links 1/10/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-10-2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Romania
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_culture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Gheorghiu-Dej
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_rural_systematization_program
claims that the Securitate continued to exist de facto, even after the revolution that ended the Ceausescu dictatorship.
“This influence distorts democracy, says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a Romanian civic activist and a leading scholar on corruption. “There’s long been ample evidence of a ‘deep state’ in Romania with roots in the former security services,” she maintains.”
“The Securitate was declared defunct and, with no admission of previous crimes – including those committed in the revolution – or internal vetting, was chopped into nine separate services that corresponded to the Securitate’s organizational substructure. The new services were staffed and directed by virtually the same people as the old Securitate.”
“During the 1990s, the Securitate’s successors, the domestic SRI, the Foreign Intelligence Service, SIE, and others, exploited their wide-ranging resources and security monopoly to become oligarchs and form cartels in the post-Communist economy. So vast was their intelligence that they could blackmail compromised politicians, media professionals and judges. In post-communist Romania, just about everyone had something to hide.”
what went wrong at Zymergen?
https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2024/33-11303.pdf
they failed to manufacture their first product to customers’ specifications, lost the orders, overstated the market for it (which the SEC sued them for), and admitted they had no revenue & would not be profitable for the foreseeable future shortly after their IPO.
ultimately the issue may be that they specialized in only one piece of the manufacturing process, strain optimization. they outsourced downstream processing and manufacturing scale-up to third party contractors, and those are often places where hiccups arise for new biomanufactured products.
“not enough controlled burns” and “climate change” are the causes of forest fires.
what’s going on in LA right now is a chaparral fire. controlled burns aren’t appropriate for chaparral. these are “wind-driven” fires spread by the Santa Ana winds, which are unusually strong this year, but the wind severity isn’t driven by climate change.
the human-preventable cause of these fires isn’t climate change or Smokey the Bear, but too many human-caused fires, in particular due to power lines, since PG&E has not adequately maintained the lines in California as population has risen and the power grid has grown.
https://www.npr.org/2006/12/15/6630791/name-calling-in-michael-crichtons-next amusing story about Michael Crichton putting an unflattering portrait of a journalist who criticized him in his (fiction) book.
https://topos.institute/work/ Topos Institute builds collaborative modeling tools based on category theory, useful for formalizing mathematics, system dynamics, epidemiology, etc.
try their tool CatColab here: https://catcolab.org/analysis/f79f1894-601f-49cf-9da1-00a2ebcc0792
textbook about these concepts: http://davidjaz.com/Papers/DynamicalBook.pdf
https://github.com/PatrickMassot/leanblueprint the Blueprint library allows you to visualize the dependency graph of a proof in Lean
links 1/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-13-2025
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-skyscrapers-became-glass-boxes
plain glass box skyscrapers were, in fact, more cost-effective for developers. it’s not all about architectural tastes. architects in real life are very far from all-powerful.
in fact, I really think people should stop writing books/movies/etc about auteur architects; it only encourages more young people to go into architecture and become unemployed. I’m looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola
https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-typical-man-disgusts-the-typical
pointing in the right direction, but overstated/inflammatory. women don’t go around being “disgusted” by every man they interact with socially.
rather, most women find the idea of having sex with a randomly selected unfamiliar man disgusting, even if there’s nothing particularly the matter with him. typical straight women are cautious/selective about sex and fairly slow to warm up sexually to new people. not much “lust at first sight.”
but yeah, getting rejected when you ask women out does not in fact mean you are inadequate or unattractive! getting rejections in dating is normal, just like every author gets rejected manuscripts and every job applicant gets rejected from jobs. the average man gets a lot of “no”s and at least one “yes”, and eventually marries a “yes.”
also i share Bryan Caplan’s view that women shouldn’t be offended by being asked out by someone they aren’t interested in. sure, persistent harassment can be a problem, but a simple question isn’t.
https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/principles Nabeel Qureshi
I agree with most of this, but “you don’t need much sleep” is very individual. some of us very much need plenty of sleep and our lives improve dramatically when we face that fact.
things I googled while reading about Venice
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festa_della_Sensa
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_II_Orseolo
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manzikert
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Innocent_III