December: Living in Awe
Hey,
This week I’ve been reminded of what an amazing time and world we live in. It sounds hella cheesy, but I’m trying to stay in this state of wonder as much as possible.
I started reading The Blind Watchmaker, a book about evolution, and it’s blowing my mind. I feel like a stoner when I sit and reflect on how crazy it is that certain animals evolved the way they did over millions of years. How the entire DNA and instructions for growing a tree lives within a tiny seed. And even how closely the development of different neural networks mirrors an evolutionary process. I just stare at the wall and think “whoa”.
And on the weekend I listened to a podcast with a university student who built a fusor (kind of like a small scale nuclear fusion reactor) in his bedroom. 🤯 What made it more interesting was his use of AI as a tutor and copilot to help learn about and build everything. It gave me a bunch of ideas about how to use AI to learn virtually anything and I’ve dropped his prompt into a custom GPT to help with prototyping ideas. This just furthers my belief that people can do anything - the only limit is your imagination.
Then I saw the news Monday about Google’s new quantum chip. The tl;dr is they overcame a major hurdle in quantum physics to enable a new type of chip that can perform calculations exponentially faster than super computers. In the press release they tease at the idea of quantum computation happening in parallel universes which is its own mind-boggling consideration.
Lastly this video hit my YouTube feed - someone building a new type of chess. It’s just plain cool and creative. I was immediately inspired and fired up watching it. I messaged a friend to say “I feel like with Google’s announcement and this random video it’s a great time to be alive and on the internet. Friggin wild.”
The internet is a finicky instrument. But if you tune it correctly you can discover some pretty amazing stuff. Not only that but REALITY is amazing if you look closely enough. I’m watching my daughter learn to stand and watching her try to figure things out is rewarding (and a good test of my own horrible habit of jumping in to “help” 🤣😬)
That’s it. Just a random reminder to stay optimistic and spend some time finding the crazy (cool) shit happening in the world.
Living in awe is a pretty great way to spend your life.