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

There's an interesting 2nd order effect on the horizon:

Eventually superconducting reversible logic will be by far the most performative computing hardware platform, for AI training and inference at scale.

This will drive massive economies of scale for cryogenics🧵 Cryogenics is the art of cooling this to be cold. Super cold - just a few degrees above absolute zero.

It turns out, at temperatures just above absolute zero most metals superconduct

Why would you want superconducting reversible logic?

This plot presents a sad truth:

Media has failed it's duty to inform the public

Instead, a business model of selling fear, stoking conflict, pandering, and pushing advertisers propaganda.

McKinsey-ification and it's consequences has been a disaster for the human species 🧵 It wasn't always like this.

In the past newspapers made money by selling newspapers, and they competed on quality of research, clarity of insight, and reliability of sources.

Then newspapers started raking in massive sums in advertising revenue and things went sideways

It would be mistaken to say companies like Pratt and Whitney have not innovated on jet engine design in the last 70+ years of making them.

For example, 13 years ago they added this single gear between the compressor stage and turbofan at a program cost of only $10 billion. 🧵 This lets the fan operate at a different speed than the compressor stage, though the ratio is still fixed. Still, having this small amount of adaptability improved fuel efficiency by 16%.

Today, their best-selling engine is the JT8D.

It first ran in 1960.

The reality is we could've easily mastered energy, food, and material abundance with 1970s era Technology.

Instead, we loaded up on virtue signaling, stakeholder engagement, and regulatory capture.

I call this general phenomenon "The Blight" The Blight is what gives you things like billion-dollar a mile railroad tracks in San Francisco, never completed high speed rail in California, the NRC killing nuclear energy, ArianeSpace, a bunch of go-nowhere climate tech bubbles, Don Lemon, affirmative action, etc

AGI must be decentralized and cheap to be accessible for all

Yet scaling laws in data and energy mean it will take trillions of dollars, leading to centralized control

The solution is a total hardware revolution

Here's the Thermodynamic Computing Explainer 🧵 w/@Extropic_AI I've spent the last few months getting to know @BasedBeffJezos, @trevormccrt1 and his team at @Extropic_AI.

What they're building is the Transistor of the AI era - the most natural physical embodiment of probabilistic learning.

To appreciate how, we need to dive deep:

How to Get to Orbit Cheaper than SpaceX's Starship

Ian Brooke has developed a new kind of jet engine that can act as the first stage of a rocket.

I get brunch with him every Sunday and have grilled him for hours on how it works.

Adaptive Cycle Jet Engines, the primer 🧵 Two facts about rockets:
- They have to carry a lot of fuel
- Structurally they are quite weak

The miracle of the Falcon 9 and Starship is they can be re-used, 10, maybe even 20 times.

But even a Falcon 9 that lasts forever has to consume massive amounts of fuel

A Weekend at the El Segundo Defense Tech Hackathon - The UNIX Timestamp of the Deep Tech Renaissance

This weekend smashed all of my expectations.

Here's my honest impressions and takeaways, and where this fits in to the evolving startup scene.

The Gundo Thread: 🧵 Organizers @apollo_defense did a fantastic job bringing together a room full of talented students, defense industry engineers, and investors.

Teams built through the night and even had calls with members of the Ukrainian defense ministry who were keen to see and use the results

Did you know that all kinds of tubes use physics?

Here's the physics of some of my favorite tubes 🧵

First up: The Vortex Tube, a thermodynamic mystery for over 80 years A Vortex tube takes a stream of compressed air and separates it into two streams of high velocity air, one thats cold, one thats hot.

It has no moving parts and uses no electricity, invented in 1933 it wasn't fully explained until 2012.

The miracle of life is to unpack a living organism from one cell, with a single molecule of instructions driving complex protein machinery.

For first time in history, we can produce fully three-dimensional videos of this process.

Let's take a look at Light Sheet Microscopy 🧵 The first person to observe single-celled organisms was Antony von Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch gentleman-scientist living in the 1600's.

His simple microscope revealed a hidden world of tiny creatures with a magnification of 300x

He named these new wonders "Animalcules"