Standardization empowered innovation

July 5th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIn the early nineteenth century, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), chemists were using different conventions for how they weighed substances, and thus were reporting different weights for the same elements:

The lack of standard practices meant that disagree­ments on fundamental issues pervaded chemistry. A prominent book listed nineteen notations for acetic acid used by different practitioners. Chemists didn’t even agree on the meaning of basic terms like “molecule.” It was a complete morass—for teaching, and for discovery.

In the summer of 1860, a small group of scientists called for an international conference—the first of its kind—to resolve the confusion. It would be held in September in Karlsruhe, Germany. The location was fortuitous. Twenty-six-year-old Mendeleev happened to be studying abroad in Heidelberg, thirty miles away.

[…]

Cannizzaro made a pitch to revive the fifty-year-old idea from one of his countrymen, Amedeo Avogadro, that if you have equal volumes of gas of different substances, and those gases are at the same temperature and pressure, they will contain the same number of molecules. The old idea was correct, Cannizzaro argued. Just as importantly, using it would allow chemists to compare different substances and arrive at consistent weights for the elements that comprised them. The lone other Italian at the meeting passed out copies of a pamphlet Cannizzaro had created. It explained his reasoning and included a list of weights that chemists should be using for common elements.

[…]

Thirty years later, while giving an honorary speech in England, Mendeleev would recall that day. He recounted how disastrously fragmented the field was at that time, but that Cannizzaro “seemed to advocate truth itself.”

[…]

The creation of standard definitions may seem boring compared to the thrill of discovery. But without consistent weights, Mendeleev’s formidable brain would have stood no chance, and nature’s pattern would have remained hidden. Standardization empowered innovation.

It allowed work to communicate across distance, even if the individuals doing it were not themselves in direct communication. In effect, it made the problem-solving team much, much larger. By 1867, when Mendeleev began to write his textbook, he could rely on the knowledge of weights uncovered anywhere in the world. In a certain sense, the new standards empowered him to collaborate with people he didn’t know.

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A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

July 4th, 2026

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Let us celebrate the 250th anniversary of the original Secession Day:

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A tight deadline can either enhance or destroy our thinking

July 3rd, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinEveryone is familiar with one way to coax the best from our big mind, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), deadlines:

But a tight deadline can either enhance or destroy our thinking, according to research on time pressure. It depends how we use it, and specifically whether we respond by rushing to multitask, or rushing to monotask.

Frank Lloyd Wright famously put off working on the design of Fallingwater for months, and then drafted his masterpiece in a few hours when the client called to say he was a few hours away and wanted to see the progress. As Duke Ellington liked to say: “I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline!”

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The only option is radiation

July 2nd, 2026

Years ago, when I first discovered Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site and its list of common misconceptions about space travel, I was taken off guard by a simple point that’s obvious in retrospect:

Rockets got wings. If your rocket has a multi-megawatt power plant, an absurdly high thrust thermal rocket propulsion system, or directed energy weapons it will need huge heat radiators to purge all the waste heat. Otherwise the rocket will melt or even vaporize. Radiators look like large wings or arrays of panels. The necessity of radiators a real problem for warships since radiators are pathetically vulnerable to hostile weapons fire.

(Also, there ain’t no stealth in space, but that’s less apropos…)

Andrew Cavalier, writing in IEEE Spectrum, argues that orbital data centers are harder than Silicon Valley thinks:

Space is cold, but it also has no atmosphere. That means the best heat-removal mechanisms, conduction and convection, are off the table. The only option is radiation. To prevent a chip from overheating in space, a large, costly surface area is required to dissipate the energy and then radiate it.

Solar energy is abundant, but collecting it with functional solar panels that maintain perfect alignment toward the sun is a complex task requiring extensive attitude control systems. On top of that, ionizing radiation in space from cosmic rays and other sources poses a unique challenge, degrading the solar panels, the radiative coolers, and the chips themselves. Because regular maintenance in space is difficult, redundancy has to be built in at launch, and cost estimates have to account for efficiency degradation over time.

