Archeologists just found ancient highly advanced stone structures in West Java radiocarbon dated to be between 27,000 - 16,000 years old, drastically upending our theories of human civilization.

Along with Gobli Tepeke it seems like our entire conception of history is flawed 🧵
This study made extensive use of Electrical Resistance Tomography to reconstruct subsurface features, chambers, and structures leveraging high sensitivity measurements, spacing metal electrodes in a 3D grid to measure the entire area and reconstruct it volumetrically

My last job was as Senior Stellarator Engineer at an early stage fusion startup. I was the lead design 'ideas' guy for stellarator systems - here's some things I learned about the art and science of stellarator design 🧵

First off, a stellarator is indeed a work of art: Like Tokamaks stellarators have a kind of periodic symmetry in the coordinate space of the magnetic field enclosing the plasma, but, unliked Tokamaks this doesn't translate into nice symmetries in our 3 dimensions.

A Stellarator is every CAD designers nightmare

Collectivism has a natural advantage over individualism in political fights because every cell of the collectivist body politic is programmed to fight against unorthodox views, while individualism naturally defends diversity of perspectives 🧵 Under collectivism, there is only one acceptable narrative and any departure from that is viewed and then portrayed as an existential threat to the entire society.

To be contrarian is to be a threat to the "progressive revolution" and painted as counterrevolutionary

People think socialism is liberation for the working class but the underlying premise is the State knows what's best for the Individual, so really it's just economic enslavement by a political elite.

Engineered scarcity and fear to keep everyone playing zero sum games. 🧵 The people advocating for greater government control are all politicians that put up a narrative that it's in the best interests of everyone because the world is too dangerous and we cant trust individuals to exercise their liberty judiciously.

So you should take it away.

The thermodynamics of industrial capitalism demands energy to keep growing.

But our economy isn't setup to be an energy-producing machine, it’s a money printing machine, money backed by nothing.

Fiat currency and its implications have been a disaster for the human species 🧵 The US Dollar has been devalued by 25% in the last four years. The government is printing its way out of a short term deficit into a longer term one.

It wasn’t always like this - money used to be backed by something, such that the government couldn’t just issue it arbitrarily.

Former RF engineer and superconducting magent engineer here - along with finding that microtubules have perfectly diamagnetic cores, a sign of superconductivity, it means that a highly structured superconducting tubule network can act as a quantum-limited noise floor RF antenna.

https://twitter.com/sterlingcooley/status/1757802109293261245

The sensitivity of an antenna is ultimately limited by the resistance in the conducting wire, because thermal motion of the charge carriers produces voltage noise. The temperature and resistivity set the noise floor of measurement sensitivity

This is a real-time video of extremely precise deposition of 1 nanoliter to 1 microliter droplets inside of 96 well plates.

Equivalent to developing photolithography but for life sciences. Absolutely incredible tech tree unlock. We live in an age of miracles.

@M2_Automation @M2_Automation Anyone that's worked in life sciences knows - pipetting is a nightmare, and variance in reactant volumes can absolutely destroy your experiment. The ability to massively mulitplex - by an factor of 100 - 1000x, the number of experiments that can occur in a standard well plate...

The conscious mind is a very narrowband filter on reality.

It has evolved to throw away almost all data, suppress all processing. It is evolved to hunt and mate.

But to escape the dull and prosaic inner life of a mammal requires some small step towards madness 🧵 Perhaps there are ways of experiencing a more raw version of reality, of expanding conscious awareness beyond what was evolutionarily useful to satiate curiosity and the search for religious or spiritual insight.

There's a clear downside though

100,000 flights per day at altitudes from 25,000 to 40,000 ft, mandating a tiny amount of sulfur in the aviation fuel could probably halt and reverse global warming.

🤷‍♂️

https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1810088211802452349

The point of this post is to make you think - there's a 100,000 flights every day at high altitude. They will be burning and spitting stuff into the atmosphere.

Is there some compound or substance that can be included that would dramatically counter-act CO2 greenhouse effect?

The simplest way I can say it is this:

Nuclear can supply all the developed worlds base load energy demand with the minimum of land, materials, and labor.

It's expensive because of bureaucracy. End of discussion. Solar = best decentralized lowest marginal cost of installation. Can supply all low density residential.

Nuclear = best centralized at-scale power for high density usage. Supplies factories, major cities, etc.

Nuclear is by far the most efficient in terms of material

Most people don't know the first iPhone was designed in 1994 by a company called General Magic, which started as an Apple project in 1989 when Marc Porat convinced then-CEO John Sculley the future of compute was a multimedia phone with touch screen

Jobs wasn't involved at all 🧵

https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1797149157775536377

The project spun out as a company in 1990 with Apple taking a minority equity stake and Scully on the Board.

