Results for “water” 831 found
Emergent Ventures, 31st cohort
Clayton Haight, Waterloo, robotics and accelerating progress in hardware.
Hemanth Surya Ganesh, freshman at Dickinson College, also India, longevity research and general career support.
Lisa Wehden and Minn Kim. Plymouth accelerates innovation through faster and more transparent immigration services.
Pranav Konjeti, Richmond, VA, high school, to build out a web site on extracurricular activities.
Neel Redkar, UCLA, artificial photosynthesis.
Kevin Liu, Vancouver, cybersecurity.
Julie R. Vaughn, Cambridge, Mass., to study delaying menopause and epigenetic reproductive aging measures.
Grace Sodunke, Oxford, AI and general career development.
Anirudh Bharadwaj Vangara, with co-founder, Toronto. Sophomores in high school, to build a semantic search engine to match students with internship and other opportunities.
John Ervin Caldemeyer, UCLA, to translate Juan Marsé into English.
T.G. Hegarty, Cork, for on-line math education and Breakthrough Maths.
Elly Shin, San Francisco, formerly of Loyal, to research the possibility of extending menopause.
Harry O’Connor, Cork, Ireland, 17, robotics.
Mark Halka, Waterloo, robotics and robotic arms.
Ukraine cohort:
Kyiv School of Economics and Tymofiy Mylovanov, repeat winners, to support and cultivate talent in Ukraine.
Taisiia Karasova, AstroSandbox, to help sponsor the Ukrainian National internet-Olympiad on Astronomy.
Congratulations to all, and yes there are still more winners to be listed (I do these in batches). Here are lists of previous Emergent Ventures winners.
Emergent Ventures, 30th cohort
Mike Ferguson and Natasha Asmi, Bay Area and University of Michigan, growing blood vessels in the lab.
Klara Feenstra, London, to write a novel about the tensions between Catholicism and modern life.
Snigdha Roy, UCLA, for a conference trip and trip to India, math and computation and biology.
Nikol Savova, Oxford, and Sofia, Bulgaria, podcast on Continental philosophy, mathematics.
Seán O’Neill McPartlin, Dublin, policy studies and YIMBY interests.
Olivia Li, NYC, geo-engineering, undergraduate dropout.
Suraj M. Reddy, High school, Newark, Delaware, 3-D printing and earthquakes.
Zhengdong Wang, USA and London, DeepMind, to advance his skills in thinking and writing.
Andrés Acevedo, Medellin, podcast about Colombia.
Luke Farritor, University of Nebraska, deciphering ancient scrolls, travel grant.
Hudhayfa Nazoordeen, Sri Lanka and Waterloo, hydroponics for affordable food.
Thomas Des Garets Geddes, London, Sinification, China newsletter.
Chang Che, book project on the return of state socialism in China, USA/Shanghai.
Alexander Yevchenko, Toronto, ag tech for farmers.
There are more winners to be listed, please do not worry if you didn’t fit into this cohort. And here is a list of previous winners.
*Who Makes the NBA?*
That is the new book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, with the subtitle Data-Driven Answers to Basketball’s Biggest Questions. Most notably, it was written in thirty days with the help of GPT-4.
It’s quite good! Excerpt:
A statistically significant percentage of sons of NBA players shoot free throws at a higher clip than their fathers.
Jokic, by the way, started off playing water polo, and that is partly why he passes as he does and has such good court vision. And this:
And the average NBA player shoots free throws 1.5 percentage points lower in clutch moments in playoff games.
Is some of that due to being more tired rather than choking? On average taller players choke more on free throws, which is perhaps consistent with this hypothesis? Being very tall, they are less likely to be athletic and well-conditioned, in equilibrium that is?
I really liked this book, kudos to the author(s)!
Sunday assorted links
1. Polysee: Irish YouTube videos about YIMBY, aesthetics, and economics.
2. Germany political map of the day.
3. Thwarted Wisconsin DEI markets in everything.
4. The EU AI regulatory statement (on first glance not as bad as many had expected?).
5. The NBA Play-In was in fact a big success. Is the implication that other sports do not experiment enough with producing more fame/suspense at various margins? Basketball games are simply a much better product when the players are trying their best.
