* “Moon landing: US clinches first touchdown in 50 years.” News that is actually important. Sort of like the guy with Astro Mechanica who says he’s invented a jet engine that is “efficient at every speed. Because it’s efficient at every speed, we can use it in a new way: as the first stage of an orbital launch vehicle.” Wow. Though I have no ability to evaluate the technical plausibility.

* “Google Gemini and Revisiting James Damore.” If that doesn’t satiate your interest in Google matters, try “Google’s Culture of Fear,” although it has a lot of pointlessly incendiary framing. Still, the Google search monopoly is under more serious threat than it’s been in the company’s history, and that may inspire real change. Amusingly, I used Google search to try and find a video of Sergey Brin saying that he’s un-retired to come back to work on AI, and Google search didn’t easily find it—but it turned up a bunch of spammy YouTube videos.

* If this is true, it helps explain why I found the first Dune movie underwhelming: “Denis Villeneuve says ‘movies have been corrupted by television.'” Corrupted by? Villeneuve goes on: “Frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today. Movies have been corrupted by television.”

When I watched the first Dune movie, I was like: “Who are these people? What are the stakes? Who cares?” I can answer from the books, but the movie felt oddly flat. Meanwhile, the director was thinking: “Ooooohhh pretty.” And it is very pretty. Also, the actor who plays Paul Muad’Dib doesn’t work as a warlord. He’d be a great Oscar Wilde, but Paul Atreides? Eh.

* Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever. About much more than Jalapeños. I read some of the articles about making fermented hot sauce and now I have a jar full of jalapeños fermenting on my counter.

* “A hymn to hot sauce.” This, combined with the article above, convinced me to buy some fermenting lids and give fermented chiles a go. What could go wrong, aside from dying?

* “Vaclav Smil and the Value of Doubt.” (NY’er, $) I think he underestimates the possibility of big changes.

* We could have had mRNA vaccines far earlier. Also, Bess wrote “mRNA vaccines: let’s be sick a whole lot less and maybe cure cancer,” which is characteristically excellent.

* “Open-Source Software Is Worth a Lot More Than You Pay for It” (bloomberg, $). The source paper is here and claims that “We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist.” Wow!

* China may dominate electric cars. The U.S.’s short-sightedness on this subject is amazing and depressing. Notably: “‘It’s a global game. It has been a global game,’ Le said. ‘Motherfuckers just haven’t been paying attention.'” And the wsj writes of “How China Is Churning Out EVs Faster Than Everyone Else.” ($) Without Tesla, American and European car companies would be ever further behind than they are.

* Can we still build big things? The answer is mostly “no,” and that’s bad.

* “Republicans can’t stop swallowing Russian propaganda: Obsessed with Hunter Biden and the Moscow Metro instead of solving problems.” This also seems bad but I don’t know how to induce a healthier epistemology. It seems that most people optimize for entertainment rather than what I’d consider effectiveness.

* What obsesses academia these days (NY’er, $), at least the administrative classes and certain academic departments. Academia is losing public support and yet many departments are devoted to internal virtue signaling spirals rather than knowledge production or dissemination, and this is the response. “Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic” comes to mind. Way back when I was foolishly seeking an English PhD, I planned a dissertation about academic novels, many if not most of which were satires. Even then, the ability to satirize an absurd cultural reality was fading; by now, it’s almost impossible to satirize academia in fiction, because how can a novelist be more absurd than reality?

* “Fresh from the biotech pipeline: record-breaking FDA approvals.” But still too few, and too slowly.

* “Why small developers are getting squeezed out of the housing market.” On the importance of leverage, among other things.

* “Brooklyn’s new borough president doesn’t care about the ‘character’ of your neighborhood. That’s ‘not more important than putting people in homes.’” Good. Progress! NIMBYs have stifled human well-being for too long.

* “We’re entering a golden age of engineering biology,” and that is good. The golden age is probably too late to save my life from cancer, but it is prolonging my life versus where I’d have been a few years ago.