The Lindy Effect of public Internet Information and Object Permanence

The Lindy effect aka "Lindy's law" is the theory that the momentary future life expectancy of an idea or technology (object) is a Pareto probability distribution proportional to the current age of the object. So the longer something has existed, the longer its remaining life expectancy.  This idea also applies to some species of life, but subpopulations of animals frequently follow lognormal distributions instead of Pareto.

The short and shrinking lifetime of trending ideas and technology is nowhere more evident than Internet blogs, web sites, AI companies, and memes.  I discovered that jwz published a pair of scripts to make your URLs a little more permanent.  One rewrite URLs to use archive.org and the other crawls your wordpress blog to rewrite all links to point at archive.org.  

archive.org is the prime target for takedowns; in fact, the Lindy's Law link above was taken down!  Luckily, other preservation sites are filling the gap for wayback machine functionality. There are many web sites like archive.ph, stillio, perma.cc, mementoweb, and archivebox that can fill the gaps, but the longevity of these archive sites is also questionable.

First they came for the Copy Editors. . .

Apologies for abusing the famous Holocaust poem in the title, I noticed today that the genAI bubble is making enormous progress at replacing developers.  I, personally, enjoy chatting with AI chatbots to accomplish many tasks and I am collecting my own personal sets of prompts and meta-prompts.  However, I cannot imagine what it would be like for a non-coder to use a genAI to write code because I already can code.  I suppose it would be akin to my using a genAI to compose and sell Hindi poetry and Hindi songs.  I speak no Hindi, have no sensibility for Hindi audiences' taste in music or how to earn money in a Hindi-speaking music market, etc.  The phenomenon is also like the Chinese Room thought experiment.

Side note on the title of this post

Niemöller famously and poetically articulated the wave of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi) popular Zeitgeist ideology that swept across the population of Germany and led to death camps, extermination of people, etc.. Although there are many variations of the poem, the most common written version in Holocaust museums is:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

However, Niemöller likely used the word "Communists" in the original oration.

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2024)

I almost always enjoy Gladwell's stories and books.  This one is fantastic and highly recommended. 5/5 Stars.

Reentry by Eric Berger (2024)

I read Eric's articles and weekly column in Ars Technica. So I had low expectations that much new material would be in his book.  I was therefore thrilled that everything in the book was never published before.  The details of the people and events at SpaceX (not Elon), at Nasa, Spaceforce, and US regulatory bureaucracies are exciting and enlightening.  There are many deep biographical sketches of the real heroes behind the company and their successes. The book is gripping, well-written, extremely interesting for any space nerd, and highly recommended. 5/5 Stars.

Screens are *still* worse than Paper for reading retention

My first published academic paper in 1987 explained an elegant experiment I ran using SAT test questions that measure retention to discover if humans retain and understand information better by reading on paper or reading from screens.  Of course the overwhelming measurements and evidence indicate that reading from paper is much better than screens.  Recently, Amy Tyson published an in-depth study about the use of books and paper versus devices (phones, tablets, computers) in classrooms and looking at test scores.  She validated my measurements in school settings.  If you have a kid in school, get them to use books and printed materials.

Starship flight 5

I am very grateful to live in a time when we have exceeded the wildest imaginative concepts of science fiction to catch the biggest rocket ship ever built with chopsticks. I have not been this excited about watching space flights since watching (live) as Neil Armstrong descended the lunar lander. Go watch the 4K videos.

The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil (2023)

I loved this sequel to the 2005 obook.  Kurzweil has fun, zany ideas that are very entertaining and sometimes compelling. 5/5 Stars.

There's a story about that

David has finally put his money where his mouth is. Well, actually, he put his time and effort where his writer's pen is.  The TASAT (there's a story about that) organization is now up and running and is associated with the Arthur C Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.  I joined, of course.  It sounds like fun!

Fission-powered rockets will fly!

Remember my rant about how 1950's technology is the cat's pajamas and still unsurpassed? We are finally starting serious steps to fly fission-powered rockets and I may live long enough to see magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters with a specific impulse of 10,000 seconds.

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies that'll improve or ruin everything by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith (2017)

Fun romp through emerging revolutionary technologies by the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoonist and lawyer wife pair. Lots of funny anecdotes.  Like most popular science, the predictions in the book were overtaken by events since it was published, so it's not nearly as good as it was in 2016.  3/5 Stars.

A City on Mars by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith (2023)

This book is well-researched and comprehensive. My personal experience with International Law is that there basically are no rules. Nation State leaders do whatever they want.  Therefore, I don't completely buy into the detailed analysis of the policies and laws of nation state actors in space. I do agree with the game theoretic analysis, including the "company towns" analogies.  The data and tech are very interesting.  And, of course, the snarky prose is wonderful. 4/5 Stars.

Interstellar by Avi Loeb (2023)

Professor Loeb is a great astronomer, scientist, and organizer.  He has some interesting philosophical ideas and fun speculations about society and the nature of existence. This book sometimes drifts into odd rants unrelated to his speculations but his reformulations of the Drake equation and sci-fi ideas are fun.  3/5 Stars.

Die Heilung der Welt von Ronald Gerste (2021)

Jemand schlug mir vor, „Wie Krankheiten Geschichte machen" zu lesen. Als ich nach diesem Titel suchte, fand ich in der Bibliothek dieses Buch desselben Autors. Es ist interessant und gut geschrieben. Wie Wladimir Lenin zum Thema politische Geschichte sagte: „Es gibt Jahrzehnte, in denen nichts passiert; und es gibt Wochen, in denen Jahrzehnte passieren." Das gilt auch für die Geschichte der Medizin. Es gab Jahrhunderte, in denen keine Welt verändernde Entdeckungen oder Technologien entdeckt oder angewendet wurden, und es gab Jahrzehnte, die die Gesundheit und das Wohlergehen der Menschen mehrfach völlig veränderten. In diesem Buch geht es um die medizinischen Revolutionen, die die moderne Welt von 1840 bis 1870 prägten, es enthält jedoch eine kürzere Berichterstattung über die Ursprünge der medizinischen Wissenschaft in den 1790er Jahren und die Ergebnisse bis in die 1920er Jahre. Das Buch ist manchmal etwas zu explizit und ekelerregend, aber insgesamt lohnt es sich. 4/5 Sterne.

Code Breaker buy Walter Isaacson

I think Brian Keating's Losing the Nobel Prize is slightly better. But this Jennifer Doudna story is pretty good.  I finished reading the book a few days before the patent office's final ruling on whose patent takes precedence for applications of CRISPR Cas9 for human gene editing (Doudna lost).  And I had no idea about the Biohackers who are editing their own genes.  The competition and races for her discoveries are fun, but the entire second half of the book, examining bio ethics, is a little boring.  It's still entertaining and fun, 5/5 Stars.

shade California's aqueducts with solar power

According to this interesting pilot and proposal, the drought-stricken state could save 63 billion gallons of water from evaporation by adding some shade.  So why not generate 13 Gigawatts of power at the same time?  It's a win-win-win and a great step towards renewable energy.

Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating

I saw Dr. Keating's Lex interview and decided to get the book.  The book is gripping and fantastic.  Dr. Keating is a great "popular science" author, bringing the difficult and complex topics of physics and cosmology accurately and simply into layman's terms. The drama and analysis of the Nobel Prize and the new privately funded larger collaborations opposed to the insane competition in science are very-well presented.  5/5 Stars, very highly recommended.

Rationality by Steven Pinker

Great book. Dense, hard-hitting, actionable. 5/5 Stars.

Science Fictions: How fraud, bias, negligence, hype undermine the search for truth by Stuart Ritchie

This book is the best non-fiction  book I have read in 2022 (so far). The suggestions and concepts to repair the economics, expectations, incentives, and ecosystems of our severely flawed institutions in science are brilliant.  Highly recommended, 5/5 Stars.

Flight Proven

This stuff never gets old.

But this part continues to be amazing

A Thousand Brains: A new theory of intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

I think this book was on Bill Gates' annual "best books I read list" of 2021.  The author is proposing a much-different and enormously rich, dense mechanism for how our neocortex is self-aware and intelligent.  It's a great theory and does fit most of the phenomena observed in neuroscience. When Hawkins wanders into ethics and philosophy, his writing is not as strong.  4/5 Stars.  I bought the hard back as a gift for someone special.