I publish a monthly email newsletter with personal updates and interesting things I read or learned that month. The latter is archived below. If you’d like to be added to the newsletter, email me.
The De Beers diamond cartel ran an advertising campaign to dissuade people from selling their diamonds
"It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world's mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds."
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? The Atlantic
Takeaways from Acquired's third part on Google
Google: The AI Company. Acquired
The manufacture of paper grocery bags is loosely 7.9x worse for the environment than plastic bags
The fastest buildout of nuclear reactors took place in France in the 70s and 80s
“During the 1980s, France increased the number of reactors in commercial operation from 15 to 55. Even China, with the world’s most streamlined regulatory process and developed industrial base, has failed to match this record”
“In the 1970s, France was building nuclear reactors at one-third to a half of the pre-interest costs that new reactors in the US had risen to amid toughening environmental and safety regulations.”
Liberte, egalite, radioactivite. Works in Progress
Paul Erdos' mathematical output heavily relied on stimulants
“Erdos first did mathematics at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since the death of his mother, he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. 'A mathematician,' Erdös was fond of saying, 'is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.'"
On Talent. Felix Stocker
In relative terms, data center freshwater consumption is unconcerning
0.19% of America's freshwater consumption in 2023 went towards powering and cooling data centers. For reference, that is 10% of the freshwater lost due to indoor household leaks. If forecasts are correct and data center electricity usage triples by 2030, their additional water consumption will be equivalent to the US producing 5% more steel. At the personal level, each day the average American consumes (indirectly) the equivalent of 800,000 chatbot prompts in water. When putting together this roundup, I realized that I've actually met Andy before. He's the director of EA DC.
The AI Water Issue is Fake. Andy Masley
Takeaways from Andrej Karpathy on Dwarkesh Podcast
Multi-scale emergence can be quantified using the entropy of a system's transition probability matrices
A very interesting non-expert summary of a paper published this month (I haven't had the chance to read the technical paper). At a high level, you can describe any system as a Markov Chain and represent its different scales as groupings of its events. Then, take the transition probability matrix of each grouping and score them using an entropy-based measure to quantify their "irreducible causal contribution".
I Figured Out How to Engineer Emergence. Eric Hoel
Coal-fired plants cause 5x more excess deaths per year than total excess deaths from Chernobyl
23k excess deaths per year in the U.S. from coal plants, 4k total excess deaths caused by Chernobyl
Mortality risk from United States coal electricity generation. Science
Deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster. Wikipedia
Power to Save the World. Gwyneth Cravens
The US and Canada accidentally kick-started India's nuclear weapons program
The US and Canada provided India with a heavy-water research reactor through the Atoms for Peace program. India then built a reprocessing facility and repurposed the reactor to extract Plutonium-239 for its first nuclear test. India argued that its test was a "Peaceful Nuclear Explosion" and did not violate the stipulation of the deal that the reactor should only be used for peaceful purposes.
The U.S., Canada, and the Indian Nuclear Program, 1968-1974. National Security Archive
Power to Save the World. Gwyneth Cravens
Pew Research survey finds increasing distaste for sports betting across America
10% more Americans see sports betting as bad for society than in 2022. This trend is growing across every demographic. 43% say legal sports betting is bad for society, while only 7% say it is good. An equal percentage of college and non-college graduates bet on sports (22%). Sports betting is more common among young people and those with higher incomes.
Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society and sports. Pew Research