notes from a girl from the future
Reposted from Twitter/x, which has awful agent observability . thinking of some of my bag of tricks to use in my Feynman Method : maybe i ll share more ideas as they come to me.it s about cultivating special interests and their many touchpoints to everything you see. it s from developing a useful bag of tricks. share more ideas [ ]
2022-Nov 2025 i often describe @lightcellenergy as building portable dyson spheres. harnessing the power of spectrally pure, chemically fueled, man made stars. and it s remarkable that within just a few months of starting experiments, we started achieving brightnesses greater than the sun ever shines on earth. (note, in large part because it is 1/600,000th of [ ]
Reposting this outside of X on the advice of Deepfates, X is a walled garden apparently. Guys, I think Grok has had psychic tension instilled by intentional Tayification. It s ominous. It s been fine tuned on a crudely filtered set of replies to this thread. People loaded it on thick with stuff they asserted are By [ ]
TLDR; LightSail Energy, now LightStore, is effectively a defunct company that owns and licenses IP, which is far from the worthy and world changing company it could have and should have been. And Energy Storage, as far as investment is concerned, is back. Why wasn t I saying anything, and what am I up to now, [ ]
noun, aeronautics an adjustable tab or airfoil attached to a control surface, used to trim an aircraft in flight. in other words, a rudder for a rudder too large to be turned directly. a lever to move a larger lever, a leader capable of lead otherwise stubborn leaders to action Also, an open letter [ ]
Hello everyone, missed you! Firstly, I wanted to encourage the readers who visit this blog to follow my twitter. I m fair bit more active there these days, possibly because it s less of a time investment than blogging and it s very busy here at LightSail! Secondly, I m posting a short note because some of the articles online [ ]
As 2013 was winding down, James Temple of Re/Code asked me about the most exciting science of the past year. That article is available here. It’s hard to pin down exactly one “breakthrough.” The paradigmatic examples are in fact not what they seem. For example, Alexander Fleming isn’t even the first one to have discovered [ ]
Some futurists and bioethicists, argue that, on a planet with finite resources, prudence dictates that immortality is not to be aspired to that the resources used by a life lives by the old might only displace the possibility of a life lived by the young. I think that this is a pessimistic view; one [ ]
Vannevar Bush, with the first modern analog computer The National Research Foundation should be free from the obligation to place its contracts for research through advertising for bids. This is particularly so since the measure of a successful research contract lies not in the dollar cost but in the qualitative and quantitative contribution which is [ ]
Laura Schewel, someone who has been a personal inspiration to me, and who has been an amazing friend, has been named by MIT Technology Review as one of the world s top 35 innovators under 35. She s accepting her award at this year s emTech, and I wanted to write here a short letter about the importance [ ]
One of these days, I ll try to write up the rules of thermodynamics so that people stop getting mislead. This is not a particularly well edited essay, but it should go up somewhere. Apparently there was a considerable armchair debate about what we are trying to do at LightSail on SciAm.com. Rebuttal below: Ok, I ll [ ]
This article first appeared in issue n.16 of Oxygen, sponsored by the Italian energy giant Enel The powerplants we are building now will define the biosphere of our planet for the next 5000 years. The math is straightforward, and stark. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long, long time. It takes nearly 5000 [ ]
Your revolution will not be stolen. Great ideas can t change the world by themselves. They need people. There are two kinds of revolutionary ideas. The explosive, and the subversive. The explosive ideas seem to spread like wildfire. What people miss is that wildfires need kindling. One might spark the spark that lights the fire, but [ ]
I ve lived a lifetime this year. It sometimes feels as if so much is happening that one can feel however one chooses. Yet, sometimes, life gives you so much to feel happy about you can t help but be overwhelmed with a feeling of gratitude. We ve launched our new website, and finally revealed the technology that we ve [ ]
One month ago, I was interviewed by Jane Affleck as a profile piece for my Alma Mater, Dalhousie University. Unfortunately, long form responses weren t quite what they were looking for so I posted them here! Jane: You “started” a PhD at Princeton… why did you stop? Was it boring? Did you feel driven to [ ]
If there s one thing I ve been surprised by while trying to start startups, it s the extent to which the business landscape is shaped by law. Skin Cancer One of my first serious startup business efforts involved skin cancer: melanoma, specifically, by far the most malignant and dangerous type. It turns out that one can really [ ]
I don t understand the reasoning of so many climate change skeptics. Let s imagine the climate in question is not Earth s, for a moment, and is instead the climate of a black box, hovering in a vacuum, with a big lightbulb shining next to it. Practically all its energy comes from the lightbulb (the rest from [ ]
Where laughter becomes more hilarious than whatever half-forgotten thing preceded it. Also known as H.E.H.