At ABI Research, where I work as an aerospace analyst, we did a rough total-cost-of-ownership comparison between a data center on Earth and one in space. It showed that the cost to launch and run a GPU in space for a year is at least an order of magnitude higher than the same feat in a terrestrial data center. Our model was simple, assuming an Nvidia H100 server rack launched with the requisite-size solar panel and radiator on a spacecraft akin to Starcloud’s pilot launch. We assumed SpaceX’s Starship was used at a highly optimistic launch cost per kilogram of US $44, and a terrestrial energy cost of $0.20 per kilowatt hour. This is a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it does signal something real.

From our perspective, the cost of delivery and space hardening of the payload makes general-purpose space-based data centers difficult to justify economically today, despite the fact that data-center builders in many regions are scrambling for electric power. However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include preprocessing data from Earth-observation satellites, real-time detection and tracking of hypersonic missiles, and active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit. Even for these, though, contending with fundamental physics will still be a demanding challenge. And a technologically compelling one, too.

[…]

To understand how big this baseline area is in practice, I used the Stefan-Boltzmann law to model the heat-rejection area needed to keep a single chip that draws 700 watts of power—such as the H100 GPU chip, an AI stalwart—at a constant 60 °C, usually considered the sweet spot for GPU longevity and stability. I further assumed that the radiator is perfectly facing deep space, at a chilly background temperature of 3 kelvins. By this calculation, a single chip would require 1.4 square meters of radiator surface.

To put this into perspective, consider that a common AI rack can hold approximately 32 GPUs (four H100 server boards). With CPUs, memory, and networking equipment, this rack would draw around 40 kilowatts of power. This single rack includes 2.5 terabytes of memory—enough capacity to serve over 20,000 concurrent users or run 16 simultaneous instances of Llama 3, an open-source AI model. But to cool this thermal load in a vacuum, that single rack would require an 80-square-meter radiator, roughly the size of a pickleball court. For an aggregate 100-megawatt data center, you’d need at least 2,500 of those radiators.

And that’s the best-case scenario. Additional problems are hidden in the low Earth orbit environment itself. Space exposes radiators and their coatings to a chemically hostile brew of ultraviolet light and atomic oxygen, quite the opposite of a clean-room environment. Over a LEO satellite’s typical 5-year lifespan, these elements degrade the radiator’s surface properties and lower its ability to shed heat.

Including this degradation in the model reveals that as the radiator degrades from a “fresh” state to an “end-of-life” state, the physics demands a further penalty. To maintain that same 60 °C operating temperature for the GPU chips, the required surface area jumps from about 1.4 square meters per chip to nearly 2.0 square meters. In other words, the physics tax rises by 40 percent. Therefore, you must launch at least 40 percent more radiator mass, endure higher atmospheric drag, and sacrifice valuable launch volume just to survive the degradation of the thermal coating. This increase adds significantly to the launch cost and further erodes the economics of a space-based data center.

When Dwarkesh interviewed him, Elon made the point that the availability of energy is the issue:

If you look at electrical output outside of China, everywhere outside of China, it’s more or less flat. It’s maybe a slight increase, but pretty close flat. China has a rapid increase in electrical output. But if you’re putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you going to get your electricity? Especially as you scale.

The output of chips is growing pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat. So how are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies?

[…]

It’s harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space. You’re also going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don’t need batteries. I almost wore my other shirt, which says, “it’s always sunny in space”. Which it is because you don’t have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere in space. The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy.

So any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night. It’s actually much cheaper to do in space. My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months.

Posted in Science, Technology | 1 Comment »

Attention is scarce and must be preserved

July 1st, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinThe year before he encountered Gloria Mark’s research on multitasking, David Epstein’s explains (in Inside the Box), he had to get a few stitches in his head:

It was no big deal, just un­comfortable. I was told to move slowly for a few days, ice regularly, refrain from jerking my head, and to sleep sitting upright. All of that was annoying. And yet, after three days I was surprised to find that I was so happy I started tracking what I was doing in a journal to see if I could figure out what was going on. My conclusion: It wasn’t so much what I was doing as what I wasn’t doing. Whether I was reading, working on my computer, or brushing my teeth, I was monotasking.