6. Your grandfather’s ACLU is back…for one tweet at least.
7. New GiveDirectly results on lump sum transfers, from Kenya.
8. Ideas matter.
9. The Chinese are using water cannons at sea, against the Philippines.
*Napoleon*
You can’t treat it as a normal movie with anything contextualized or explained. Nope. Rather think of it as a crazed male fantasy (the director’s? Certainly not mine) about one particular way of living, presented large and vivid on the screen, with sex scenes too. The fantasy doesn’t even have Napoleon as an especially smart guy, which of course he was. The battles scenes for Austerlitz and Waterloo are some of the best ever filmed. I can’t bring myself to call it “a good movie,” but it was better than expected and I was never tempted to leave.
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description:
Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, provides a nuanced look into the influential economist and public intellectual.
Tyler and Jennifer start by discussing how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact in statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, they discuss Jennifer’s previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there’s so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. They also delve into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s the future of Milton Friedman, say, 30, 40 years from now? Where will the reputation be? University of Chicago is no longer Friedmanite, right? We know that. There are fewer outposts of Friedmanite-thinking than there had been. Will he be underrated or somehow reinvented or what?
BURNS: Let me look into my crystal ball. I don’t think the name will have faded. I think there are still names that people read. People still read Keynes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential. I think that Friedman has got into the water and into the air a bit. I do some work on tracing out his influence.
Within economics, no one’s going to say, “Oh, I’m a Friedmanite,” or fewer people are, but this is someone whose major work was done half a century or more ago, so I don’t think that’s surprising. It would be surprising if economics had been at a standstill as Friedman still called the tune. When you think about the way we accord importance to the modern Federal Reserve, of course, there were things that happened in the world, but Friedman’s ideas did so much to shape that understanding.
He’s still in policymakers’ minds. He’s still in the monetary policy establishment’s minds, even if they’re not fully following him. I think we’re in the middle of a big reckoning now. You saw all the debate about M2 and the pandemic and monetary spending. I don’t know where it’s all going to settle out. It’s a more complicated world than the one that Friedman looked at. I tend to think he is an essential thinker, that the basics of what he talked about are going to be known 50 years from now, for sure.
COWEN: Did Milton Friedman have friends?
Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year. It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.
Sunday assorted links
1. Will Sweden move away from school vouchers?
2. Lagos harbor and various water and real estate projects.
3. How Manuel Blum became such a successful academic advisor.
4. Chinese confrontations with Filipino ships.
5. U.S. approves chikungunya vaccine. As I’ve been telling you, it is all going to work.
6. Claims about fake license plates.
A Genius Award for Airborne Transmission
One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic was the early insistence by the WHO and the CDC that COVID was not airborne. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” the WHO tweeted on March 28, 2020, accompanied by a large graphic (at right). Even at that time, there was plenty of evidence that COVID was airborne. So why was the WHO so insistent that it wasn’t?
Ironically, some of the resistance to airborne transmission can be traced back to a significant achievement in epidemiology. Namely, John Snow’s groundbreaking arguments that cholera was spread through water and food, not bad air (miasma). Snow’s theory took time to be accepted but when the story of germ theory’s eventual triumph came to be told, the bad air proponents were painted as outdated and ignorant. This sentiment was so pervasive among physicians and health officials that anyone suggesting airborne transmission of disease was vaguely suspect and tainted. Hence, the WHOs and CDCs readiness to label airborne transmission as dangerous, unscientific “misinformation” promulgated on social media (see the graphic). In reality, of course, the two theories were not at odds as one could easily accept that some germs were airborne. Indeed, there were experts in the physics of aerosols who said just that but these experts were siloed in departments of physics and engineering and not in medicine, epidemiology and public health.
As a result of this siloing, we lost time and lives by telling people that they were fine if they kept to the 6ft “rule” and washed their hands, when what we should have been telling them was open the windows, clean the air with UVC, and get outside. Windows not windex.
Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech was one of the aerosol experts who took a prominent role in publicly opposing the WHO guidance and making the case for aerosol transmission (Jose-Luis Jimenez was another important example). Thus, it’s nice to see that Marr is among this year’s MacArthur “genius” award winners. A good interview with Marr is here.
It didn’t take a genius to understand airborne transmission but it took courage to put one’s reputation on the line and go against what seemed like the scientific consensus. Marr’s award is thus an award to a scientist for speaking publicly in a time of crisis. I hope it encourages others, both to speak up when necessary but also to listen.
