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It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.

But our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same. It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.

Ordinary Abundance celebrates everyday miracles.

Maybe GDP per capita just has to hit a certain point before people even have time, attention and energy to think about new inventions that aren’t literally putting food on the table, a roof over your head, or a shirt on your back.

Jason Crawford asks why it took so long to invent the bicycle.

Far too many diseases are still untreatable. It’s painful to imagine gradually forgetting your children’s names, forgetting how to hold a conversation, how to recognize your own home, and eventually even how to swallow food, while your family watches someone they love disappear. But that’s the reality for over thirty million people with Alzheimer’s globally, and we have almost nothing to offer them. Part of the reason may be because the brain is so complex, or because it’s lined by the blood-brain barrier, a tightly sealed layer of cells which keeps out most pathogens and toxins, as well as most drugs. That makes it challenging to design a drug that can cross the barrier, reach the right cells, and do what it’s meant to do without any unexpected side effects.

A gorgeous WIP article on medical innovation. A good reminder that intelligence is rarely the bottleneck to progress.

To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here?

In fact, this paradox is the solution. I believe that open weight models are good for innovation (and, per the above, I think that labs on the frontier will be fine), but it’s a problem to be dependent on China. The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else.

Stratechery on Chinese AI models. Good points all around on R&D costs versus COGs, distillation and open source in general.

NYC has been using aerial photography for over 100 years to catalog and measure the city. Thanks to some superb data preservation, you can explore some amazing aerial photography data going back to 1924.

BPD covers NYC's building footprints dataset updated weekly and covering 1M+ structures. Garages make up about a fifth of NYC buildings.

The cost of DNA sequencing has fallen faster than Moore's Law. Since 2001, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has tracked costs at its funded sequencing centers — from $95 million per genome in 2001 to around $500 today.

Genome sequencing costs fell 190,000-fold since 2001. Data here stops at 2023 and I can't seem to find reliable sources since then.

As a new parent, my mind immediately went to movie-viewing volume. With a four-month-old, I am not exactly plugged into movie culture—or really any culture unrelated to said four-month-old. So I wanted to know whether this “parent tax” is universal: Do we watch fewer films as our responsibilities grow?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. In the MovieLens dataset, average rating volume peaks among users ages 25 to 34, then declines with each passing decade.

MovieLens data shows movie taste shifts with age, driven by nostalgia bias via Don't Worry About the Vase

Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.

The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News

“My strip,” Watterson once said, “is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships.” Well, ditto for my relationship with the boy Calvin and his tiger Hobbes. Those adventures of a weirdo from another planet and his homicidal psycho jungle cat, their magical world in which the days are just packed with deranged mutant killer monster snow goons, that place where scientific progress goes “boink” and there’s treasure everywhere — they belong to their readers.

Matthew Morgan's gorgeous essay on Bill Watterson's fight for control over Calvin and Hobbes and his principles. I just learned about Nevin Martell's book "Looking for Calvin and Hobbes" and will be reading it soon.

A dictionary asks: what is this color called? A pigment compendium asks: what is it made of? This catalogue asks both, and also: who paid for it, in money or in poison? Who painted with it before they knew what it was doing to them? When was it banned, and which sweeter substitute replaced it on the shelf?

Storied Colors - history and context for named colors.

Words of Type brings together the terms used in typography, illustrated and explained in multiple languages.

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This is the first version of the encyclopedia. It includes 200 terms covering multiple categories, such as type design anatomy, digital and analog typography, historical, technological and conceptual terms, as well as terms specific to certain scripts.

The fantastic, illustrated Words of Type encyclopedia,

Mesh networking over the airwaves presents a very unique opportunity for our societies. We could build a resilient, peer-to-peer network that coexists with the internet, enabling connectivity in currently underserved regions and increasing our personal sovereignty online by maintaining a functional backup to the internet for our most critical needs.

It's also just a freeing feeling to be able to send a message to someone else relying only on devices that you and people in your network own outright, instead of renting the capability to do so from your local ISP or Elon Musk's Starlink.

Jonah is getting into mesh networks... so am I!