Not being able to move quickly, or turn my head, had the effect of forcing me to focus on doing one thing at a time, and at a reasonable pace. Despite the temporary discomfort, it was a joy.

[…]

As I was chronicling those days in a journal, I thought about the discomfort of two writers who, in my opinion, are among the best alive: Laura Hillenbrand wrote the universally acclaimed nonfiction works Seabiscuit and Unbroken, and Susanna Clarke wrote the wondrous fantasy novel Piranesi. Both authors have suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, and both have discussed how that has, at times, forced them to simplify their work routines. When I mentioned this to Cal Newport, the computer scientist and author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, he told me that Hilary Mantel, another of the foremost writers of a generation (who had recently passed away), “dealt with chronic pain and fatigue, so had no choice but to work slowly and meticulously, creating masterpieces.”

[…]

In a lecture in 1970, Simon said: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Simon explained that as information was becoming easier to gather and transfer, organizations were reflexively using technology to deliver more of it to individuals, even when it exceeded their capacity to attend to it. In theory-of-constraints terms, the information piles up at the bottleneck, which is you and your limited attention. “The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of ‘the more information the better,’ ” Simon said.

How would we live and work if we prioritized the design principle that attention is scarce? We probably would not check email seventy-seven times a day—the average in one of Mark’s studies—at least on days when focused work is the priority.

[…]

I resolved never to start the day with email, because for me email is an instant gateway to multitasking. And since I can never get through all of it, it will leave attention residue that makes it difficult for me to switch wholeheartedly to my most important work.

[…]

When I make a plan for tomorrow, I now simply put fewer tasks on it. I was underestimating switching costs, as we all do, so I was chronically overestimating what I could actually get done in a day. (This pervasive cognitive bias is known as the planning fallacy.) The result was that I would end up trying to multitask to keep up with the list, which I now realize meant that I both performed worse and took longer. I would then carry over unfinished tasks to the next day’s list. This would proceed until the list became so ridiculous that I would flip it over to avoid the anxiety of seeing it, before eventually realizing it was hopeless and throwing it in the trash. Then the cycle would begin again. Now, at the top of each list is one single thing that, if accomplished, will mean it was a good day.

In an effort to curtail external interruptions, I started using focus mode on my phone to avoid constant notifications. Then I started just leaving my phone off and in another room to try to diminish my self-interruptions. It didn’t immediately make a difference, but pretty soon the internal metronome that prompted me constantly to check various feeds or inboxes slowed to an army crawl. As with email, I cut checking to once or twice a day, and on days when focused work was the priority, only at the end of the day.

[…]

When self-interruptions still inevitably arose—usually related to some reply I’d forgotten to send—I would immediately write them down in a notebook. That cognitive outsourcing prevented unfinished tasks from lingering in my mind.

Finally, I took Mark’s advice to work in intervals. Attention is like a bucket, she told me, and you want to take a break from intense focus before the bucket is filled and you’re exhausted.

[…]

In 2022, scientists showed that hours of concentration leads to a buildup in the brain of the chemical messenger glutamate; too much glutamate is poison to brain cells, so it could be that part of mental fatigue is your brain reducing activity long before that point. Whatever the case, little mind breaks help you recover focus before reaching exhaustion.

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Socialists have a long history of denying that other socialists are socialists

June 30th, 2026

How socialist was Germany under National Socialism?, Bryan Caplan asks:

I first started pondering Nazi economic policy during the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Since the end of World War II, mainstream culture had energetically covered Nazi crimes, but largely gave the Soviet bloc a pass. Yet in the late 80s and early 90s, a long list of long-forgotten Soviet crimes loudly entered the Western conversation: Lenin’s coup against Russia’s first democratic government; Stalin’s agricultural collectivization; the Gulag; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; the Katyn massacre; mass deportations to Siberia; and more. Once there was widespread recognition that self-righteous Soviet socialists had committed many Nazi-level crimes, the etymology of “Nazi means ‘National Socialist’” intrigued me. If the world’s most famous brand of socialists turned out to be total monsters, could the world’s most famous brand of monsters turn out to be total socialists?