Addendum: I didn’t take part in the aerosol debates but my wife, who has done research in aerosols and germs, told me early on that “of course COVID is airborne!” Wisely, I chose to take the word of my wife over that of the WHO and CDC.
Saturday assorted links
1. Model this.
2. A bunch of claims about nobles, genetics, and violence.
3. New results on interpretability. And much more detail. Potentially very good news. One interpretation. Some are becoming less pessimistic.
4. Arnold Kling on the trouble with books. Remedies will come!
*The Creator* (movie review with spoilers)
This movie was deeper and more philosophical than I was expecting. Imagine a Buddhism that decides the AIs represent the true renunciation of desire, and thus embody the Buddhist ideal. Globally, the AIs ally themselves with the Buddhist nations, now unified under a “Republic of New Asia” banner. Mostly it looks like Vietnam (water buffalo), until snow-capped mountains are needed near the end.
The Buddhists considers the AIs to be kinder than humans. America, however, tries to destroy them all, as part of a misguided quest to bomb the proverbial data centers.
You will find visual quotations from A.I., Robocop, Terminator II, Kundun, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Firestarter, Westworld, Lost in Space, the Abraham story from Genesis, and more. The special effects were good, and surprisingly understated compared to the usual excess. Scientific consistency, however, you will not find.
In this movie it is Eliezer and the Americans who are the bad guys. I was surprised to see Hollywood make that move.
From the director of Rogue One, a good sign of course, and the soundtrack is by Hans Zimmer. This movie is not perfect, but I am very glad I saw it. The U.S. reviews for it are unreliable, the BBC did OK, Vulture too.
Do not underrate the elasticity of supply
When I first read about the discovery of a vast new deposit of lithium in a volcanic crater along the Nevada-Oregon border, I can’t say that I was surprised. Not because I know anything about geology — but because, as an economist, I am a strong believer in the concept of elasticity of supply…
Now about elasticity of supply, in which we economists tend to have more faith than do most people. Time and again over the centuries, economists have observed that resource shortages are often remedied by discovery, innovation and conservation — all induced by market prices. To put it simply: If a resource is scarce, and there is upward pressure on its price, new supplies will usually be found.
Not surprisingly, the Lithium Americas Corporation put in a lot of the work behind the discovery. Searching for new lithium deposits has been on the rise worldwide, as large parts of the world remain understudied and, for the purposes of lithium, undersampled. Just as Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor would lead one to expect, that set off many new lithium-hunting investigations.
Sometimes the new supplies will be for lithium substitutes rather than for lithium itself. In the case of batteries, relevant potential substitutes include aqueous magnesium batteries, solid-state batteries, sodium-based batteries, sodium antimony telluride intermetallic anodes, sodium-sulfur batteries, seawater batteries, graphene batteries, and manganese hydrogen batteries. I’m not passing judgment on any of these particular approaches — I am just noting that there are many possible margins for innovation to succeed.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column.
The Jones Act Enforcer
The Offshore Marine Service Association has a ship, the Jones Act Enforcer, whose only job is to spy on and harass European vessels that are installing wind farms off the coast of New England.
BostonGlobe: To get Vineyard Wind done, developers are turning to vehicles such as the Sea Installer, which arrived in Salem in early August. Owned by the Danish firm DEME Group, the vessel is one of the few on the planet capable of installing GE Haliade-X wind turbines that are the size of a skyscraper into the ocean floor.
Measuring more than 430 feet in length and 150 feet wide, Sea Installer is a “jack up” vessel that lifts itself out of the water on legs more than 300 feet long. Once elevated, the vessel becomes a platform where an immense crane, capable of lifting more than 1,600 tons, can install the tower sections, nacelle, and blades for each turbine.
The Jones Act Enforcer does not board the suspected ships. Instead, as it did this day with the Sea Installer, the crew photographs the vessels from about half a nautical mile away and, if they suspect violations, files complaints with US Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard. The outcomes of the complaints are confidential, Smith said.
…The law prohibits foreign ships from transporting goods between two points within the US. But the actions that ships can and can’t take on American waters gets very technical.
For example, the Jones Act Enforcer observed Go Liberty, an American ship, perched beneath the Sea Installer. Smith said the American vessel was most likely transporting materials to the site so the Sea Installer could place a monopile — the bright yellow steel piles that support the turbines — into the ocean.
However, if the Sea Installer received material from the Go Liberty and then physically moved to another monopile in a different location, that act could violate the Jones Act.
