“The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people”. So starts Andre Gorz’s justly famous 1973 essay which remains as relevant ...
Really great description of the american sprawl. These issues eat away my soul every single day, and this guy wrote about it in 1973.
Some of my favorite excerpts: >The invention of the personal automobile, and destruction of public transportation, was a triumph of capitalist drug-peddling; suddenly, all at once, everyone’s personal mobility became dependent on a single, new commodity, gasoline. Without it, we are unable to function, since urban sprawl and suburbanization now means we can’t even walk to work if we wanted to.
>“The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”
>You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them.
>These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.
>No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.
https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/1364150
This is a really great course, taking you from a beginner in neuro-science, to a high level. It's probably worth having some background in biology, but the first few chapters do give a very brief review of some relevant topics, like genetic techniques. I haven't finished reading it yet, but I find myself picking it up all the time.
Huygens Optics demonstrating an interesting experiment that really challenges your incorrect intuitions about optics and quantum mechanics.
A discussion about the ethics of scientific journals, with compelling arguments. Giving some love to https://sci-hub.st/
Very interesting exploration of politics, ethics, and human nature. He present information in a very level way without too much editorializing. This video is very approachable and level headed.
Widely applicable model that describes how electrons bound to an atom respond and generate electromagnetic fields, similar to a mass on a spring. Relevant to understanding EM waves and the usually glossed over topics of Reflection, Refraction, Absorption and optical properties of plasmas. Very interesting.
Golden resources related to computational neuroscience and an introduction to the field. Artem Kirsanov, with incredible book recommendations and an entertaining format.
The diagrams are awesome in this paper, and the results about split-personality are really interesting. sperry1968
A short, approachable book to the theory of Quantum Electro-Dynamics based Feynman's lectures.
Home-shop OLED production! Such an incredible display of technical skill, and a home shop anyone would envy.
Huygens Optics and his awesome shop made monolithic telescope. Such an interesting series diving into the details of optics and their production.
The famous U-Net paper, foundations for modern image generators like Stable Diffusion
Seminal paper describing Trans-cranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). I'd love to build one of these.
He explores the idea of an inductive clutch mechanism, for CVT. Interesting concept. good execution, but ultimately not efficient.