[…]

After all, socialists have a long history of denying that other socialists are socialists. In the late 1920s, for example, the Comintern started insisting that so-called “social democracy” was actually “social fascism,” the “moderate wing of fascism.” Democratic socialists, for their part, routinely retroactively strip revolutionary socialists of their socialist credentials once things turn ugly enough. Stalin wasn’t really socialist, Mao wasn’t really socialist, and neither is North Korea.

Upshot: Even if the Nazis were the sincerest of socialists, mainstream socialists would almost certainly deny them the label regardless of the facts.

[…]

Germany had fairly high economic freedom before World War I. This collapsed during World War I and the subsequent hyperinflation. By modern standards, Germany 1916-1923 would be virtually the most socialist country on Earth — though remember that due to lack of credible data, Fraser doesn’t score Cuba, Eritrea, or North Korea.

After the end of the hyperinflation, German economic freedom briefly recovers, peaking at 6.6 right before the Great Depression. Then there’s a total collapse. When the Nazis take over in 1933, Germany is already down at 4.1. If it were a modern country, that would be just freer than Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela.

Measured in rank order, Nazi Germany keeps falling, hitting rock bottom — #166 out of 166 — by 1936. But in absolute score, Nazi Germany falls every single year, from 3.6 in 1934 to 0.7 in 1945.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

His supposed deal with the devil became a marketing trope.

June 29th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinBlues music is respected now, but, as David Epstein’s explains (in Inside the Box), it was known in its early days as “the devil’s music.”

Pious families learned that blues shouldn’t be played in the house. [Robert] Johnson learned a different lesson: that competent guitar players could attract whiskey, women, and a little spending cash.

[…]

He was so poor that he had to start on a diddley bow—just a wire nailed to the side of a shack. At fifteen, he upgraded to a real guitar, albeit missing two strings.

[…]

Johnson played across the entire fretboard, using complex patterns and chords more typical of jazz. He used repetitive guitar riffs to add structure to a song, and he managed to emulate boogie-woogie piano players by doing two things at once with his right hand: picking out a steady, rhythmic bass line with his thumb while simultaneously playing elaborate melodies with his other fingers. That’s why Keith Richards, decades later, would think he was hearing two guitars.

[…]

During stops in San Antonio and Dallas in 1936 and 1937, Johnson recorded the only twenty-nine songs he left behind. A famous producer heard a recording and went looking for him. The producer meant to invite him to perform at a venue about as alien as possible to a juke joint: Carnegie Hall. He had trouble reaching Johnson, and before he could extend the invitation, the producer learned that Johnson was dead, the first member of what would become known as the “27 Club” of famous musicians who died at that age.

[…]

Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Doors all covered his songs. His supposed deal with the devil became a marketing trope.

[…]

Rather than to the crossroads, Johnson had gone back to Hazlehurst, and sought out Zimmerman, a proficient guitarist who was a few years his elder and could teach him how to play. Johnson moved in with Zimmerman and his family in nearby Beauregard, Mississippi. The teacher would take his student to Beauregard Cemetery at midnight, and joked about playing for ghosts, but the real reason was perfectly simple. As Zimmerman’s daughter told a historian in 2007: “He said [he’d go to the cemetery] ’cause he could play better ’cause it was still… real quiet. Real quiet…. And I think when he was carryin’ Robert up there it was so Robert could really concentrate on his guitar…. He was determined not to let him fail.” And why midnight? “I think because it was quiet and nobody around to walk and interfere.” Her father and Johnson would sit on two of the tombstones and carry on their lessons. Johnson’s progress, which seemed so magical that it engendered the most renowned ghost story in music, was the result of something more like the approach Isabel Allende employed to produce forty years of bestsellers.

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These hallucinations can last several days

June 28th, 2026

Lanmaoa asiatica is a species of mushroom from Yunnan, China that induces unusual hallucinations:

On this trip, there are none of the heightened colors, breathing or pulsing objects, nor geometrical patterns typically reported by users of psychedelic substances. In fact, the hundreds of people who enter clinics in China’s Yunnan province during each year’s summer mushroom season tend to say their vision is clear and largely unaltered.

