Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Welcome to the latest edition of the Practical Polymath.
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Until next time,
Florian
Weekly Wisdom
🤖 Looking Back: The road to taming the unfamiliar is paved with good analogies. Could they also be a tool to envisage what the future might hold? This piece uses historical analogies to understand what might be the impact of language-generating artificial intelligence on society. I really want number seven to be true.
⚡ Making Suns: Imagine generating five times the temperature of the sun. That would be more than 100 million degrees Celsius. Scientists have done this right here on earth using donut-shaped chambers surrounded by magnets called “Tokamaks”. These fusion reactors heat up hydrogen and helium atoms to such high heat that they end up fusing together producing energy. We are creating stars here on earth and I find that absolutely baffling and beautiful at the same time. Why does this matter? Because it could give us an unlimited, safe and clean source of energy. That’s if we can figure out how to turn fusion power into electricity at scale. If you want to learn more, I recommend this introduction to fusion power. And if you want to dive deep and regret having snubbed your high-school physics classes, I highly recommend this 3-hour podcast with the Director of the MIT Plasma and Fusion Center.
📚 Book of the Week: I think it was the title that made me want to pick up this book: “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare”. If there is one thing I cannot stand it is the overzealous and ubiquitous use of air conditioning. What I didn’t expect was to read such a scathing critique of American culture and society. The book recounts Henry Miller’s trip across America and his impressions of a country he’s coming back to after ten years spent in Paris. Despite being written in the 1930s, some of the points he makes in the book still sound eerily true.
Lateral Thought
“America is a vast place, and I doubt if any man knows it thoroughly. It’s possible too to live in a place and not know anything about it, because you don’t want to know.”
Henry Miller