December 2021 – Briefonomics – You are what you read

Researchers at Firmenich established the primary chemical components of the aroma of sewage and then determined which odorant receptors they activate. Then they tested perfumery ingredients against these sewage-linked receptors. To their surprise, they found hundreds that blocked them. “One of the big contributions that our team has made, in the last few years, has been to show that, actually, blocking of receptors seems to be about as common as activation of receptors,” Ben Smith, a research director at Firmenich who has worked on the company’s receptor program, told me. Perfumers often find that the addition of a new ingredient mysteriously causes a fragrance to go “flat.” Blocking is almost certainly why.

Among the more effective blockers were several lily-of-the-valley–type ingredients. Firmenich designed a fragrance around two of them. When mixed with latrine scent—the company concocted its own for testing purposes—the perfume kept its white floral aspect, while the sewage seemed to fade away. Bill Gates reported the finding on his blog. “I took a whiff of the future of sanitation,” he wrote, “and it smells pretty good.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/the-odor-of-things-solving-the-mysteries-of-scent/

Alenka starts her Vertical Blue dives with a 100 meter-plunge and completes it easily. A few days later, 103 meters. Then a meter deeper. If she can manage 105 meters, she will equal Zecchini’s world record. On the live internet stream of the dive, the commentator remarks on Alenka’s “perfect control, perfect technique” after she comes up.

Hirose and Zecchini also reach 105 meters. Each diver has another two dives to go deeper. But a voice in Alenka’s head tells her to pause.

https://onjustonebreath.com

There is no menu at Bros. Just a blank newspaper with a QR code linking to a video featuring one of the chefs, presumably, against a black background, talking directly into the camera about things entirely unrelated to food. He occasionally used the proper noun of the restaurant as an adverb, the way a Smurf would. This means that you can’t order anything besides the tasting menu, but also that you are at the mercy of the servers to explain to you what the hell is going on. The servers will not explain to you what the hell is going on.

https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

Starship is Still Not Understood

If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong. Because it isn’t intuitive, and it wasn’t foreseeable 73 years ago.

Here’s how this all happened.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/how-this-all-happened/

Our planet supports approximately 8.7 million species, of which over a quarter live in water.

But humans can have a hard time comprehending numbers this big, so it can be difficult to really appreciate the breadth of this incredible diversity of life on Earth.

To fully grasp this scale, we draw from research from “The biomass distribution on Earth,” by Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo to break down the total composition of the living world, in terms of its biomass, and where we fit into this picture.

https://nautil.us/issue/108/change/all-the-biomass-on-earth

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Challenges coming up with the launches of numerous satellites in the fields of astronomy

https://overcast.fm/+JXrQLL0ko

Mattress: a tool for modern self-improvement that’s as mysterious and necessary as sleep itself.

https://lnns.co/Bsf6jYuiUbr

Inspiration comes – not surprisingly – from the Netherlands. The sea has been a threat in the Low Countries since long before climate change. The Dutch built their country partly at the bottom of the sea, drained it with windmills, and surrounded the new land with dykes. The Dutch coast has fine-grained, sandy soil that offers little resistance to the friction of the water. Currents, waves, and propellers of ships scour the bottom and can easily lead to the collapse of dykes, banks, quays, locks, and abutments.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/11/fascine-mattresses-basketry-gone-wild.html

It might go without saying, but for as long as humans have lived, we have also died. Our answers to the question of what to do with our earthly remains have evolved alongside religions and beliefs. Prehistoric humans buried their dead, sometimes with weapons or animal heads to offer some protection — against wild beasts, perhaps, or spirits — in the beyond. Some placed cadavers on mountaintops instead, trusting the elements, and scavengers, to scatter them (this practice persists in Tibet and in some parts of China and India). The first architect, the Egyptian Imhotep, is known for his mortuary constructions. Methods of interment have changed throughout the ages.

A Death Full of Life

Originally built as a resource colony by prisoners in the Soviet Gulag, Norilsk has been a metal making center for 80 years. Norilsk Nickel outlasted communism, embraced capitalism, and now aims to ramp up production to sell the high-purity metals needed for batteries and other technologies of the 21st century clean energy economy. The company’s ambitions coincide with those of Russian President Vladimir Putin for greater development in the Far North, which he maintains can be accomplished sustainably.

In the Russian Arctic, One of the Most Polluted Places on Earth

The world’s second most popular electric car (after the Tesla Model 3) is the Wuling HongGuang Mini, which costs $5,000 and outsells vehicles from Renault, Hyundai, VW and Nissan. [Brad Anderson & José Pontes]
Airline Food is a programming language whose programs look like Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routines. [Jamie Large]
Early versions of PowerPoint were created by a technical team that was 43% women, compared to an average of 10% in Silicon Valley at the time. [Russell Davies — buy his book here from Fluxx friends World of Books]

View at Medium.com

Using the standard method devised more than 70 years ago by Richard Feynman, he had sketched diagrams of hundreds of possible ways the colliding particles might morph and interact before shooting out three jets. Adding up the individual probabilities of those events would give the overall chance of the three-jet outcome. But Gehrmann needed software just to tally the 35,000 terms in his probability formula. As for computing it? That’s when “you raise the flag of surrender and talk to your colleagues,” he said.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-algorithm-that-lets-particle-physicists-count-higher-than-two-20211122/

As early as 3,000 years ago we encounter interest in intelligent machines and AI that perform different servile functions. In the works of Homer (c. eighth century BCE) we find Hephaestus, the Greek god of smithing and craft, using automatic bellows to execute simple, repetitive labor. Golden handmaidens, endowed with characteristics of movement, perception, judgment, and speech, assist him in his work. In his “Odyssey,” Homer recounts how the ships of the Phaeacians perfectly obey their human captains, detecting and avoiding obstacles or threats, and moving “at the speed of thought.” Several centuries later, around 400 BCE, we meet Talos, the giant bronze sentry, created by Hephaestus, that patrolled the shores of Crete. These examples from the ancient world all have in common their subservient role; they exist to serve the desires of other, more powerful beings — either gods or humans — and even if they have sentience, they lack autonomy. Thousands of years before Karel Čapek introduced the term “robot” to refer to artificial slaves, we find them in Homer.

Surveillance, Companionship, and Entertainment: The Ancient History of Intelligent Machines

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“A Fascinating, Sexy, Intellectually Compelling, Unregulated Global Market.” (Ep. 484)

Tales of cross-species communication. When we gaze into the eyes of a wild animal or a beloved pet, can we know what they might be thinking? Selection bias may be at work here, but just about everybody in this podcast, from whale-rescuers to dog-walkers, says “Yes”

https://overcast.fm/+ILLiNc

Economist Steve Levitt talks to cosmologist and physicist Max Tegmark, co-founder of the Future Of Life Institute, about the existential threats facing humanity

https://overcast.fm/+z2JCAn7w0

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