Links #13

Just a pile of links this time

I didn’t have a chance to go more in depth on the links I found this time, so we’re jumping straight into a pile of links. I’ve bolded the 3 best things though.

Ideological Abuse, Busyness, and the Importance of Rest. Great piece on the things abusive communities do to keep people trapped. Rest is important for thinking clearly and breaking out of bad situations, it may even help you in your own life.

How to Live Near Your Friends. How one person took a very active role in getting friends to move near her. She now has dozens of friends within walking distance. Having close friends nearby is probably as or more important than where you live (within limits, I’m not sure if me and all my friends would be happy living together in Siberia).

HOAs are really good, actually. Makes the case that HOA’s are really just voluntary local governance and that any argument against them applies with more force to local government. HOA’s are a highly-local governance system that competitively provides local public goods.

Thread on making road pricing politically feasible. Basically, gas cars already sort of pay congestion pricing via fuel taxes. You can add taxes to new electric cars without anyone getting upset, ensuring that all cars pay congestion taxes. This doesn’t quite fix congestion problems, but it’s a good example of how tax policy is a complicated balance between what’s efficient, feasible to implement, and politically viable.

Detecting Genetically Engineered Viruses With Metagenomic Sequencing. The Nucleic Acid Observatory ran a pilot test which seems like it went pretty well. They monitor wastewater to identify mutations to common viruses in order to detect bioterror attacks. A similar system can be used to detect more generic disease outbreaks. Scaling this technology is one of the most promising ways we can prevent pandemics and reduce risks from biological weapons. Lowering sequencing costs is key, the $1.5 million per wastewater source would be a little hard to scale to 1 million (my wild estimate of the number of wastewater sources in the world) wastewater sources in the world ($1.5 trillion/year is still a steal relative to things like covid). 1-3 OOM lower costs would be great. Fortunately sequencing costs have been falling rapidly, and hopefully those gains will translate to wastewater. From there, staffing costs will be the main issue.

A paper (explainer here) on “reverse translation” of proteins! This was on my list of weird research areas. It doesn’t look very practical, but reverse translation would allow us to do some pretty crazy stuff.

Controlling semiconductor growth with structured de novo protein interfaces. This is neat. Using peptides to direct materials synthesis is an interesting potential application of modular peptides.

Bioinspired polymeric woods. This paper makes a plastic material with properties similar to wood. Growing timber takes up a lot of land, why can’t we make some sort of plastic material instead? I could even be carbon negative by using CO2 from the air to make the polymer. Apparently, plastic-based materials aren’t strong or durable enough yet. All the more reason for there to be more research on this topic!

Vitalia Startups We'd Like to See. I love reading lists of projects people would like to see.

Expanding the Brain. Literally. Editing genes in mice known to contribute to larger brain size increases the size of mice brains. The author is worried about this, but seems like important and useful work.

Nandgame is cool, you start from simple components like transistors and build up to a simplified version of a computer. I wish it went a little farther connecting to higher-level languages like C.

I came across more weird things you can do with FPGA’s including high-frequency trading, physical unclonable functions, and this excellent post listing more ideas. I’ve added this to my previous list here.

A multimaterial 3D printer that can lay down plastic, metal, and semiconductors (but not something as complex as a chip per se). 3D printing keeps getting better.

Cute paper (explanation here): warp drives might be possible, if another alien civilization builds one and it collapses then it should produce gravitational waves that we could detect. Imagine getting evidence for alien civilizations in this way, you know they’re working on warp drives, you know they’re coming, but you don’t know from where.