Well, aside from one major exception: nearly all users see visions of hundreds to thousands of highly-rendered miniature people, dressed in bright colors like elves, gnomes, clowns or other fairy-like figures. The hallucinated sprites wriggle under doors, dive off spoons into soup bowls and make lewd and mischievous gestures, among other strange behaviors.

These visions are reported by 90% of those who consume a single species of bolete mushroom, called Lanmaoa asiatica, in its raw or undercooked form. Yet despite decades of anecdotal reports, the fantastical claims were dismissed by western scientists as a form of “mushroom madness” — until Colin Domnauer, an undergraduate student taking an optional university module on funguses, caught wind of the rumors.

These hallucinations can last several days.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Studying what, exactly, workers in a knowledge economy do all day

June 27th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinGloria Mark, David Epstein’s explains (in Inside the Box), has been at the forefront of studying what, exactly, workers in a knowledge economy do all day:

Early on, this meant that she and her colleagues were shadowing office workers with stopwatches and logging all of their activity.

[…]

The resulting paper was published in 2004, and for its title she borrowed an emblematic quote from one of the subjects: “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness.”

Mark found that the typical office worker switched tasks every three minutes, on average. When her team studied “working spheres”—basically groups of tasks that are connected to the same project—they found that people switched about every twelve minutes and cycled through ten different working spheres per day. Whenever a sphere was interrupted, it took about twenty-five minutes on average to get back to it.

[…]

By 2012, office workers were switching tasks every seventy-five seconds. By 2022, it had stabilized at about every forty-five seconds.

[…]

In simplified form, the shift between tasks actually occurs in two steps: “goal shifting” (switching what you want to do) and then “rule activation” (mentally turning off the rules of one task and on those of another). This takes effort and time, and it is why studies of drivers, in both simulators and the real world, have shown that those having conversations react slowly to hazards, and the impact is the same whether they’re talking on a handheld or hands-free phone.

[…]

Even when people are allowed to switch between tasks at their own discretion, the more they choose to switch, the longer everything takes. As Mark has written: “We find that in real-world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end-of-day assessed productivity.” They also perform worse on important tasks. Multitasking physicians and pilots make more prescribing and in-flight errors, respectively. Famed investor Charlie Munger had it right when he said: “I see these people doing three things at once, and I think, God what a terrible way that is to think.”

[…]

Perhaps the most surprising of Mark’s findings has to do with “self-interruptions.” Self-interruptions are what they sound like: not a phone call or an app notification, but a thought, perhaps about something left undone or what’s happening on social media, that commandeers our attention and leads us to switch goals. Mark found that we are nearly as likely to self-interrupt as we are to be interrupted by some external cue. And here’s the frightening part: We gravitate to a customary level of interruption. If you are disrupted all day, every day by notifications, even if those external triggers magically disappear, you will unconsciously increase your self-interrupting in order to maintain the rhythm of distraction to which you have become accustomed. It is as if we have some sort of internal distraction barometer that, once used to a certain rhythm, will work to maintain it. That is why the mere presence of a smartphone on a desk, or in a pocket—even if it is turned off—has been shown to impair performance on cognitive tests particularly among people who are more phone dependent.

[…]

Background music can have energizing or calming effects that improve performance, but it also has a distracting effect that becomes important when a task is new. Rousing background music has been shown to impair performance among new surgeons learning an unfamiliar task, and a survey of more than two thousand professional software developers found that they tend to turn music off when learning new tools.

Posted in Business, Science | No Comments »

Ukraine understands Russia in ways that Western services never fully can

June 26th, 2026

Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 exposed deep weaknesses inside Ukraine’s security services, including the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU):

In 2015, the CIA helped support the creation of the SBU’s Fifth Directorate, a specialized unit that combined counterintelligence and special operations. According to reporting by The New Yorker, the unit developed networks of agents inside occupied territory, conducted surveillance operations and carried out some of Ukraine’s earliest covert actions against Russian proxy forces.

