tech for immortality, the nuclear power flop & polar bears
CC#31 - Emotions are data, train travels & open source governments
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
This time, you’ll find a bit more podcast- than article-recommendations as I was without my kindle for most of the past two weeks (I forgot it at the café I’ve been working at, but eventually got it back thanks to some of the other nice volunteers there). Hope there is something interesting in for you nonetheless!
Things I Enjoyed Reading/Listening To.
🎭Emotions Are Data...So Listen to Them [Podcast]
I do identify as a person that always tries to focus on the positive and I have found it difficult (like, I guess, many of us), to deal with situations where stubborn optimism is misguided. While obviously not providing you with the perfect guideline on how to behave in such cases, the podcast has given me some ideas that I am aiming to apply in the future.
When you have someone with cancer who is terminally ill and is suffering, and we say to this person “Just keep positive!”, what we are conveying is a display rule, that their experience of pain and grief and hardship has no place. So its really important to realize that one of the reasons why we ‘un-see’ our difficult emotions is, that despite the fact that they exist all around us, there are these narratives that basically say, either they are not allowed or they don’t belong, or we live in a world that says “We can fix everything!”
⚛️ Why has nuclear power been a flop?
While I haven’t been able to make up my mind about nuclear power (yet), I’d say this economic investigation of why it hasn’t been widely adopted (as predicted in the years after its invention) definitely helped me to get a more nuanced picture of the whole discussion.
There is a great conflict between two of the most pressing problems of our time: poverty and climate change. To avoid global warming, the world needs to massively reduce CO2 emissions. But to end poverty, the world needs massive amounts of energy. In developing economies, every kWh of energy consumed is worth roughly $5 of GDP. How much energy do we need? Just to give everyone in the world the per-capita energy consumption of Europe (which is only half that of the US), we would need to more than triple world energy production, increasing our current 2.3 TW by over 5 additional TW. If we account for population growth, and for the decarbonization of the entire economy we need more like 25 TW. This is the Gordian knot. Nuclear power is the sword that can cut it: a scalable source of dispatchable (i.e., on-demand), virtually emissions-free energy. It takes up very little land, consumes very little fuel, and produces very little waste. It‘s the technology the world needs to solve both energy poverty and climate change.
So why isn‘t it much bigger? Why hasn‘t it solved the problem already? Why has it been “such a tragic flop?”
🔮Balaji Srinivasan: Living in the Future
I certainly don’t agree with all the beliefs of Balaji. Nonetheless, I must say, I have been listening to/reading multiple interviews with him and his way of thinking about the future are just immensely inspiring.
Which is, if the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, then the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality. Let’s break that down. The first part, if X then Y, right? If the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity… Why do we say that? Well, every technology that you’ve ever heard of, it’s usually described as, this makes something faster, or cheaper, or better, lighter, that type of stuff. (…) If you’re doing all these things in tech to produce scarcity, the ultimate scarcity reduction that gives everybody back lots of time is life extension or reversing aging and that should be technically feasible now. That’s the thing that people don’t get. It is possible to reverse aging.
Food for Thought.
🛴 Taiwan will soon have more electric scooter swap stations than gas stations.
🧮 The statistical model used by the Danish Ministry of Finance to model the economy has been made open-source and is now accessible to anyone on Github. Should generally all models and in-house written code from governments be made public?
🤝Interesting patterns - doesn’t look too good for the UK though…
Random Stuff.
🐻❄️ Polar bears have taken over an abandoned arctic weather station. A story about the entanglement of humans and wild nature.
🖼️ Baltimore museum of art is launching an exhibition that has been curated by museum guards. It’s call ‘Guarding the Art’ and simultaneously tells a story about class hierarchy in museums.
🗺️Bahn.Guru shows you all stations reachable by train within 1h/2h/3h/4h/5h from a specific train station in Europe.
Personal Update.
End of January I had the feeling that I was spending an unhealthy amount of time on Social Media (most likely a bit related to me having to quarantine for 10 days due to COVID). Thus I decided to impose a little experiment on myself and delete my Instagram app for a month (might or might not have purposefully chosen the shortest month of the year for this experiment). Preliminary conclusions in the footnotes.1
I started reading “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering” by famous mathematician Richard Hamming. One thing that I really like about the book, is that it breaks with the traditional conventions of science books vs. biographical storytelling - Hamming does it both, he tells stories from his personal experience splattered with (sometimes quite complex) formulas and equations. This also makes for a quite unconventional reading experience and I have found myself going back and forth between studying and ‘reading to enjoy’ mode. Haven’t made my mind up yet whether I like that or not.
Found out that the Danish language does not have a word for ‘please’.
While I logged into Instagram on my computer ~3 times so far and checked Facebook more often (which mostly only confirmed that there is not much on Facebook anymore that gets me interested), my overall Social Media consumption has definitely reduced drastically. I also do have the impression, that I actually do compare myself less to others and that I am having an easier time to disentangle my personal wishes/desires from externally imposed ones (i.e. seeing all those happy people on beaches and asking myself what went wrong in my life that I am not there in this very moment). I further feel it makes me more reflective (i.e. acknowledging that all the happy beach people most probably also have not so happy, not on the beach & no sunshine moments) and more attentive to the joy of small things (i.e. baking cake for my colleagues). Might be correlation, causation, a self-full-filling prophecy or hindsight bias - not saying this subjective observation implies anything. However, what I can say objectively, is that I have ‘gained’ time through the experiment.
Nonetheless, I am pretty sure that I will re-install Instagram once February is over. Mainly because it allows me to keep up with people I care about but who I am not able to meet regularly. I guess, living abroad acts as an amplifier for this. But I am planning to drastically reduce the amount of people I am following. I’ll kick out all the bloggers, all the acquaintances from ages ago that I am only following to be able to gossip about them, all the semi-random people I secretly admire from afar. That’s definitely gonna cut my feed by quite a lot and hopefully make it incredibly boring to open Instagram more than once every few days.