In LibertyRPF’s latest newsletter, he makes brief mention of the “Humongous fungus”, an Armillaria ostoyae fungus that covers roughly 2,385 acres of Oregon forest, and weighs an estimated 35,000 tons.
When you read enough about mycology, you find some science fiction-level stuff:
Most of this giant fungus is underground as a network of mycelium and rhizomorphs, black or dark brown structures that are kind of like roots or shoelaces.
The mushrooms you might see on a hike in the forest are just temporary fruiting bodies, like apples on a tree. The real organism is this vast, interconnected web beneath the forest floor that slowly spreads by feeding on tree roots.
Why are we looking for aliens in space? They’re already here on Earth.
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Differentiating two different variants of The Enlightenment:
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April 4, 2024 • # Confounding details interfere with honest science.
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February 20, 2024 • # David Deutsch's two enlightenments: the British vs. the Continental model.
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October 26, 2023 • # We should be teaching the mechanisms of evolution.
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May 23, 2023 • # An interview with author Richard Rhodes on the Manhattan Project, nuclear weapons, AI, and more.
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November 10, 2022 • # Invention requires the right combination of environment, timing, and purpose.
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September 29, 2022 • # A deep dive interview on what progress studies is all about.
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September 23, 2022 • # BigThink's complete issue dedicated to progress studies.
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September 21, 2022 • # From John McPhee's 'Annals of the Former World'.
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September 15, 2021 • # Superheated plumes of magma, hotspots, and the composition of the mantle.
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February 6, 2021 • # Defending liberal science, keyboarding in Roam with Roam42, and how to write effective Jobs to Be Done examples.
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October 21, 2020 • # Vannevar Bush's seminal report.
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October 5, 2020 • # Roots of Progress's list of inventions and why they were discovered when they were.
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September 23, 2020 • # Innovation doesn't happen while we wait around, it's something that we choose to pursue, even if it doesn't always look that way.
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July 28, 2020 • # Venture Stories interview with Jose Luis Ricon.
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June 13, 2020 • # Commandos, infantry, or police for markets, why sleep deprivation kills, and how Marc Andreessen works.
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June 6, 2020 • # Adam Elkus on the current state of culture, Devon Zuegel on using calendars, and Robin Hanson on skepticism.
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May 7, 2020 • # Did Christensen and Kuhn get it wrong in describing scientific innovation in such a binary way?
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April 23, 2020 • # ✦
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January 13, 2020 • # Scientist Wernher von Braun explains how we might one day reach the moon.
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December 26, 2019 • # Steve Stewart-Williams on kin selection and altruism.
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December 4, 2019 • # Using space and microgravity as a new center of manufacturing.
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November 23, 2019 • # How Figma built their multiplayer tech, rice vs. wheat and influence on culture, and how tuft cells communicate threats to the immune system.
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November 22, 2019 • # Visualizing the interconnected record of 150 years of scientific research.
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November 9, 2019 • # A new blogging tool, the complexity of hand-drawn visualizations, and detecting wildfires from satellites.
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October 6, 2019 • # A newsletter on innovation and the history of technological progress.
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August 27, 2019 • # Do we see more progress during the hard times or the good? Speculation on what generates inventions.
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August 11, 2019 • # Predicting symmetries in the laws of physics, and sometimes not.
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July 25, 2019 • # A startup company is working on light generation using bacterial sources of bioluminescence.
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July 2, 2019 • # BLDGBLOG on navigating through deep space and time.
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June 28, 2019 • # Neuroscientist Karl Friston explaining the free energy principle.
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June 17, 2019 • # A book review becomes a great insight into how the brain works.
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June 14, 2019 • # A group building tools for sharing and collaborating on academic papers.
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April 14, 2019 • # On 'Loonshots' and how phase transitions apply to companies.
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April 6, 2019 • # T cells for immunotherapy, engineering new proteins with Jupyter Notebooks, and Spatial Networks named as a top workplace.
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February 10, 2019 • # Reviewing David Quammen's 'The Tangled Tree', rethinking new discoveries in evolutionary biology.
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February 3, 2019 • # Text of Richard Feynman's 1974 commencement address on cargo cult science.
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December 11, 2018 • # “A conversation with Steven Pinker and John McWhorter on linguistics, and much more.”
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August 12, 2012 • # Graham Hawkes wants to fly beneath the waves.
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