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Good tokens 2025-07-03

2025-07-03

The third day of the Battle of Gettysburg was 162 years ago today. An amazing reminder of the capacity of America to change and flourish. Glory, glory, hallelujah. His truth is marching on. Happy early birthday, America. I continue to love you and believe in you 🇺🇸 🎇

Worth your time

1. If this doesn’t inspire you, I don’t know what to tell you.

Having no experience did not stop me from making a VTOL with world-class range and flight time, all in 90 days.

This is the thing I'm most proud of building to date! pic.twitter.com/iUtNeZqFAw

— Tsung Xu (@tsungxu) June 9, 2025

2. The cultural decline of literary fiction
3. Tyler Cowen and Any Austin. My favorite CWT in a long time. New goal: to be the best in the world at something no one else does.
4. The astoundingly high rate of child protective services reports (as high as 37% of children) seems to be real according to Maxwell Tabarrok.
5. Uri has a request for posts. I personally would like to see the IUD one written. Also, IRB rules apparently apply to all research?
6. You are 100% alive right now.
7. The Zvi on school. And the likelihood of me home schooling / Montessori schooling

Musings

"The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury" ―Marcus Aurelius (via The Browser)

An entrepreneur is someone not limited by the resources directly under their control.

Brian Potter on the Apollo Program

2023-12-29

Two things I took away from Brian Potter's recap of the Apollo Program:

1. The mixture between "complicated" innovation and "brute force" innovation; to make the second stage rocket booster light enough to be effective took both totally new design concepts and simply shaving off weight wherever it could be taken off.

Not every effort at weight reduction was solved through clever (if complicated) ideas like cold-strengthened aluminum or the common bulkhead. Much of the effort was achieved by pure brute force: parts would be fabricated, tested until failure, and then redesigned to be slimmer until they broke at exactly the required load (scaled by an appropriate safety factor).

1. The interaction between new designs, new materials, and new techniques. New designs almost always require a new material or a new technique to be used.

Worth reading!