This is 9 months ahead of schedule. That is unheard of for a billion-dollar-plus mission. NASA deserves a lot of credit for this. It’s an example of what is possible when an agency is firing on all cylinders.

Hidden just underneath those clouds is the Grand Coulee Dam. Back in the 1930s when civil engineers who speak English still knew how to dream, they spammed as many GW scale dams across the country as they could manage. The Grand Coulee and Hoover Dams were the ultimate manifestation of this. Gigawatts of generation built during the Great Depression to spur the growth that was required for us to build our way out of the Great Depression. In the 70s, they further increased the Grand Coulee’s generating capacity to 7 GW, primarily to attract aluminum refineries to the region and to brace for the ever present Henry Adam’s curve. Then we dropped off the Henry Adam’s curve and Aluminum refining went overseas. Gone are the days of Kaiser building dams and the aluminum refineries to use their power, beautiful vertical buildout. Furthermore, unfortunately the civil engineers and managers forgot how to build great things quickly and only ~20% of the water in the Pacific Northwest is put through dams. We could well do with 5x as many dams! Though not all hope is lost! There’s far too much dirt in that image going completely unused and sooner rather than later we’ll tile it all with solar arrays and build many more majestic things. If only, like the engineers of years past, we remember that you can just build thins.

Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.

This week, @ActinideInc became the first startup in history to enrich uranium, producing HALEU, the fuel for next-gen and small modular reactors. We did it using Endurance, a particle accelerator that we designed and built in Texas. Endurance usually produces enriched Yb-176, a precursor for cancer therapies worth roughly $30,000 per gram. After a bulk Yb-176 delivery on July 30, we reconfigured Endurance for uranium.

It's because building anything at all is illegal. We have multiple canal systems built nearly a century ago that leak or can't run anywhere near capacity, because fixing them would (normatively) take two guys and a bulldozer but (descriptively) consume 10 years and billions of dollars of payoffs to a 100-turtle-deep layer of the usual suspects. We could easily desalinate another 10 million acre feet of water per year, but ... building anything at all is illegal.

On Sunday, China is sending a hopper into Shackleton Crater at the Lunar South Pole to look for ice. The West does not have this capability. The right time to be building hoppers was yesterday. We're building it @insitu_space

There's a subset of women who have four cones (instead of three) in their eyes, enabling them to distinguish between colors that nobody else can. Most of these women probably have no idea that their vision is unique. For context: The human retina (usually) has three cone receptors that, roughly, are tuned to sense short, medium, or long wavelengths. The brain "sees" an image by comparing how activated these three sensors are. It is the ratio of activation that determines the color we see. Hence, if you were to look at a pure orange light, and then look at a light made by mixing red and green lights, the two would look identical to your brain even though they are made in different ways. This partly explains, for example, why our phone screens only need three kinds of pixels (red, green, blue) to convince the brain that it is seeing every possible color. Now, the genes for the medium- and long-wavelength cones sit right next to each other on the X chromosome. Sometimes, when eggs or sperm are made, they can "swap over" each other and make a hybrid gene that is tuned to detect light *between* those two wavelengths. A man who inherits a hybrid gene on his X chromosome is called an "anomalous trichromat," and will generally have trouble telling apart reds and greens. But his mother, carrying an ordinary gene on one X chromosome and a hybrid gene on the other X chromosome, is different! Early in development, cells in the retina randomly silence one of the X chromosomes, and its descendant cells then inherit that selection. Since there are millions of these cells in the retina, each of those cells will express the gene on either this X chromosome or that X chromosome. This means that, in these rare women, their retina will actually contain *four* types of cones rather than three. In 2010, researchers tested the vision of women who have sons with red-green colorblindness, and soon found a woman -- who they called cDa29 -- that seemed to possess four cone cells. They tested her child with an anomaloscope, an instrument that projects a small circle split across the middle. One half is lit by a single pure orange wavelength, and the other is lit by a mixture of red and green light. A knob is used to control the ratio between the colors, and the participant is asked to turn this knob until the two halves look exactly identical. The son was red-green colorblind. Then they showed the mother color pairs that look identical to most of us, but look different to a person with a fourth cone. She could quickly spot color differences that nobody else could. cDa29 was later sequenced, and researchers found that she had normal cones for long-, medium- and short wavelengths, but also a hybrid gene made by merging the first four exons from the middle-wave cone, and the last two exons from the long-wave cone. She can see (and distinguish colors) between these two wavelengths. Article snippet from a recent New Yorker article where I first heard about this.

UC Berkeley Professor Zvezdelina Stankova reveals the semester she first watched a third of her calculus class collapse, having to lower grade cutoffs and redesign her syllabus on the fly "In spring 2023, I'm teaching calculus two, second semester calculus at Berkeley." "I had something between 12 and 1400 students in two classes." "And for the first time, I noticed that about a third of them were disengaged with the class after week two." "They would not come to lecture. There would be a missed quiz here, not submitted homework there. The first midterm was a disaster. I never seen anything like this before." "And don't get me wrong, we have still fantastic students at the higher end. But the lower end was so far behind, so many standard deviations behind their classmates." "So I on the fly had to redesign the syllabus to make it easier, more accessible. I introduced bonus points. I introduced polls in class just for participation. Come and answer these multiple questions on your phone and we will give you some credit." "And even then, this bottom third did not come to class. I had to revise my grade cutoffs, I lowered them down in order to help students pass the class. And belatedly now, in retrospect, I find that this was a wrong decision."