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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!

One is that, given that the attractiveness of owning vs. renting can vary depending on the person and the state of the housing market, making a broader array of rental options available for people is a positive thing. I remember years ago when I was trying to find a large (3+ bedroom) place to rent, and how difficult it was to find rentals that size in the area I was looking in. Giving people more ways to purchase housing is good, the same way it’s good for people to have the option to buy or lease a new car.

Second, it’s clear that many folks strongly believe that large-scale corporate ownership of rental housing (which would include BTR communities) is something that can have negative effects on the housing market. But I think it’s more useful to think of the popularity of rental housing as something that’s a product of the housing market: it’s a natural consequence of housing getting increasingly unaffordable thanks to high interest rates and skyrocketing housing prices. Shutting down BTR is a poor way to address that problem; what we need to do is build more housing and develop construction methods that let us construct buildings more cheaply.

A fantastic writeup by Construction Physics on the birth of build-to-rent housing, it's growth, and current controversy.

“To choose Inuit wayfinding,” the ethnographers conclude, “becomes increasingly heroic in the face of wayfinding that depends on an advanced technological system.”

It may be a losing battle to demand that basic acts of competence require heroism. But I still think it’s worth noticing what assumptions that Silicon Valley steam engine metaphor is trying to force us to accept.

Tim Requarth's essay on AI as steam engine, instead of a bicycle.

Andes virus is simply not that contagious and infection comes nearly entirely from those who are symptomatic.I built a probabilistic model decomposing this question into exposure pools — the widow’s KLM boarding, the Airlink flight from St Helena, the JNB hospital, household contacts of disembarked passengers — applying Andes-specific transmission and incubation parameters, then conditioning on the observation that zero non-passenger cases have surfaced as of today. Running this, I get a 4% chance that there will be more than 5 cases from people outside those on the Hondius cruise, with a 70% chance of at least one non-passenger case by August, and about a 17% chance of three or more.

Peter Wildeford's analysis on hantavirus - and why we don't need to worry about a COVID style pandemic.

The question this brings to my mind is: why is this a story at all? This is nothing more than the moderately unhinged opinion of a guy whose company owns a lot of real estate. Why is it in the newspaper? The answer is that there’s an entire genre of media coverage best described as “rich guy has an opinion.” It’s surprisingly common, and once you notice it you’ll see it everywhere: entire news stories dedicated to the otherwise unremarkable opinion of a rich person, or news stories that fold the opinions of rich people into their otherwise neutral coverage. It’s taken for granted in many newsrooms that a person’s wealth imbues their opinions with newsworthiness.

On "Rich Guy Quote Journalism"  - see also: Nobel Disease.

My view of AI use (especially cheating) in Go originally manifested as disgust for its practitioners. I switched eventually to an attitude of compassion and pragmatism towards a habit that was clearly much more vulgar and weak than it was evil. Over time, I have progressed to feeling deep sadness for a group that surrenders much of what it claims to value. The thing I want to impress with this article is the consistency with which we as a species underestimate our own willingness to give up our culture, economy and autonomy to AI, even without monetary incentives. For this to happen, AI does not even need to be superhuman. Indeed, Go AI automates human players’ role in culture as shallow simulacra. All an AI needs to do is be passably good at a task and that may well be enough for people to volunteer their own replacement.

LessWrong post on how Go players limit themselves when utilizing AI for post-game review. Compare to a previous paper in 2023.