[…]

Among the officers who emerged from this period was future HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov.

The Times reported in February 2024 that Budanov served in Unit 2245, an elite military intelligence formation that worked closely with the CIA after 2015. The unit specialized in recovering Russian military equipment, communications systems and other material that could be analyzed by both Ukrainian and American intelligence services.

The intelligence gathered from captured Russian equipment provided valuable insight into Moscow’s capabilities while helping deepen cooperation between Ukrainian and American services.

Budanov was later wounded while conducting operations against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine and received rehabilitation at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the United States. He would go on to lead Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.

Officers trained during the years immediately following Crimea now occupy senior leadership positions throughout Ukraine’s intelligence and security services.

[…]

A December New York Times investigation noted that CIA officers and US military planners had assisted Ukraine in refining its campaign against Russia’s energy sector.

Rather than attacking refineries indiscriminately, planners reportedly focused on hard-to-replace components. In one case, a CIA expert identified a critical refinery coupler whose destruction could leave a facility offline for weeks.

The same logic reportedly informed Ukraine’s campaign against Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, the network of aging vessels used to export sanctioned Russian oil around the world.

[…]

Following the public confrontation between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025, Washington temporarily suspended intelligence cooperation with Kyiv, raising concerns about the future of US support.

However, The Times reported that CIA Director John Ratcliffe successfully argued for maintaining the agency’s presence inside Ukraine despite broader political disagreements over military aid. The CIA reportedly retained personnel in the country and expanded funding for several Ukraine-related programs.

The decision reflected a reality often overlooked in discussions about Western assistance: Ukraine also provides value to the United States. As Bogan put it, “Ukraine understands Russia in ways that Western services never fully can.”

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

The result would be a new book about every eighteen months for the next forty-three years

June 25th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinI was only vaguely aware of Isabelle Allende — I knew she was a Spanish-speaking magical realist — when I came across David Epstein’s explanation (in Inside the Box) of her way of working — starting with a bit of backstory:

In 1970, Salvador Allende, the first cousin of Isabel’s father, was elected president of Chile. Three years later, he died during a military coup, and Augusto Pinochet began his long reign. After the coup, Allende’s grandfather warned her to keep a low profile, but she defied his instructions. She kept writing satirical columns for a feminist magazine and hosting a humorous television program until she was fired from everything as independent media withered. After that, she sheltered political fugitives in her house and helped them over the walls of foreign embassies.

In 1974, she began to realize how much danger she was in. Men in a black car stopped her two kids as they walked to school and told them, in vulgar terms, to let their mother know that she had better leave the country. Allende fled to Venezuela.

[…]

Six years later, Allende was still in Venezuela. She was thirty-nine and working a job she hated as a school administrator when she got a phone call informing her that her grandfather was dying. He was the anchor in the country of her childhood. Without him, her exile would feel complete. She could not return to visit, but she wanted him to know that the family stories he had imparted, many of them tinged with magic, would live on with her. He hated the telephone, so she decided to draft a letter. She took out an old Underwood typewriter, sat alone at the kitchen table at night, and began to write. That was January 8, 1981.

I didn’t realize the “Venezuelan” writer was Chilean and closely related to that Allende. The first mention of Salvador Allende on this blog naturally references A. Stafford Beer’s Cybersyn system. Jared Diamond noted, “The coup was welcomed with relief and broad support from centrist and rightist Chileans, much of the middle class, and of course the oligarchs.”

Back to her writing methodology:

What began as a letter to her grandfather turned into a ritual. Every January 8, she would clear her calendar and start a new book, assuming she had finished the previous one. The result would be a new book about every eighteen months for the next forty-three years.

[…]

Allende’s January 8 ritual is a form of what social scientists call a “commitment device”: a self-imposed restriction of freedom in service of a larger goal. There is no obvious reason that she couldn’t start on some other day of the year, but the ritual itself has become a promise that brings her predictably back to her most productive space (and keeps others out of it).

