As recently discussed on The Carbon Copy with Brian Janous, utilities are seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades, and almost entirely from data centers. These data centers are running the internet, serving videos, hosting blogs … Continue reading How to Feed the AIs

How much ancient text might we recover from the library in the Villa of Papyri in Herculaneum? How much was there to begin with? We know it was a huge luxurious villa filled with exquisite art works. Before the printing press, books were one of the highest value items one could own, especially on a per-volume or per-weight basis. We know that the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus lived and worked in the villa, probably to confer further prestige on the site. If you were a rich Roman keen to flaunt your taste and patronage of the arts, your library must be … Continue reading How many scrolls await discovery?

One from the archives, from an old (and not yet concluded) project to search for the origins of my name. What is this graph and what does it mean? It’s a kind of family tree, but the full explanation is below! Most genealogy is personal and pretty boring so I’ll skip that stuff. Instead, I’ll write here about statistics, which is comparatively interesting. My surname, Handmer, is rare enough that everyone who has it (about 20-30 living people) can have a unique URL. Previous family history efforts (before my time) sought some connection with the slightly more common name “Hanmer” … Continue reading Genealogy Ancestor Search Using Math

Originally posted on the Terraform blog. At Terraform Industries, we’re making cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. Among the list of the Terraformer‘s familiar attributes we include: In addition to these, it is generally underappreciated that Terraform’s synthetic … Continue reading Terraformer Environmental Calculus

Mars Helicopter will fly no more. But there is work to be done and Mars helicopters to do it! We should build dozens and then hundreds as serialized standard spacecraft buses and run a global competition for the best instruments to fly attached to this bus. A fleet of helicopters sent as a continuous campaign every launch window is the best way to get on-the-ground data, over any kind of terrain, that is vital to the search for life and to the next, crewed, phase of Mars exploration. Why are we going to Mars? Of all the ~5570 known planets … Continue reading Mars Helicopter 2.0

Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agriculture on Earth, and the Salton Sea. Together with Los Angeles, this area uses over five million acre-feet (MAF) of water from the Colorado River every year, a river whose flow continues to trend downward due to the changing climate. For many years, California’s approach to the problem has been to seek comfort from its senior water rights and its outsized power compared to neighboring states, while telling stories of managed decline and fallowing farms in both … Continue reading A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest and the revitalization of the Salton Sea

Elon Musk is a divisive character. My intent here, as always, is to add some nuance and signal to a noisy, complex and/or obscure subject. Whatever your views on Elon, I feel that it is a worthy goal to move the conversation towards more meaningful engagement, hopefully without painting too large a target on my back. The problem is that 99% of the critique out there is not well-intentioned and it’s not accurate, which means that most people simply lack the context they need to understand what Elon is doing and why. This is a problem, because Elon is a … Continue reading Elon Musk is not understood