who Solved The Market was just interesting enough to get me through a four-hour flight.

A very short guide to planning reform, a useful resource to lean on when YIMBY-proselytising. Addresses a lot of the common misconceptions. And gentrification without displacement.

Jatan curates some photos of the Moon. The Apollo Remastered book is astounding. And Andrew McCarthy gives us the following gift:

ChatGPT can invent a fairly consistent, heavily inflected language. A fun example use, but I’ll be more impressed when it develops some irregular verbs from some sort of environmental or phonetic pressure.

Guesstimate is a really good little tool for generating Fermi estimates.

Science has been doing an experiment on itself for the past 60 years. That experiment is called ‘peer review’, and it failed.

Rohit performs a Fermi estimate for scary AI.

Gastro Obscura on pot-au-feu.

Gavin Leech’s papers of the year list.

2022’s Twitter trends. A brilliant reminder of how ephemeral most of the discourse is.

Lowell projects his own eyeball onto Mars and Venus.

Simon Sarris develops a diet I can relate to.

Nabeel argues for reading slowly and deeply.