Henry Valk retweetledi
coming out of twitter retirement because after three (3) years of @tamarawinter and I courting each other I finally work at @stripepress
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Henry Valk
56 posts
Henry Valk
@HLValk
Digitizing the sense of smell @Osmo_Labs
New York City Katılım Ocak 2022
551 Takip Edilen63 Takipçiler
@isaiah_p_taylor Seeing aluminum processing plants in Iceland blew my mind. Cheaper to ship bauxite-derived alumina from Australia to Iceland for smelting, then ship to China for downstream fab. All bc of their cheap geothermal
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China makes 99% of the world’s gallium because they make most of the world’s aluminum, and gallium is a byproduct of making aluminum from bauxite.
This is a process that we invented in the United States, but it requires very cheap energy.
Valar Atomics is working to fix this.
Steve Milloy@JunkScience
New F-35s lack most advanced radar because Communist China makes 99% (and the US zero percent) of the world's gallium. Planes will instead contain deadweight in nosecones. "Over 11,000 components in the Pentagon’s defense systems require gallium. With nearly 85 percent of those supply chains depending on a Chinese supplier, the defense industry is at risk." wapo.st/4cykGL7
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Almanya’daki Sprengel Müzesi’nde sergilenen sıra dışı bir kinetik enstalasyon:
Havada sallanan bir şamandıra, Atlantik Okyanusu’ndaki gerçek ikiziyle eşzamanlı hareket ediyor ve dalgalar üzerindeki salınımını birebir taklit ediyor.
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Works in Progress 23 — Title page art (ASML) is revealed when negative space on the translucent page is filled in by the previous page. Delightful! @s8mb @WorksInProgMag
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The Gods will reveal themselves when humanity can successfully reproduce The Hand, by far their hardest design challenge in creating our species.
Sawyer Merritt@SawyerMerritt
Tesla's Optimus V3 robot hand looks to have been revealed in a new international patent published today. The patent describes a tendon/cable-driven hand: • Actuators in the forearm • Each finger has 4 degrees of freedom • The wrist has 2 degrees of freedom • Tendon-driven system: 3 thin, flexible control cables (tendons) per finger run from forearm actuators, through the wrist and into the fingers. • Advanced wrist routing: Cables switch from a lateral (horizontal) stack on the forearm side to a vertical stack on the hand side, plus a transition zone to minimize stretch, torque, friction, and crosstalk during yaw/pitch movements. • Integrated control cable channels in the finger segments and precise routing (behind some joints, forward others) for selective bending. The full filing is in the thread below if you want to read more about it:
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Tried reading The Waste Land this week and afterward went straight to the publisher’s notes in the back
Line 92 — Aeneid reference
Line 98 — Milton reference
Line 99 — Ovid reference
I feel like I need to have read the entire western canon to appreciate this poem.. or not? Is it possible to appreciate something like that while missing so many of the references?
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Henry Valk retweetledi
Henry Valk retweetledi
.@maxhodak_ gives a fascinating explanation for why restoring smell with brain implants is much harder than fixing vision or hearing:
Vision and audio are straightforward to digitize. We can already encode images as pixels and store audio as WAV files.
But smell-o-vision would be far tougher to figure out.
For years, companies have tried to create chemical detectors by growing neurons that express olfactory receptors - basically attempting to replicate a dog's nose, which are "some of the most sensitive chemical detectors in the universe."
When dogs are trained to detect cancer, they're not picking up a single "cancer chemical." There are thousands of chemicals constantly leaking from your blood, and dogs learn to notice irregularities.
The problem is you can't just mass spec smell. Smell is made up of thousands of compounds at once - and we still don’t have a file format for representing that complexity.
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A few years ago I was making the same gesture control pitch to the smart watch OEMs "Just repurpose the EKG electrodes that are already in the watch. Small hardware mods can unlock a ton of new capabilities"
Incredible to see it in mainstream devices. Congrats @pisontech @Xiaomi
GIF
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I've always found it difficult to allay concerns about toxic ingredients in fragrances. Binary designations like "clean" can't capture the nuance. This RIFM paper lays it out pretty clearly -- for a fragrance containing 95th percentile concentration of benzaldehyde, you'd need to spray yourself with 276 100ml bottles / day before reaching an adverse dose
#sec6" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
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Henry Valk retweetledi
OSMO RAISES $70M SERIES B
Exciting move in beauty-tech. Digital scent company Osmo raised a $70M series led by Two Sigma Ventures.