People credit Steve Jobs with his vision of the iPhone but this is fundamentally wrong. At the time Jobs was building NeXT.

The credit entirely belongs to Porat

Am I too late to get into deep-tech / hardware / physics / science / engineering?

I didn't start my engineering degree until I was 24. Before that I was working in marketing and sales, I had a humanities degree, and for my entire life had been "not a math guy"

So no. Go do it I didn't do chemistry or physics in high school.

So, at age 24, while selling moorage at a marina, I did Grade 11/12 chemistry and physics homework and wrote the high school equivalent exams.

My office was a portable on a construction site (with dog)

DoD is deploying $9bn to unify the control systems of the Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy, Space Force into a single AI entity - SkyNet.

Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) requires hundreds of laser comm satellites.

This will bring the internet to space 🧵

https://twitter.com/andercot/status/1759731014950154321

JADC2 will integrate sensor and communications data into an AI-powered network comms that links every branch of the Armed Forces.

Current generation satellite radios are easy to intercept and interrupt because the beam is wide - but lasers are tighter and more secure

The only thing that actually makes sense to back a currency is a promise of energy or compute in the future.

This ties time value of money to opportunity landscape of new technology development.

Therefore resources are spent the most when there's the most to be built 🧵 The issue with fiat currency is it can be artificially created without any corresponding creation of value

It breaks as a proxy measure of value for this reason and so many areas of activity generate money without producing value.

In 1487 at the dedication of the Temple of Mayor the Aztec high priests sacrificed 80,000 prisoners over ten days.

Tenotchitlan had a population of 800,000 at the time, and the empire itself 5-6 million.

In 1521 the empire was defeated by 600 Spaniards under Cortez 🧵 2 years previously Cortez had landed on the coast of Mexico with 600 men and 16 horses, and within a few months has been welcomed into the capital Tenotchitlan on friendly terms by the ruler Moctezuma II

The encounter spelled an inevitable doom for either side

Proteins are what perform useful functions in the body, but the vast majority of DNA does not code for any protein - rather, it regulates which proteins get made

The same is true of our legal code - it's mostly junk. A short 🧵 about viruses, evolution, and regulatory capture Proteins only make up 20% of your body but perform essentially all the functions - digesting, transporting, signaling, and so on.

Much of your body is like infrastructure - the roads, bridges, cellulose scaffolding and cytoplasmic medium that lets proteins do their thing

Fusion is one of the most important technologies mankind will ever develop, and will power civilizations for thousands of years to come.

The Kardashev scale is simply a measure of how much fusion you've captured, because it's the origin of all usable energy 🧵

https://twitter.com/energy_zap/status/1782793917035073792

Deep in the hearts of stellar furnaces light elements are crushed together into heavier elements by gravitational pressure and heat.

The sun burns 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, releasing photons that take a 10,000 year random walk to the surface

Gentle Reminder that in 1964 we flew a supersonic reconnaissance drone with a cruising speed of Mach 3.3 at 90,000 ft with a range of 3,000 nm to take photographs of Russian ICBMs and airfields.

The D-21 was launched from an SR-71 while going Mach 3.2.

A short 🧵 on ramjets

https://twitter.com/kane/status/1782635758530314407

During the 1960s Lockheed Martin developed the A-12 program, a precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird. The autonomous D-21 drone was developed using many of the same techniques - titanium hull, airfoil design, and powered by a ramjet.

But ramjets only work when you're going fast

The meter was very nearly defined as the length of a pendulum such that the period is exactly two seconds.

This would mean the strength of gravity, measured in meters and seconds, is exactly pi squared.

But it's not - a short thread on the importance of units🧵 Christian Huygens invented the first Pendulum Clock in 1657, and it was far more accurate than spring driven clocks of its time.

In fact pendulum clocks were the most accurate means of time keeping until the invention of quartz clocks in the 1930s

SF co-living homes are like deep ocean currents that drive the nutrient and talent rich city newcomers into convection cells with the experienced and well-capitalized.

The sociology of San Francisco does this amazing thing of idea, talent, and capital discovery 🧵 I've never actually lived in a co-living house, but its remarkable how often I learn that interesting and successful characters can trace a common origin to a certain vintage of roommates in now-legendary house.

The Archive, Genesis, The Embassy, Monument, Solaris...

The entirety of modern robotics is hopelessly outclassed by the elegant dexterity and mechanical efficiency of an insect.

Nature has sprinkled the world with walking engineering miracles. Far easier to simply hack their software than reinvent the hardware from scratch 🧵 The beetle is one of the most successful animals on Earth and has adapted to every biome possible.

Industrious, efficient, resilient, we are easily hundreds of years of compounding tech progress from producing something like this with silicon and steel