Ben Mann Monthly July 2021
oil, delta, precision, scaling up
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Sleep tracking experiments
I started a sleep tracking journal to correlate my daily actions with my perceived and measured sleep quality. I particularly wanted to capture the effects of consuming allergens like milk products or stimulants like caffeine. My watch (Garmin 745) tells me when I had "long but restless sleep" vs "long and refreshing sleep." Having tried it for a week, I find it pretty hard to associate effects across time. For example, maybe I ate some expired leftovers. How can I tell the difference? The scientist in me says I should only change one variable at a time: eat exactly the same shelf-stable thing every day, exactly the same exercise rotation, etc, and then introduce controlled, replicated changes. It feels like it's a lot of effort and roughly no one does this. It'd probably be very worthwhile though!
Buying socks
You'd think that in 2021 we'd have solved a problem as basic as "what are the best socks for everyday activity?" but it's still a globally contentious issue. Looking on Amazon, everything has logos or bad colors or crappy quality. I usually defer to The Wirecutter, but in this case, they didn't have an opinion to lean on. Perhaps you.com will someday come to my rescue, but for now I decided to go with Everlane since they at least claim to have good practices and their stuff seems reasonably thoughtfully designed without an overwhelming amount of variation. So far so good!
How to make oil
We watched videos on how to make oil, obviously in preparation for the zombie apocalypse 🧟. For things like sunflower seeds, just grind them up at high temperature and pressure, and oil drips out of one end of the machine; "seed cake" out of the other. Avocados are easier: mash the flesh, dry out the pulp, and squeeze in a cheesecloth. To make eucalyptus oil, steam the leaves, capture the steam in a distiller, then separate the oil from the water. Industrial-scale edible oil production involves lots of filtering to remove fine particulates.
Emotion rating {-3, 3}: mean .5, std 1
Highs: Roong-ji continues to be a wellspring of play and fun, work projects coming to fruition, hanging with friends, got engaged, improving swim efficiency
Lows: food poisoning? still occasionally feeling tired all day, want to make more reading progress, spending too much time on brainless webbrowsing
Life updates
🤖 Started reading The Most Human Human
🎊 Catching up with everyone
🧗 More bouldering
🔥 Fire season is coming, get your air filters now!
🚴 1 month until Santa Cruz triathlon
🥾 Hiked Montara and Sweeney Ridge
🪐 Engage!
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
If you’re vaccinated, your main risk from the Delta variant is probably long-haul COVID 5/5
Extremely in depth analysis of the Delta variant of COVID that's now spiking everywhere
Infection in spite of vaccination is still possible (breakthrough), and persistent symptoms are also possible (long COVID)
This wave is expected to be steep & brief, so taking personal countermeasures like increased masking are likely to be easier and more impactful
Might want to get a booster shot at ~6 months
Fascinating history of precision engineering from the ancient Greeks up to modern times, with chapters titles corresponding to mechanical tolerance of the contained technology.
I once dabbled in mechanical engineering, woodworking, and generally building stuff, so I know how hard it is to make even dumb parts line up. The shift from stuff we can see to stuff we can't is where the tale gets really mind-bending.
The meter used to be "one ten-millionth of the quarter meridian, the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along the meridian through Paris" but of course the Earth itself changes shape over time, so we had to switch to something more constant. Now almost every SI unit, including weight, is based on the speed of light.
Whether national or personal, security has always been a major driver of precision, from gun barrels to door locks to GPS.
Eli Whitney was a charlatan, contrary to American public school propaganda. Interchangeable parts were invented by the British and French, or perhaps earlier.
Best summary of my work I've seen: keep scaling up models (more compute, more data) and they get better
Intuitive explanation of what's going on as language modeling loss decreases
Overview of the different organizations' angles in the AGI race
We've hardly poured any resources into this so far (ie compare to the budget of a single blockbuster movie)
Loki E4-6 3/5
Mediocre ending to an otherwise good series; felt kind of slow and stretched out
Main characters' motivations seem a little too simple for a plot trying to be complicated
Black Widow 2/5
A little comic relief (David Harbour), kinda fun action sequences, but otherwise entirely predictable
Could've been more feminist, given the cast
In one scene ScarJo hits her head on a table to sever her olfactory nerve. In fact this is located somewhere in the back of the head and could never happen.
Clearly setting up for ScarJo to retire and Florence Pugh to take over
Why are swords and armor still a thing? "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight"
