Darren Zhu

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on the atlas — 32

highlights — 26

The science-fiction writer Chen Qiufan told me that “the space program and China’s explosion of scientific research have been taken as one of the most representative symbols of China’s uprising. By decades of promoting “科学技术是第一生产力” [a government slogan that means “science and technology is the first productive force”], the idea has taken root deep in people’s minds
China’s Space Dream
Hainan Island, a tourist spot marketed as “China’s Hawaii,” with surfers and sunseekers and the annual Boao Forum, China’s answer to Davos. China’s Cape Canaveral, the Wenchang Space Launch Site, is also on the island, in the rural hinterland on the northeastern coast.
China’s Space Dream
Cheng Li, the Brookings Institute’s Zhongnanhai watcher, told me about the “cosmos club,” a group of technocratic leaders rising through the ranks of China’s space industry; as the 20th CCP congress approaches in the fall, it seems likely that several of these techno-populists will be elected to the Politburo, bringing Xi’s vision of the future to life.
China’s Space Dream
everything from cake shops to grocery stores to breakfast stalls claimed to be somehow related to outer space. The streets are named after China’s Shenzhou (Milky Way) spaceships, even if they look identical to the ones in any other northern Chinese town
China’s Space Dream
Xi’an’s role as a science capital in China stretches back to the 1950s, when Soviet experts came to visit and help jumpstart Chinese industry. Following the Soviet “science town” model, where employees of a given enterprise were clustered together near the workplace, residential blocks sprang up across the city for the “danwei” work units. So too did companies like Xi’an Aircraft Industrial Corporation, which was founded in 1958 during the first decade of “New China.” Today, the company is on America’s sanctions list, identified as part of China’s military-industrial complex and a military end…
China’s Space Dream
Planetary-scale computation is an example of what may be called, after the great Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, an “epistemological technology.”
Planetary Sapience - NOEMA
Microscopes did not conjure microbes into being, but once we knew they were there, we could never see surfaces the same way again.
Planetary Sapience - NOEMA
smart exoskeleton, a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer capable of calculating things like: How old is the planet? Is the planet getting warmer? The knowledge of “climate change” is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation.
Planetary Sapience - NOEMA
And so we kind of just have to go into that without too many opinions and just try things. And I kind of used a lot of lessons from Leap here, which was that instead of trying to go in and design a whole experience out of nothing, presupposing that you can somehow see 10 steps into the future, just make a bunch of things and see what’s cool and what people like. And then take a few of those and put them together. It’s amazing how you try 10 things and you find the three coolest pieces, and you put them together, it feels like a lot more than three things. It kind of multiplies out in complexit…
Narratives – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
I would even go as far as to say that being "for-profit" is a skeuomorphic mode of operation, and leads to a local optima that misses the broader opportunities that come from a diverse platform ecosystem on top of your protocol. The nature of the medium of token ownership and unstoppability means we no longer need to extract profits to realize value creation. We can create "for-public", with a new underlying value system that means the value created in Hyperstructures far exceeds any amount of profits that can be extracted in the immediate term, and can be recognized for the value they provide…
Hyperstructures
There is no cost to maintain and keep the protocol operational forever. Once deployed, it will work exactly as it’s designed with no degradation. For example, if the Uniswap team and website disappeared today the protocol will run in perpetuity. This is something that simply hasn't been possible before.
Hyperstructures
The dilemma is resolved...by distinguishing two very different activities, both denoted by the same word, “science”: the first level of meaning refers to private science (let us term it S₁), the science-in-the-making, with its own vocabulary and modes of progress as suggested by the conditions of discovery. And the second level of meaning refers to the public science (S₂), science-as-an-institution, textbook science, our inherited world of clear concepts and disciplined formulations.
When do ideas get easier to find? - by Eric Gilliam
An extreme example that Holton cites was John Dalton, whose atomic theory was built on FOUR fundamentally incorrect assumptions but still revolutionized our understanding of the makeup of the chemical world.
When do ideas get easier to find? - by Eric Gilliam
None of these elements fit in with the conventional model of the scientist; they seem unlikely to yield to rational study; and yet they play a part in scientific work.
When do ideas get easier to find? - by Eric Gilliam
In a single day, the ocean leveled Lisbon, the empire’s nexus where much of the country’s wealth was stored in vast waterfront warehouses. One destroyed warehouse, the Casa da India, contained an estimated 1.5 percent of Portugal’s GDP in Brazilian diamonds. Lisbon’s devout Catholic population saw the ruined city as divine punishment. The Protestant countries of Europe also saw the destruction as punishment, but for backward Catholic behavior. Pombal, however, saw a path to power and an opportunity to rewrite the future of a crumbling colonial state.
The Earthquake That Brought Enlightenment | Hakai Magazine
Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.”
Reimagining Capitalism — Patagonia
Schrag, still focused on Cassava-linked scientists, was looking for examples that could refine his own sleuthing. In a PubPeer search for “Alzheimer’s,” postings about articles in The Journal of Neuroscience caught Schrag’s eye.
Potential fabrication in research threatens beta-amyloid theory
As Ashe’s star burned more brightly, Lesné’s rose. He joined UMN with his own NIH-funded lab in 2009. Aβ*56 remained a primary research focus. Megan Larson, who worked as a junior scientist for Lesné and is now a product manager at Bio-Techne, a biosciences supply company, calls him passionate, hardworking, and charismatic. She and others in the lab often ran experiments and produced Western blots, Larson says, but in their papers together, Lesné prepared all the images for publication. He became a leader of UMN’s neuroscience graduate program in 2020, and in May 2021, 4 months after Schrag de…
Potential fabrication in research threatens beta-amyloid theory
This approach doesn’t just apply to Huh’s mathematical work. In 2013, he decided he wanted to learn to cook. As a total beginner, he adopted the strategy of making the same dish — a simple pasta in oil — every day until it was perfect. For six months, that’s exactly what he did. (To date, according to Kim, that’s the only dish he knows how to cook.)
June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
He found the writing process too focused on the self — and for him, that exploration was often painful and depressing. Moreover, as he later realized, “I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry,” he said. “I didn’t want to write great poetry.” Now he sees that version of himself as almost a complete stranger.
June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read. He felt an urge to revisit books he’d first encountered when he was younger — including Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and several novels by the German author Hermann Hesse — so that’s what he did. “Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.” (He’s since made peace with this constraint, though. “I used to try to resist … but I finally learned to give up to those temptations…
June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work
June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
One might say the same of his path into mathematics itself: that it was characterized by much wandering and a series of small miracles. When he was younger, Huh had no desire to be a mathematician. He was indifferent to the subject, and he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along
June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
For example, platforms could periodically ask users to rate the accuracy of randomly selected headlines, thus reminding them about accuracy in a subtle way that should avoid reactance33 (and simultaneously generating useful crowd ratings that can help to identify misinformation27,34). Such an approach could potentially increase the quality of news circulating online without relying on a centralized institution to certify truth and censor falsehood.
Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online | Nature
the results show that subtly shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of news that people subsequently share
Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online | Nature
First, we find that the veracity of headlines has little effect on sharing intentions, despite having a large effect on judgments of accuracy. This dissociation suggests that sharing does not necessarily indicate belief.
Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online | Nature