Token stream 2024-11-15
2024-11-15
A message from my sponsor
Macro Oceans received a grant to use kelp for sustainable aviation fuel. From the oceans to the skies!
Things I learned
78 percent of Christmas hits were penned before 1990. From Can’t Get Much Higher. Also: “According to a report by CNN, about 52% of adults said they celebrated Halloween in 2005. In 2012, that percentage had jumped to around 72%. Over a decade later, ~the New York Times related~ that that percentage has slowly crept up closer to 75%.”
Transplant recipients can inherit memories and preferences from their donors from Adaobi Adibe. More on this here and here.
Worth your time
Getting materials out of the labby Ben Reinhardtin Works in Progress. Lots of this resonated for me in my work at Macro Oceans, even though our materials aren’t novel in the same way that say carbon fiber was in the 1960s. There’s an interplay between unique functionality (what the material does), scale (your ability to produce consistently), and price at each step along the journey. The art is picking use cases where your unique functionality isn’t blocked by your limited scale and high price.
I know from my own experience of studying martial arts in Japan that intense study brings rewards that are impossible to achieve by casual application. For a year I studied an hour a day three days a week and made minimal progress. For a further year I switched to an intensive course of five hours a day five days a week. The gains were dramatic and permanent, resulting in a black belt and an instructor certificate. Deep down I was pessimistic that I could actually learn a martial art. I thought you were either a ‘natural’ or nothing. Then I saw natural athletes fall behind when they didn’t practice enough. This, shamefully, was a great morale booster.
The global wars between ant super colonies.
"Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture" and more from Katherine Dee.
The Marginal Revolution Podcast on Crime in the 1970s. They were somewhat pessimistic as the episode ended, but it made me much more optimistic about America’s future. The resilience of our society is really underrated.
AR binoculars that automatically identify birds anywhere in the world. Stupid great product idea.
Observations
Product market fit provides gravity for a business. Before you have it, moving in almost any direction might be a good idea. But after you have it, you’re either going to double down on what’s possible or expand into the adjacent possible. All the moves are directly related to your current momentum.
“For an increasing proportion of software it’s more helpful to think of it as content rather than software” — Daniel Kuntz
“The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be.... But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy — and rarely does it take more money — to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to perservere until it’s really great.” - Steve Jobs
Sometimes caution is the riskier choice.
Politics is made up of both style and substance. I remember Tom Holland of the Rest Is History saying that Roman political parties didn’t break down on policy lines the way that ours do but on style: a conservative style vs a progressive style.
Prizes are an under used way of incentivizing behavior.
ABP.