Tell me what you pay attention to, and I tell you who you are …

“You don’t look Native to me” … Some things you may say, gestures you may do, if you lack a particular type of experience, can end up being perceived as disrespectful. There is no cure, just curiosity and attention.

  • Also check Carlos Andrés Gómez - Where are You Really From?

  • Once I went to a talk where a woman mentioned that men would, frequently and at the first encounter, touch her hair together with a remark or compliment. Her response was quite disarming - she would immediately repeat the same.

  1. John Hugo Loudon was the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell from 1952 to 1965 and later served as the president of the World Wide Fund for Nature from 1977 to 1981. He was known for promoting equality in the workforce during his tenure at Shell.

    • Shell, to me, is a very interesting company. Fallen into popular contempt, it still remains one of the greatest things the Dutch have built. I believe a lot of its controversies started with very good intentions. Check my article on the company here. E.g. “Shell has argued that it is already taking “serious steps to reduce emissions”. It complained the original ruling was unfair as it singled out one company for a global issue, and said it was unrealistic to try to hold Shell accountable for its customers’ choices. Shell said if people considered progress was too slow towards cutting emissions then they should lobby governments rather than Shell to change policies and bring about a green transition.” — from here.

  2. The state of next-generation geothermal energy

    • The gyrotrons used in fusion experiments produce enough energy to vaporize granite.

    • To land a rover on a planet like Venus or Mercury, or to send a probe into the atmosphere of a gas giant like Jupiter, we need motors, sensors, processors, and memory that will not fail soon after they encounter high heat and pressure.

    • Turbines need to be specially designed for supercritical fluids. While turbines already exist for supercritical water, new designs are necessary for lower-temperature fluids like supercritical CO2.

  3. GTL: Small Scale and Modular Technologies for Gas to Liquid Industry - Oil & Gas Portal

    • The economic advantages or breakthrough is in small scale GTL plants have occurred with the advances in 4 areas: Commercial introduction of micro-channel F-T technology; Higher reactive cobalt catalysts; Mass production of F-T reactors; Modular construction of the plants.

    • In addition, greenhouse gas emissions can be further reduced with GTL systems through the input of CO2 streams as co-feed which is converted into gasoline or methanol, representing a valuable use for what is typically considered a low-value or even negative-value gas stream. Properties of GTL Fuel include the enhanced aquatic and soil biodegradability, lower aquatic and soil ecotoxicity. Fuels produced from the FT process offer significantly better performance than their petroleum-based equivalents. FT-derived diesel does not contain aromatics or sulfur, and it burns cleaner than petroleum-derived fuels, resulting in lower emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx), sulfur oxide (SOx) and particulates. Exhaust emissions experiments on GTL products revealed an overall significant reduction of CO (22%–25%), hydrocarbons (30%–40%) and NOx (6% to 8%). GTL diesel has the potential to be sold as a premium blendstock.

    • Coal to Fuel explainer video. — As of 2020 Sasol’s Secunda CTL is the world’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gas, at 56.5 million tonnes CO2 a year.

  4. Energy Cheat Sheet

    • “US grid energy storage, mostly in the form of pumped hydropower, is today around 600,000 megawatt-hours, or 0.002 quads: roughly 10,000 times less than hydrocarbon energy storage. The lack of storage has historically meant that electrical generation must match supply on a minute-by-minute basis, which incentivized having large, connected power grids to smooth out variations in demand and reduce the requirements for infrastructure.”

  5. Bird Flu Is a National Embarrassment

  6. Sequencing anything, anytime, anywhere - Wellcome Sanger Institute Blog

    • “Well, it starts with three words: anything, anytime, anywhere. We are developing simple-to-use instructions for anyone interested in carrying out sequencing for malaria surveillance and biodiversity studies. With our project, anyone, anywhere will be able to sequence locally (almost) in real-time. “

  7. Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM)

    • “PDFM Embeddings are condensed vector representations designed to encapsulate the complex, multidimensional interactions among human behaviors, environmental factors, and local contexts at specific locations. These embeddings capture patterns in aggregated data such as search trends, busyness trends, and environmental conditions (maps, air quality, temperature), providing a rich, location-specific snapshot of how populations engage with their surroundings.”

  8. How do we measure whether China’s economy is “ahead” of America’s?

  9. How China turned the tables on biopharma’s global dealmaking

    • “[M]ost expect a squeeze in talent where companies simply can’t find enough CEOs, CMOs, CSOs or CFOs to run the show, or hire enough mid-level managers to handle projects. Qiang Lu —GenFleet “

  10. Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC

    • “Chang is introduced to learning curve theory by the Boston Consulting Group. The learning curve is the observation that production costs tend to fall by a constant percent every doubling of production volume. […] With TI’s high yields, the company’s manufacturing costs are already lower than its competitors, so Chang decides to regularly reduce the price of integrated circuits to put the screws to the competition and try to capture market share.”

    • Also check Acquired’s feature on TSMC, and the interview with Morris Chang

  11. Welcome to the Tour — Grand Tour

    • “Right now, Europeans have a laundry list of grievances about the present but no compelling narrative about the future. Your tweets about over-regulation will continue to do nothing to unlock growth. Instead, we need to spend more time talking about what we do want life in Europe to be like twenty or fifty years from now. “

    • Read also: Nederland heeft een hoopvol toekomstverhaal nodig dat ons verbindt

  12. Notes on China

    The biggest surprise from talking to Chinese VCs people at AI labs was how capital constrained they felt. Moonshot AI, one of China’s leading AI labs, raised $1 billion at a $3 billion valuation. Meanwhile, just xAI’s new cluster alone will cost $3-4 billion. The tech ecosystem feels quite shell shocked from the 2021 crackdown. One VC half-jokingly asked if I could help him get his money out of China. If you keep your money in China, you’re basically stuck choosing between terrible options. You can either accept a measly 2% yield from state banks, or throw it into China’s perpetually struggling stock market. This helps explain why valuations for Chinese companies are chronically low - the exit opportunities just suck. Even if you build (or invest in) something great, there’s no guarantee the company will be able to raise the next round. And even if you do raise again and succeed, the government might randomly cancel your IPO. And even if you somehow make it to the public markets, Chinese equities have been performing terribly anyways. It’s a good reminder of how easy it is to completely wreck an innovation ecosystem that depends on risk-taking investors.

  13. Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations

    • “Living in a country built off of bilateral negotiations for everything is simultaneously the libertarian dream and an incredibly inefficient way to do most collective things. “

  14. The Chemical Probes Portal is an open, online resource whose purpose is to identify and make available high quality chemical probes for use in biological research and drug discovery.

  15. Our Sleep, Brain Aging, and Waste Clearance

    • “In the last decade a whole body of knowledge has emerged about the brain’s drainage system—glymphatics— and the accompanying key components of the system that efficiently rids us of unwanted molecular waste every day. The dramatic impact of non-REM sleep, particularly stage 3 slow-wave deep sleep, cannot be emphasized enough.”

    • “With the new elucidation of this pivotal drainage mechanism, it is notable that none of the commonly used sleep medications or supplements have been shown to improve waste clearance, the principal function of sleep. Or promote deep slow-wave sleep without important side effects.”