The Jones Act Enforcer also observed the Italian ship Giulio Verne, which was working to connect underseas cables to an electric substation that would power the wind turbines. In this case, Smith claimed the Italian ship was violating the law because it was moving the cables from one point (the sea bed) to another point (the substation).
The stupidity, it burns. But Biden supports the Jones Act.
Thursday assorted links
1. McCartney and Starr will re-record “Let It Be,” along with Peter Frampton, Mick Fleetwood, and Dolly Parton. Can we have Carnival of Light now, please?
2. Ecuador is deteriorating (NYT).
4. Massive influx of Chinese into ride-hailing jobs.
5. The story of Ozempic (NYT).
6. A directory of Date Me docs. What are the meta-lessons from these?
Doha travel notes
Qatar is a greatly underrated tourist destination.
The Museum of Islamic Art is one of the finest museums in the world, with a collection of unsurpassable quality, drawing on Islamic creations from as far away as Sumatra and the Philippines, as well as the more familiar Persian, Indian, Turkish, and Central Asian items. The I.M. Pei building offers fantastic views, and there is an Alain Ducasse restaurant on the top floor.
The National Museum of Qatar is more didactic, but still I found it spectacular, including the architecture and external sculptures on the front side of the building. Usually I dislike audiovisual displays in museums, but their films on the history of Qatar — shown on very large Imax-like screens — were spectacular. The costumes and jewelry displays are hard to top. “Culture” and “growth” seemed to be the organizing themes of the exhibits. The progressions were logical, and at the end of it all I came away thinking that Qatar has had cultural sophistication for a long time, and is not just a place where they throw a lot of money at art. I fell for their propaganda, but now I am going to read up and see just how true that is.
In value terms, the government of Qatar is the largest buyer of art in the world. The country has other notable museums as well, but I did not have the time to visit them, as sometimes their hours are irregular, or they are private collections which require special appointments.
In most public spaces you will see some attempt to make them look creative or aesthetic. By no means do all such displays succeed, but they are always trying. Many of the contemporary buildings, or sculptures along the road, are worthy of inspection.
In the water you still can see wooden dhows, and on the roads you might see a man in desert gear shepherding his camels across the road. The main souk has a whole section devoted to falcons and falconry. The souk at dusk is magnificent.
Overall the place feels cheerier and homier than does Dubai. Everyone I met was friendly. English is the lingua franca, and most of the people here do in fact speak reasonable English.
“Cultural Village” and “Pearl Island” are hard to explain, but they are parts of town worth a visit, moving at times in Las Vegas and “Venetian” directions.
The nearby development of Lusail (is it a separate city?) has some iconic buildings and is worth a visit, check out the medical center, it looks better in real life than in the photos.
Doha sparkles when it comes to food. The Parisa Persian restaurant in Souq Waqif (don’t go to the other Parisa restaurant, supposedly it is worse) was the best fesanjan I ever have had, excellent decor too.
Saasna is one local high-quality place for Qatari food. Not cheap, but excellent ingredients. The dishes skew in the Saudi direction (“lamb shank on saffron rice,” or “beef stewed with wheat”) rather than Persian.
Good Indian and Chinese places seem to abound, I even saw an apparently high-quality Miami restaurant. The breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel was first-rate, most of all the pistachio labneh.
Based on n = 6, this seems to be one of those countries where they ask if you want lemon in your sparkling water, you say no, and they give it to you anyway.
On Fridays, the country does not open until 1:30 p.m., so if you are doing a short visit try to avoid that day.
The on-line visa form was easy to fill out, and I received a positive response within seconds.
Going in August, as I have done, is not crazy. Sometimes the temperatures reach 47 degrees or higher, but somehow it is manageable, or at least it was for me. Perhaps more people are around other times of the year? In any case you should go, as Qatar ought to join the list of must-visit destinations, and it is easy enough to combine it with other trips, given the use of Doha as an air hub.
Monday assorted links
1. Oddly distributed asymmetric worries. And U.S. scientists repeat fusion power breakthrough.
2. “Vidya Mahambare has a fun assignment for her students, and I fully intend to copy it this upcoming semester.” Link to the idea here.
4. Square watermelons in Japan.
5. More on the Collie transhumanist [transcollieist?].
6. MIE: “A funeral home in El Salvador has taken Barbie mania to an extreme, offering pink coffins with Barbie linings.”