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I hope more people will participate in Substack Notes. I'm enjoying it a great deal!
Michael Nielsen
50.2K posts
Michael Nielsen
@michael_nielsen
Searching for the numinous
🇦🇺 🇨🇦, currently live in 🇺🇸
Research @AsteraInstitute
michaelnotebook.com
bsky.app/profile/michae…
- Bill Gates is setting up factories to manufacture 7 leading vaccine candidates before we know which is best & safest; we can test the vaccines in parallel, and then throw away all but the factory for the best vaccine. May save many months. Just extraordinary.
- Brian Eno on the design specs for the Windows 95 startup chime:
- This whole article is incredibly interesting:
There are crystal structures that simply won't form anymore, even though they did a few decades ago. Real life Ice-9? Could make an incredible sci-fi book. en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti… - Simone de Beauvoir, asked about her extremely hard-working, highly disciplined creative habits, which involve: + 2-3 months of vacation per year + Starting work at 10am, and going until 1pm, then taking a four hour break for friends + She does work in the evening, but she also
- The person who led the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour later lived much of his life in the United States. This is astonishing throughout:
- I love this fact: average walking speed increases predictably as city size increases, roughly as N^{0.1}, where N is city population. pnas.org/content/pnas/1…
- Since reading this 6 months ago, I've come to think it's half a dozen of the best paragraphs I've ever read on how to get much, much better at anything: (by @autotrnslucence )
- Twitter has made a huge positive impact on my life. Lots of people complain about it, so I wanted to write some notes about how I use it. Love to hear others' strategies too.
- A thoroughly fascinating table, from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_…
- One of my favourite letters, insightful & humane, from Richard Feynman to a former student who was having a rough time I was reflecting on it as an argument in favour of scope insensitivity, or even in favour of smaller problems:
- One rather strange event of the past ten days: like ~600,000 Australians, much of my retirement savings is with a superannuation (think 401-k) firm called Unisuper Unisuper uses Google Cloud to store their data. Well, ~10 days ago, Google Cloud *accidentally* *deleted* *their*
- The use of spaced repetition memory systems has changed my life over the past couple of years. Here's a few things I've found helpful:
