Nuclear Fungus, New Sincerity, and the Universe Heat Death

1st of January 2025

Hello,

Happy New Year!

Here's what I have published on the blog: 

• Summary of The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier

---

Here's the cool stuff I have learned:

• China began planting trees in 1978 to slow down the spread of the Gobi desert. This Great Green Wall will be completed by 2050 and will be 4,800 kilometers long (3000 miles).

• Certain fungi feed off gamma radiation, challenging our understanding of the impact of one on the other.

• The DNA sugar deoxyribose seems to be particularly effective at regrowing hair.

• A model from OpenAI tried to escape its sandbox when it was told it would be disconnected. Then it lied about trying to escape.

• Robert Conquest was a British-American historian and novelist known for his Laws of Politics. Here are two of them below:

  • Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

  • The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

• Peter Beck is a Kiwi entrepreneur, founder of Rocket Lab, a rocket company. He never attended university.

• You can now launch your own mobile carrier with gigs.com.

• How Databricks became a $62 billion business.

• Musk’s satellite Internet service Starlink is prohibited in Iran. The black market for satellite dishes is striving.

• LG made a transparent television.

• How two brothers became billionaires by building a cheap toy empire.

• Panspermia is the concept that life exists throughout the universe and was distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, or more original means.

• The heat death of the universe is a theory speculating that at some point in time, there won’t be any energy left in the universe. The stars will be dead, the black holes will have disappeared, and the universe will have reached thermodynamic equilibrium. This shows how the universe evolves through time and has not “always” existed.

• Only 15% of time played on Steam was spent playing games that came out in 2024.

• New sincerity is the new intellectual movement breaking away from post-modernism.

• A great article on Gen Z’s dating world.

• Americans are not sharing their friends.

• People overestimate their own IQ by 30 points and their partners’ IQ by 37 points.

• The more you put on muscle, the more your risk of depression decreases.

Iraq wants to create a transportation hub across the country for economic development purposes.

Don’t start an alcohol business. Source.

Take care.

Aure :)