Commitment devices have been shown to help people save more money (when they open accounts with limited withdrawal windows) and exercise more (using voluntary contracts in which participants have to pay if they skip too many days). Behavioral scientist Katy Milkman would classify Allende’s January routine as a “soft” commitment device, because the immediate penalty for failure is psychological, not financial, but those often work too.

Allende’s reward for her rigid ritual is unadulterated focus. As computer scientist and author Cal Newport has noted, writers were, in a sense, the original remote workers, and anyone who studies the great ones will notice that they tend to go out of their way to designate specific space and time for their work. Maya Angelou famously rented hotel rooms and stripped even the bland artwork from the walls so as not to be engaged by anything extraneous. Victor Hugo locked away his own clothes so he wouldn’t be tempted to change and go outside while writing. Marcel Proust lined the bedroom where he worked with cork to dampen outside sound.

Those are extreme examples, but the reason such practices are important is that the kind of sustained focus Allende employs hour after hour, and year after year, is highly unnatural. Our brains evolved to be extremely distractible, to attend to any novel sights and sounds in our vicinity. Unsurprisingly, research has found that people instantly become more creative when distractions are removed. Science writer Annie Murphy Paul, in her book The Extended Mind, explains: “It was only when we found ourselves compelled to concentrate in a sustained way on abstract concepts that we needed to sequester ourselves in order to think. To attend for hours at a time to words, numbers, and other symbolic content is a tall order for our brains.” And we have been struggling.

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Active flow control systems blow precisely directed jets of air over the wing and tail surfaces to reshape the airflow around the aircraft

June 24th, 2026

Aurora Flight Sciences has announced that the triangular wings for its X-65 demonstrator have arrived at its Virginia integration facility:

The X-65 uses a triangular, or delta-derived, planform with modular outboard wing sections that can be reconfigured between test campaigns, allowing engineers to evaluate active flow control performance across multiple sweep angles rather than committing to a single fixed geometry. That modularity is deliberate and goes to the heart of what the program is designed to produce: not just data from one flight configuration, but a flexible platform capable of generating comparative data across multiple aerodynamic setups. The wings are built with embedded effector pathways throughout their surfaces, housing the plumbing and structural provisions needed to deliver pressurized air to the fourteen active flow control effectors that represent the X-65’s core research purpose.

Those fourteen effectors are what makes the X-65 genuinely unlike any aircraft that has flown before at this scale. Active flow control, or AFC, is a concept that aeronautical engineers have studied since the mid-20th century: instead of using physical control surfaces such as ailerons, elevators, and rudders to change an aircraft’s attitude, AFC systems blow precisely directed jets of air over the wing and tail surfaces to reshape the airflow around the aircraft in real time, producing the same pitch, roll, and yaw responses without moving any mechanical components. The concept is elegant and potentially transformative, because control surfaces are among the most mechanically complex, maintenance-intensive, and aerodynamically disruptive features on any aircraft. Removing them eliminates the joints, actuators, and hinge lines that add weight and create drag, and it allows aircraft designers to pursue shapes that simply are not practical when mechanical control surfaces must be accommodated.

X-65 Design Rendering

The stealth dimension of active flow control is one of the reasons the Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA, Naval Air Systems Command, and the Office of Naval Research are all actively monitoring the CRANE program, as Kent confirmed to National Defense Magazine. The outer mold line of an aircraft, meaning the precise shape of its external surfaces, directly determines its radar cross-section, and current stealth designs must accommodate the joints and hinge lines of conventional control surfaces in ways that create radar-reflecting discontinuities. An aircraft that can achieve full maneuverability with smooth, unbroken surfaces throughout its flight envelope could achieve a lower radar signature than any conventionally controlled aircraft of similar size. That potential application to future stealth combat aircraft gives CRANE a strategic relevance that extends well beyond its immediate research objectives.

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Stop starting and start finishing

June 23rd, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinThe idea that growth can come from a focus on limits, rather than limitless expansion, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), is at the core of a simple but profound idea:

In the 1970s, Israeli physicist Eli Goldratt was working on algorithms to predict the behavior of atoms in heated crystals, when a friend asked for help with a comparatively quotidian problem: constructing chicken coops.

