Some overflow from the past couple of weeks of nerding out on war.
Most of the links this time are about tech and science.
As always, all links on this newsletter can be found here.
History, Culture, and Religion
Back in 1926 (about 20 years before he was shot and killed) an Irish woman named named Violet Gibson, the daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, attempted to assassinate Mussolini, was caught, arrested and deported.
This article covers how the world reacted to it - which is shocking in itself. They've made a movie around Ms. Gibson who sadly had to spend the rest of her life in a psychiatric for probably being among the few sane people around at the time.
A lovely voiced over video by the channel - Drachinifel.
A slightly morbid, but, funny overview of the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron in 1904. I highly recommend just listening to it when you have time, incredible case of mistaken identity of sorts.
Tech, Science, and Math
Article from 2012 about physicist Larry Smarr who chose to quantify and measure every bodily function that he has. Sounds alright to us now when fitness trackers are popular, but, a man slightly ahead of his time with an aim to better understand how the body works and impact healthcare.
mRNA vaccines and the cure for cancer
A fascinating Q&A with the co-founders of BioNTech which goes into how the Pfizer vaccine was developed, approved and the potential future uses of the tech behind it.
A paper by @balajis on how to evaluate an idea to take from there to an actual business. Something I plan to put into practice. Would recommend saving the pdf if interested since I don't know who owns this copy of the pdf.
As someone trying to get back into math slowly, I found this super useful, just an mindmap of how concepts in math relate to each other and an overview of each concept, not too detailed, but, just detailed enough to make sure i'm not overwhelmed.
Found this hiding in my bookmarks and re-read it. This is an article written by Neal Stephenson in 1996 about how the internet was created and connected by the laying down of wires in deep seas.
Its incredibly detailed and took me around 2 hours to read fully. Also prompted me to pick up one of his books.
The Web's Missing Interoperability
I was discussing the meme of how most of our time spent online is on essentially one of 4 websites (this newsletter is an attempt to hedge against that) and came across this recent article by Ben Thompson of Stratechery (an excellent blog in general) which goes into why none of these websites really work with each other which was the general promise of Web 2.0
Everything else
A friend sent me this critique of the book Why We Sleep while they defended my sleeping habits. I found it warmly reassuring and quite informative. I can't even judge a book by its contents anymore apparently.
You can't derive ought from is
I discovered a bunch of science blogs earlier this year and this one is from Sean Carroll who is a public intellectual and one of the foremost theoretical physicists out there.
The topic is in the title, very interesting to read late at night when you have run out of things to do and just need a way to think about things beyond your daily life.
Thank you for reading
Do subscribe if interested and do reply with interesting stuff
Sainath