In this update:

• Tonight: Live on the Yaron Brook Show

• Wanted: Technical animator and/or front-end developer for interactive diagrams of invention

• Links and tweets

(In the poll in the last newsletter, with almost 200 votes, keeping this 1x-weekly format beat the 2x-weekly by a 7:3 ratio. So, I’m sticking with this format.)

This email digest is now on Substack. If you have a Substack yourself, and you enjoy my writing, I’d love a recommendation—thank you!

Tonight: Live on the Yaron Brook Show

Tonight (Thursday) at 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern, I’ll be interviewed live on the Yaron Brook Show. We’ll be talking for an hour or two about progress and philosophy, and will take live questions via YouTube chat. Join us!

Wanted: Technical animator and/or front-end developer for interactive diagrams of invention

Seeking help for a project to create interactive diagrams—an “explorable explanation”—of the history of the steam engine.

Goal: To allow readers to explore the early evolution of one of the most impactful technologies in human history.

Content: The content will come from Anton Howes’s extensive research uncovering the origins of the steam engine (parts 1, 2, and 3).

We envision it covering precursors like the perpetual motion machine of Cornelis Drebbel, early thermometers and barometers, seventeenth-century experiments on atmospheric pressure, precursor devices like those shown by Salomon de Caus, our best guesses of the Kalthoff/Petty engine, the Savery engine, and the Newcomen engine and its improvements. (After this initial phase, we would then want to expand it to include the improvements by James Watt, and the rise of the high-pressure engine, with its various nineteenth-century improvements.)

This page on the steam engine may serve as a start for eventually creating the definitive online and interactive reference work on the history of technology, informed by the latest expert research.

Format: We have been greatly inspired by the works of Bartosz Ciechanowski, such as his mechanical watch and internal combustion engine explanations. We’re looking to create something like this. Here are more examples of locomotive valves.

The team: Anton Howes as researcher/writer, me (Jason Crawford) as editor/producer, you as animator/developer.

Your input: We’ll provide the written essay and some sketches and ideas for what diagrams we should create and how they should work.

Your deliverables: The code and/or other files to implement a set of interactive and/or animated technical diagrams.

You: A technical illustrator, animator, and/or front-end developer, or a team, who can deliver this. Must have a portfolio of relevant work to demonstrate your abilities. The ideal candidate will have an interest in engineering, invention, and the history of technology.

How to apply: Email explorables@rootsofprogress.org with a description of your skills and examples of your work.

We have budget for this project and are willing to pay market rates for high-quality work.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/wanted-technical-animator-developer-invention-diagrams

Links and tweets

The Progress Forum

• A catalog of big visions for biology

• London progress meetup, Feb 25

• A Cure for My Cancer, by Virginia Postrel

• Eli Dourado AMA has concluded

Announcements

• Metascience event at AEI, Feb 9 (via @AlecStapp)

• Visa Limbo, a site from IFP tracking visa processing delays (via @JeremyLNeufeld)

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plus for $20/month (via @miramurati)

Links

• Let’s add AP Progress to the high school curriculum (by @JimPethokoukis)

• Marc Andreessen on Dwarkesh’s podcast. Also Dwarkesh now has paid subscriptions. And what should he ask Elad Gil?

• A vision for cargo airships (by @elidourado)

• This comment convinced me I was wrong: we are not “pre-theory” regarding cancer

• NASA, DARPA to test nuclear engine for Mars missions (via @elidourado)

Queries

• Is there a directory of all the open-ended grant programs?

• Who should Milan Cvitkovic meet in SF? (@MWCvitkovic)

• Who is hiring for robotics roles/internships? (@momahmood_)

• What is the best way to bootstrap an advanced understanding of biology? (@danielgolliher)

Quotes

• The philosophers who told us not to celebrate progress

• History is biased to war and politics; progress is relatively neglected

• “Scientific management” was the precursor to 20th-century technocracy

• The need for ambition, from GH Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology” (@nabeelqu)

• Bacon on lumpers vs. splitters

Tweets

• LLMs create a vector space for concepts

• We will get many specialized AIs, not a massive centralized Great Brain

• People’s work is defined more by their methods than their goals

Retweets

• How much more quickly things were done in the 1960s (@Gilesyb)

• ChatGPT as a universal translator (@YirenLu)

• 69 of 109 jurisdictions in SFBA now subject to the builder’s remedy (@Yimby_Law)

• “This might be my favorite 1-page philosophy paper” (@davidalanbuiles)

• A hypothesis about things capitalism gets blamed for (@mbateman)

Charts

• Auckland liberalized building rules and housing permits soared