[…]

Goldratt realized that shifting a lone extra worker from a non-bottleneck over to the bottleneck could multiply the total output of the business. He crafted a new schedule that actually called for some workers at non-bottleneck steps to work less. If they worked at full capacity, they just produced more parts that piled up wastefully before the bottleneck. Without changing the workforce, the new schedule tripled chicken-coop output. This was the beginning of what Goldratt would call the “theory of constraints,” or TOC: the notion that a single bottleneck determines the fate of a system.

[…]

In 2011, Time magazine named [The Goal] one of the twenty-five most influential business books, alongside genre classics like Dale Carnegie’s 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People. In 2013, Jeff Bezos hosted an all-day book club on The Goal with Amazon executives.

[…]

But for managers judged only by the efficiency of their particular stage in production, there was little incentive to change. Goldratt had a saying: “The sum of local optimums is not equal to the optimum of the whole.” He saw that separate parts of an organization had their own incentive structures, all set up to optimize production in their silo—like Boy Scouts running ahead of Herbie—even when it was wasteful for the whole.

Long-time readers might know that I’ve discussed the Theory of Constraints plenty here, just not recently. Kevin Fox‘s Blue Light anecdote is an excellent soft introduction to the key concept. I discuss a more detailed example from The Haystack Syndrome in another post, if you’re interested in a bit of a puzzle, with numbers.

Epstein offers a few unconventional examples that don’t quite match Goldratt’s concept, including this one:

In one theory-of-constraints case study I encountered, a factory that made custom gearboxes for industry had a severe bottleneck, not on the factory floor, but in the fifteen-person design office where the gearbox plans were conceived. The designers had so many projects in progress that their workday was ravaged by multitasking. These were intricate endeavors, and the designers were switching focus more than fifty times a day. It led to errors, and then to quitting. Ultimately, the design team implemented a rule: “Stop starting and start finishing.” Orders kept coming in, but the design office was forbidden from working on any new order until one already in progress was finished. Multitasking plummeted, and a few months later the office was getting three times as many designs out the door.

This is more an example of Goldratt’s concept of the Critical Chain, or classic project management.

Posted in Business, Theory of Constraints | 2 Comments »

It’s not just because Americans wanted more space

June 22nd, 2026

Why are suburban yards so big?, Stewart Hicks asks:

It’s not just because Americans wanted more space, systems underground required it.

After World War II, developers began building suburbs at a scale and speed the country had never seen before. But instead of connecting every new house to municipal sewer systems, many developments relied on rural technologies: private wells, septic tanks, and drain fields. That decision helped shape the familiar postwar suburb with curving streets, the square-ish lots and wide lawns.

In this video, I look at how septic systems influenced the physical layout of American suburbia, from Levittown to FHA mortgage standards, and why the rules meant to keep drinking water separate from sewage helped produce the half-acre lot as a suburban ideal. I also look at what went wrong: collapsed drain pipes, overloaded systems, contaminated aquifers, expensive sewer retrofits, and even neighborhoods where septic saturation helped destabilize the ground itself.

Posted in Urbanism | No Comments »

Elements of public spaces that accommodated the very young, the very old, and people with disabilities led everyone to use a space more

June 21st, 2026

Inside the Box by David Epstein When the pioneering urban sociologist William Whyte studied the movement of pedestrians in cities, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he found that elements of public spaces that accommodated the very young, the very old, and people with disabilities led everyone to use a space more:

Through the 1970s and ’80s, Whyte persuaded New York City officials to alter public spaces to include ramps, flexible seating, shaded areas, numerous entrances, clear sight lines, and to be no more than a few feet above or below street level. “There must be access for the disabled,” he said. “In effect, better access for everyone.” His guidelines rejuvenated spaces like Manhattan’s Bryant Park, which transformed from an invisible-from-the-street haven for drug dealing into one of the busiest public spaces in the world, integrated with the surrounding streets in a seamless river of urban life.

I’ve mentioned Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces before. The video is worth watching:

Posted in Urbanism | 6 Comments »

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