More book recommendations
I went on holiday and read some fantastic books
Sorry for the radio silence, I just returned from one of those holidays I’ll remember forever — hauling the kids around museums in Paris, walking in the Dolomites, and exploring the narrow streets of Orvieto.
Along the way I read some excellent books:
Part historical fiction, part magical realism, the story spans several generations of a Hungarian aristocratic family from twilight of the 1900s to the Hungarian National Uprising in 1956 and the social upheaval along the way. I can’t quite fathom how a 21 year old wrote this.
This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
This novel tells the story of three characters in contemporary Pakistan and how they struggle to choose between the moral path and the path that will allow them to survive entrenched social systems.
In honour of the SpaceX IPO, I felt compelled to read this story of the early SpaceX days and it’s excellent. It describes in detail the rollercoaster of getting SpaceX to orbit, and all the insane feats required to survive that journey. For anyone looking for a critical story of Elon Musk, this isn’t it, but that’s not the point - the point is to celebrate the extraordinary achievements of the early SpaceX team.
Links
I went down a rabbit hole of NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photos after seeing this. Absolutely gorgeous.
Back in March I wrote about the need for agent infra for knowledge work (not just coding). We’re starting to see these emerge in companies like Stripe:
Imagine seeing this in 1349 when it was completed:
Only a French CEO would write a PR reaction this articulate:
“Intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world…I shall bring the example of medicine: we might be aiming or effort at the wrong bottlenecks. In medicine, as I’ve argued, regulatory reform gets a tiny fraction of the attention lavished on AI-enabled biology and even within AI-enabled biology, the interventions that would actually move the needle are the ones that often seem less funded.”
The startup journey as a game…
So you think you’ve delayed gratification to reach a challenging goal? Artist Charles Ross conceived the Star Axis in 1971, began construction in 1976, and just completed it fifty years later.
“The sculpture's "Star Tunnel" is the central feature, a 147-step, nine-story stairway, exactly parallel to Earth’s axis. Ascending the Star Tunnel stairs, a visitor can "walk through" and experience all of the orbits of Polaris—the current north star—throughout the Earth’s 26,000-year cycle of astronomical precession. When a viewer enters the Star Tunnel at bottom, the aperture at the top appears to be the size of a dime held at arm’s length and frames the smallest circumpolar orbit of Polaris corresponding to the view in the year 2100 CE. As a visitor climbs the stairs, they can see increasingly larger views of the sky framing larger and larger circumpolar orbits of Polaris.”