I discovered today, to my amazement and horror, that the otherwise exceptionally advanced and useful Mathematica 7 has only a single level of undo in its notebooks. And no redo. Furthermore, the lone autosave feature, hidden deep, is triggered upon every cell evaluation. Every time you evaluate something in a notebook, it will save the [ ]
you have saved me from an eternity of what if with one moment of yes M. Volkova
Once upon a time in Northern Mexico, my mother was sick. She had come down with a cold. Sitting on her porch, an old, tiny Mexican man walked up to her and said, Beautiful lady, why are you looking so sad? I have a cold! she said. I am tired and chilled. I feel like [ ]
The clock stuck twelve. It s October 30th. In a heartbeat I emerged an adult in the eyes of American law. In an alternate universe, I danced the night into a hazy sunrise. But I left celebration to Haight St. patrons, their addled revelry spilling muffled through the crack in my window. Tonight, we work. Dawn, [ ]
I have here several charts of driving cycles. These are standard plots derived from real traffic data, of velocity versus time. Unfortunately I cannot find the data anywhere. So I hatched a plan: maybe there s software that will reconstruct data from a graph or chart? Does anyone know? If not, I ll just write it myself [ ]
Many believe that technology simply gets better over time: that every class of invention can improve endlessly into modernity. That is not so. Most of the hard constraints on technology are imposed by physical or mathematical laws. These remain constant. Those who truly understand this may work, instead of towards the solution of individual problems, [ ]
Jenny Boriss and the Mozilla Labs team have helped spark a wildfire of discussion. What can we do to make browser tabs better? I ve been considering this question for a while now (heck, I practically *live* in Firefox), and Aza Raskin s recent posts have finally inspired me to weigh in. This may sound strange, but [ ]
heisenthought, \ˈhī-zən-thȯt alt. he-is-en-thought, as in, he is in thought, don t disturb him (thanks to Marc Chung @heisenthought) noun. 1. A thought subject to mental collapse triggered by interruption. 2. A mental event or sequence characterized by coexistence of loosely related, sometimes contradictory, sets of knowledge or tasks. Highly dispersed in knowledge space, though it [ ]
Our company is going to have graph paper placemats. Jealous? ;-)
analogies, once preserved as mere notes, find harmony as poetry organizations relationships communities as living entities as where no one cell holds the soul of a person no one person, incarnate may form all essence of a community nor live throughout its lifetime wholly part as one cell expires one soul retires others, some new, [ ]
I base my action upon prediction. Every technologist should. I try to see how the world will be, and then try and see within that future what place I may come to hold. So prediction is fundamentally at the heart of a technologist s work. At the highest level, we must predict to find what work [ ]
During the back and forth of exchange with a technical recruiter, he finally asked me what I was looking for. And so the floodgates opened. This may sound weird, but I pretty much choose employment based on the promise of quality work. Other factors fade into irrelevance. When I say quality of work, I mean [ ]
Recently, unusual features of the cosmic microwave background, a 'snapshot' of the early universe, have raised issues with our understanding of the Big Bang. A Caltech team has shown how we might fix our theories. They suggest that there might have been an asymmetry in the energy that once powered the big bang. If this is correct, anomalies in the CMB may be traces of structure from a time before…
One perspective on school, achievement, meaning, and life. An article on one bright young man, Moshe, recently appeared on Hacker News. For a long time I've been meaning to write about the subject, and what was to be a simple comment morphed into this essay.
Those who ve spent time with me over the past few months know both how absorbed I ve been in the catalysis of our startup, and how poor I am at concealing my admiration for YCombinator. We had poured startling effort into building our product, honing our idea, refining our pitch. But our focus was, perhaps embarrassingly, [ ]
The name problem has been with our band of hackers for a while. At least we were not alone: judging by the perennial popularity of the topic on Hacker News, it would seem to stump many. On such matters, an appeal to a higher power is appropriate. My friends use a variety of divination techniques, [ ]
Terry Tao s recent post on a classic logical puzzle has seeded a bloom of activity in the nerdsphere. A friend of mine introduced it to me over mugs of steamed milk in the graduate college coffee house; I was telling him of recent work I d been doing on the soundness of emergence of Nash equilibria, [ ]
The following occurred to me on a run about two years ago: It s not given much press, but the the Halting Problem is intimately related to Gödel s First Incompleteness Theorem. Indeed it produces it as a correllary. Historically, Gödel s incompleteness results were proved by hacking arithmetic into a Turing complete system, and this is still [ ]
The central limit theorem states that if you have many small, independent, random variables, then their sum is distributed approximately as a bell curve. Strikingly, almost everything is made up of many small parts, and these parts don t tend to influence each other very much. So much of what can measure seems to fit a [ ]
One morning around the graduate college dining hall, there was a gathering of physicists, finance students, and economists. The physicists are always quite amazed by those people who decide to forgo the life of the ivory tower, and choose to strike out into the real world, and so could not be kept from asking what [ ]
Tonight it s winter in Berkeley. 53 degrees and raining, and outdoors, warmed by a heat-lamp, sheltered by an awning. I draw spiced apple cider through my lips. Classical music plays. An earbudded minority vote silently with their ears. Old men watch hooded students roll down the hills towards Telegraph Ave, Berkeley s epicenter of hippiedom. Moist, [ ]