Links #127

Victoria Gill on the reservoir of liquid water found on Mars. Exciting!

Benj Edwards on researchers crafting lifelike robotic skin from living human skin cells. This is weird and kind of disturbing in a few different ways. (I’m over here imagining a fleshy Roomba whose skin starts decomposing after a software update fails. Zombie robots, anyone?)

Victor Tangermann on scientists creating a robot controlled by a blob of human brain cells. And hey, another disturbing step forward. Ha. Part of me wonders, by the way, how far advances like these will get before global climate change regressions become a blocker to progress.

Ted Gioia on doctors raising a patient from a deathlike state with ultrasound electronic music. Fascinating.

Sara Hendren on sending kids to college. “This is the first of many parenting presuppositions that make up the cultural water we’re swimming in and therefore can’t see. We imagine our children as maybe-slightly-immature but essentially fully-formed selves. Our job is framed as clearing the obstacles only; we’re tasked with whatever passive supports will help our children optimize themselves on their own terms.” Which is how I’ve seen it. Her point here, though, is that this isn’t enough, and that these kids still need to be formed. “But formation is in short supply everywhere! I don’t get very far, even among fellow professors, when I bring this up. The autonomy-led, buffet-style, platform-burnishing model for higher education is thoroughly internalized in most places. You have to look pretty far and wide to find a strong sense of mission for forming young people into their free future selves.” Interesting throughout.

Teenage Engineering’s medieval EP-1320. Ha. Love this.

Tanner Greer on Patrick Collison’s canonical Silicon Valley reading list. While I’ve admittedly soured a fair bit on SV technologists in general and I have zero interest in becoming more like them, the books on this list that I’ve already read (The Power Broker, Dealers of Lightning, The Dream Machine) were good, and I suspect there are a few others here worth reading. (I’ve long wanted to read A Pattern Language, for example, and Seeing Like a State and Titan and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt are on my list as well.)

C. D. Cunningham on the CES Letter not actually being the sincere questions of an honest truth-seeker. Not a huge surprise.

Eleanor Konik on themed logs being more useful than daily ones. Agreed.

Steven Luu on using enums instead of booleans. A good point.