Launched in 2023, Osmo brings machine learning to the lengthy process of developing new scents. The company formed as a spin-off from Google Brain (now deepmind).
What I find interesting about this is Osmo’s capacity to dramatically lower the barriers to start their own fragrance brand.
Large fragrance houses like LVMH and L’Oreal have historically partnered with large manufacturers like Givaudan which require high MoQs but Osmo democratizes scent design using AI.
Funds have been actively deploying in fragrance and this will continue with Osmo:
- Secret Alchemist raised $3M led by Unilever Ventures
- Homecourt raised a $8M series A led by CULT Capital
- Xinú — De las Américas. raised from The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.
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I currently have Claude:
- building me a game (with replit)
- doing research for two essays
- brainstorming and writing a partnership proposal
- while my team is productizing something we built with claude
I was late to getting hyped on LLMs but this is really fun.
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A lot of these health claims are unsubstantiated, but they stick bc of people’s fear of anything ‘chemical’. Geraniol is naturally occurring in rose oil extract, but the trade name sounds scary.
Yes if you put 100% rose oil on your skin, you could get a rash. But there are regulations (headed by all major brands) that keep usage far below concerning levels.
But I totally understand frustration with the lack of transparency. People should be able to make informed decisions about what they consume. An interesting possible solution would be to allow perfumers/brands to patent fragrances. Then you could regulate full ingredient disclosure and still protect IP.
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Reminder the thing that helps a fragrance linger is the thing that mauls one’s hormones. Beyond those forever chemicals, it’s truly wild that fragrance companies have never had to disclose the full ingredients. Something stinks.
Oasis@oasishealthapp
Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince people to spray thousands of toxic chemicals on their bodies. For years, the FDA allowed toxic chemicals to hide under "fragrance" or "parfum" to protect trade secrets. A single fragrance formula can contain 20–80 ingredients, including: • Phthalates – solvent & fixative • Synthetic musks – scent fixatives • BHT – preservative • Linalool, Limonene, Citral, Geraniol – scent allergens • Coumarin, Hexyl cinnamal – scent allergens • Benzyl alcohol – solvent/preservative • Benzyl benzoate – fixative • Alpha-isomethyl ionone – allergen Brands like Dior, Aesop and Tom Ford use these mystery cocktails of volatile solvents and allergens, revealing little about the contents. In 2025, new U.S. and EU transparency laws require fragrance brands to disclose ingredients, revealing many disrupt hormones. Many colognes use Diethyl Phthalate (DEP), linked to sperm damage and hormonal issues. Top offenders include: • Calvin Klein Eternity • Victoria’s Secret Dream Angels Wish • Giorgio Armani Acqua Di Gio • Chanel Coco To protect your health, we independently test and rate fragrances on Oasis app, so you know what's safe.
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Really lucky to work with someone as talented as Christophe at @Osmo_Labs. And grateful to @stripepress for bringing his story to more people.
Tamara Winter@tamarawinter
1/ Today @stripepress is releasing the first two mini-documentaries in a series we’re calling Tacit. They’re vignettes of craftspeople who provide a pretty compelling answer to the question, “after AI, does mastery still matter?” This episode features Christophe Laudamiel, master perfumer at Osmo. Christophe is the creator or co-creator of dozens of scents, most notably, Polo Blue by Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie Fierce, and Tom Ford Amber Absolute. We spent a week with Christophe, following him from his office, to his home (which too, looks suspiciously like an office), observing him as he built fragrances essentially from scratch, isolated problematic notes (TIL: certain fragrance notes, when put together, can produce an unfortunate ‘wet dog’ smell), and even discovered new molecules. Christophe is an archetype of individual we’re obsessed with: *he’s* obsessed with mastery for its own sake. For the past 30 years he’s been at the forefront of perfumery, and now he wonders if and how computers can augment his craft.
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Henry Valk retweetledi
this is a wonderfully clear & elegant way of defining research
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@robkhenderson I’ve wondered whether the middle class enforces societal norms (even outdated ones) the most strictly. Could explain why this is a U shaped curve.
Also connects back to the passage you highlighted in Class by Paul Fussell
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"LGBTQ Americans are more likely to be at the tail ends of both sides of the socioeconomic spectrum...LGBTQ Americans are more likely to be high school dropouts and college grads...more likely to struggle with homelessness, poverty...and to be wealthy." press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…
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