P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #319

Technology helping me get closer to nature

my story 🚀

🐛 I’ve discovered another feature of my iPhone a few months ago, and its been helping me get closer to nature. The photos app can identify birds and bugs and probably other things too. If you take a picture of one, the info button at the bottom of the photo app will help you name it. That’s how the kids and I learned the critter above is a caterpillar of the pale tiger moth, not a butterfly.

fun facts 🙌

The last question. A short story by the influential science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. “Asimov thought that The Last Question, first copyrighted in 1956, was his best short story ever.” It’s about a 15 minute read. ~ check it out

Militarized dolphins protect almost a quarter of the US nuclear stockpile. “For protection against enemy divers, dolphins will swim up to the infiltrator, bump into them and place a buoy device on their back or a limb, using their mouth. The buoy then drags the outed diver to the surface for easy capture.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Rewilding Zilker Park. A proposal. You might remember the other proposal for this mainstay park in Austin. “Parts of ZiIker Park are being loved to death, while other parts are being under-utilized due to a lack of shade.” ~ learn more

Things you may not know about historic Barton Springs. “According to historical accounts, modern use of Barton Springs began nearly 200 years ago when colonists settled in the region.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Quantum computing explained by FT. This is includes multimedia to help explain quantum computing and the algorithms that might be applied with it to unravel our internet’s security. It’s pretty incredible, yet as I told the friend who sent this to me, quantum computers don’t really exist and may never exist. This article mostly implies they’re inevitable, though they do throw in this line: “But [quantum big shot and mathematician Peter Shor] does not rule out the possibility that the physics challenges will prove too hard and we will never build workable quantum computers.” ~ learn more

One Googlers’ internal memo: we have no moat, and neither does OpenAI. “But the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch. I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us.” Good or bad? Hard to say. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

How repositioning a product allows you to 8x its price. One can only cut expenses down to zero, while there is no cap on growing revenues. This post suggests that you can take advantage of that dynamic by positioning your product as a growth driver, even when it’s mechanism really does reduce costs. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

The story of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy). I found this story fascinating despite my lack of interest in luxury brands. The hosts did extensive research and present the story and its nuances in a really entertaining way. “We tell the full history of LVMH, and how Bernard Arnault turned a $15m investment in a bankrupt French textile company into the world’s largest individual fortune. It’s a story that’s equal parts Berkshire Hathaway, Steve Jobs and Barbarians at the Gate… and wholly under-appreciated for the genius business model innovations that enabled it.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Cessations of consciousness in meditation. The full paper is paywalled (boo Elsevier) but enough is there to be intriguing. There are rare meditators who seem to enter a state without consciousness for up to 7 days. Unlike sleep, “they cannot be 'woken up' from the cessation state as one might be from a dream. Cessations are also associated with the absence of any time experience or tiredness, and are said to involve a stiff rather than a relaxed body.” ~ learn more

Science, cessation, and human hibernation. Building on the published evidence above, Dr. Ruben Laukkonen proposes the hypothesis that this is a version of human hibernation. It’s a very interesting idea. ~ learn more

Regenerating hair cells to restore hearing. “A team of Harvard Medical School scientists say they've come up with a new drug cocktail of molecules that they say can successfully regenerate the hair cells in the inner ear that enable hearing — a potentially groundbreaking treatment for hearing loss.” ~ learn more

Stem cell ‘junk removal’ process changes as the cells age. The researchers learned that rather than clearing unusable proteins right away, ”blood's stem cells actually squirrel away their misfolded waste and only recycle it when they need it.” And as the cells age, their ability to do this declines. Researcher Robert Signer thinks there’s a way to help cells maintain this recycling machinery for longer, helping them maintain a healthy state for longer. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Mr. Ranedeer: Your personalized AI tutor. This is a prompt that lets you create an AI tutor that’s customized to your depth of knowledge, learning style, and even tone. Want a tutor who engages you in debates? Cool. How about an encouraging tutor instead? Can do! ~ learn more

thanks for reading!