Stephen Fleming

Itaipu Dam on the Paraná River between Paraguay and Brazil, one of the largest dams in the world

Those foreign-run “[State] Life” pages on Facebook trying to manufacture opposition to data centers are getting even dumber. Here’s one of some Kansas farmers literally *standing on water*. 1,700+ likes and over 380 shares.

Whole language teaching methodologies have done so much damage it’s not even funny. Millions and millions of kids are basically illiterate because of it, and the tragic truth is that most adults blindly trust these methods like gospel because they don’t know any better. If you were born in the English speaking world after the 60s, the chances are, you’re completely unaware of how reading and decoding should be taught. I get it, English is a very complex language when it comes to the correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. But still, robbing so many kids of the necessary foundational knowledge they need in order to master their mother tongue is criminal.

Whole language teaching methodologies have done so much damage it’s not even funny. Millions and millions of kids are basically illiterate because of it, and the tragic truth is that most adults blindly trust these methods like gospel because they don’t know any better. If you were born in the English speaking world after the 60s, the chances are, you’re completely unaware of how reading and decoding should be taught. I get it, English is a very complex language when it comes to the correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. But still, robbing so many kids of the necessary foundational knowledge they need in order to master their mother tongue is criminal.

A humanoid robot is learning to pick tender tea leaves under the guidance of workers at a West Lake Longjing tea plantation in Hangzhou, east China’s Zhejiang Province. With AI recognition models and algorithms, the robot is capable of identifying and locating leaves that meet harvesting standards.

DOE Sec Chris Wright "I think we are in the midst of the greatest malinvestment in human history." $10 trillion to fight climate change for a collective 2.6% of global energy from wind and solar and the net result, a significant increase in the price of electricity. Listen 🔊

A mathematician at Bell Labs noticed that the scientists who won Nobel Prizes and the ones who never amounted to anything were equally smart, equally hardworking, and equally credentialed, and the only thing that separated them was a single question almost nobody is brave enough to ask themselves before they die. His name was Richard Hamming. He spent 30 years at Bell Labs, in the same building as John Tukey, Walter Brattain, and a long list of physicists who took home Nobel prizes for work they did down the hall from his office, including the legendary Claude Shannon. His invention of error-correcting codes made modern computing possible. He has won the Turing Award. And all the while he was creating his own legacy he was secretly doing a study on the people around him. The study was straightforward. 2 Teams. The legends and the lost. Same I.Q.s. Degrees same. Same desk hours. Same access to the world’s best resources. And yet, at the end of 40 years in their careers, one group had changed entire fields, and the other group could not be remembered by their own colleagues five years after retirement. He wanted to discover what the actual difference was. In March 1986, he stood before 200 researchers in a Bellcore auditorium and told them what he had seen. He said it all came down to one question. And hardly anyone he ever met was willing to ask it directly. He called it the Friday-afternoon ritual. He spent years blocking out his Friday afternoons and not doing anything productive with them every week. No experiments. No meetings. No deliverables. He called it Great Thoughts Time. He sat down with a notebook and asked himself a couple of questions in order. What are the most relevant problems in my discipline? And why I am not working on either of them.” Most weeks, the answer was the same, he said. For a week now he had marched confidently in a direction he did not think was the most important direction. He was a goer. He worked a bit. He was getting clean results that would publish in respected journals. ( And for five days straight he'd been lying to himself about whether any of it mattered. The reason almost nobody does this ritual is because the honest answer is unbearable. The thing is that if you sit down on a Friday afternoon and say out loud that you are not working on the most important problem in your field, now you have to do something about it. You have an immediate change in direction, or you have to keep lying to yourself every week from that point on. Most people choose the lie. In the short term it’s cheaper, but over a career it’s more expensive. Hamming took the ritual a step further in the Bell Labs cafeteria. He began approaching scientists he barely knew, asking them what they thought the most important problems in their field were. A week later he would ask them why they had not worked on these problems. Eventually people wouldn't have lunch with him. “I had to keep finding new tables,” he said. Nobody had a good answer for that, and being around someone who kept asking it made every meal feel like a performance review. The line that broke me is the line that most people skim over in the transcript. His words: If you do not work on an important problem you are unlikely to do important work. That’s not motivational line. It is a rational one. You cannot make a great result from a problem that does not matter. Input restricts the output. The choice of the problem is the ceiling of the career. The transcript has been freely available on the internet for almost 40 years. Stripe Press published the complete lectures as a book. Naval Ravikant quotes it all the time. It’s still given out to new hires at every serious engineering lab in Silicon Valley. Most people will not run the ritual this Friday. They will be busy. They always are.