Continuations

So I had promised that I would start writing about potential solutions to the climate crisis. As I started down that path, I realized that to discuss their relative importance or effectiveness requires a better understanding of the scale of the crisis. The alien invasion analogy sums it up as a single number: the excess energy above the pre-industrial baseline that we are adding to the atmospheric system amounts to 1 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb every second (all day, 365 days a year). But wh...

As I wrote last year, I am not a fan of the reasoning behind taking the Large Hadron Collider into operation. If you have followed this story, then you know that last fall, the attempt to start experiments failed with a meltdown of some magnets causing a significant delay. Then this summer, there was a report of more problems with magnets, which somehow lost their ability to operate at high energies. Over the same time period two theoretical physicists have published several papers arguing th...

Last week I had the opportunity to cross something off my bucket list: sailing faster than the wind. Now at first this sounds like a preposterous idea – if the wind is pushing you, then how could you go faster than it? It seems the equivalent of the Baron Munchausen pulling himself from a swamp by his own hair. Or powering a sailboat by blowing into the sails (maybe with a huge fan?). Before providing an explanation, here is a brief video I filmed on the Lending Club 2 in the San Francisco ba...

It is now six years ago that we at USV held our one day mini conference on “Hacking Education.” A lot has happened since then. We have made investments in Codecademy, Duolingo, Edmodo and Skillshare. MOOCs really took off with classes that have been taken by tens of thousands of students. Susan and I started homeschooling for our children. And yet when I think about what is possible in theory it still feels like we are early on. One of the things that I envision is an interactive learning env...

I love it when I come across math, science or computer writing that is really mind blowing. This can be something I already know but is presented in a different way that offers a deeper understanding. A couple of weeks ago I picked up on a lark at a bookstore at London Heathrow a gem like that: “Why does E = mc^2?” by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. It provides a really lucid introduction to Einstein’s theory of relativity. If you have any interest at all in this and feel you don’t understand it ...