Nov & Dec '23

How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution.

Huang was relentlessly bullied. “The way you described Chinese people back then was ‘Chinks’” Huang told me, with no apparent emotion. “We were called that every day.” To get to school, Huang had to cross a rickety pedestrian footbridge over a river. “These swinging bridges, they were very high,” Bays said. “It was old planks, and most of them were missing.” Sometimes, when Huang was crossing the bridge, the local boys would grab the ropes and try to dislodge him. “Somehow it never seemed to affect him,” Bays said. “He just shook it off.” By the end of the school year, Bays told me, Huang was leading those same kids on adventures into the woods.

Malachowsky and Priem were looking to design a graphics chip, which they hoped would make competitors, in Priem’s words, “green with envy.” They called their company NVision, until they learned that the name was taken by a manufacturer of toilet paper. Huang suggested Nvidia, riffing on the Latin word invidia, meaning “envy.”

The curious case of Dmitry Balyasny.

Video: Jeff Bezos rowing boat.

The Knight Capital disaster.

The greenhouse gas footprint of LNG exported from the US.

NOTE: Not peer reviewed yet. Total greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 27% to 2‐fold greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker.

Shale extraction produces methane, which has a vastly stronger greenhouse effect than CO2. Substantial methane leaks occur at every stage of LNG production, storage and transport, and while more modern ships can use the evaporating methane to power their engines during the voyage, it is not enough to outweigh the costs.

The Israeli bombs raining on Gaza.

Appreciation of the Yemeni Rial relative to the USD.

The rebel-controlled Yemeni rial is made up entirely of a fixed supply of notes printed prior to 2016. In the chart below you can see it appreciating in value (the blue line) against the dollar.

Video: How to speed up Pandas in Python by 150x.

Sniffing women’s tears reduces aggressive behavior in men.

A GM bacterium that outcompetes the bacteria that cause tooth decay.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past.

What’s the matter with Bridgewater?

What the Italians did for us.

Early Christian men were far more likely to be secondary converts, someone who joins a religion because a spouse had done so.

Ants recognise infected wounds and treat them.

For treatment, they then apply antimicrobial compounds and proteins to the infected wounds. They take these antibiotics from the metapleural gland, which is located on the side of their thorax. Its secretion contains 112 components, half of which have an antimicrobial or wound-healing effect. And the therapy is highly effective: the mortality rate of infected individuals is reduced by 90 per cent, as the research group discovered.