Daniel Fetz

fermi foundation,

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@DStrachman Free to Learn (Peter Gray) is also awesome!

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@K_Niemietz I doubt the resistance of the local population would have anywhere near as bad if they had not this most outrageous design

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@K_Niemietz But the construction in Peckham would have looked much worse. I do think this is genuinely awful.

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

Of course a lot of awards fall under what could in all fairness be called normal charity... but the idea for the https://t.co/FEU3UuE250 is something structurally different from most awards. It's not for the exceptional researcher who did remarkable things. Rather, it's for the mentor standing behind them, like the namesake Adolfo Amidei who mentored the 13-year old Enrico Fermi... who lent him books, urged him to learn German amid the war with Germany, personally went to Pisa to scout the university there for Fermi... all of that for neither monetary gain nor public recognition.

So the Prize is in some sense a deliberate act of cultural repair, building a recognition category that doesn't currently exist for a kind of work that is so central for the flourishing of civilization

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@Ben_Reinhardt Contributing the initial endowment for new Prizes.

https://t.co/1txLt9Mp3n

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@paulbohm Have you read "Where is my flying car?". You'd like it!

https://t.co/E5CBw3ydtz

[Andy Matuschak @andy_matuschak]

One fun way to describe this book: the narrative is a sort of glue which holds together a non-stop parade of Fermi estimates.

These results are probably much less surprising to a physicist, but snippets like this are truly shocking to me!

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@jspaulding42 @TheZvi I think it's worth knowing that, no, it doesn't have to feel like getting hit by a car. Using a local anesthetic with a painkiller mixed in can reduce pain immensely and you can safely get an epidural early. The advice against is now mostly outdated.

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@jspaulding42 @TheZvi

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@jspaulding42 @TheZvi I also like to see artificial wombs, but you do realize that there are a lot of medication options available for managing pain during childbirth?

Appx. 75% of women giving birth in the US use an epidural or spinal anesthesia

Other countries where this isn't common should adapt

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

SpaceX started with a Fermi estimate.

In 2001-2002, Elon Musk looked at the cost of buying rockets (initially trying to buy refurbished ICBMs from Russia) and then estimated the raw material cost of a rocket (metals, fuel, etc.) and concluded the materials were only about 2-3% of the rocket’s price.

That gap between material cost and market price convinced him that rockets were drastically overpriced due to manufacturing practices and lack of competition, not physics.

He reasoned that if you built them more like cars (vertically integrated, mass-produced) you could slash costs by an order of magnitude. That estimate became the founding thesis of SpaceX in 2002.

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@caleb_kinmon @cboyack No, they mostly aren't. If you are interested in the Sudbury model you can read Peter Gray's "Free to Learn" book

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@Scholars_Stage But that is only because what currently falls under “critical thinking” is just a joke. It doesn’t have to be like that. If you do probability calibration training, Fermi estimation, etc. … then you have a proper “critical thinking” curriculum

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

@DrNickA This all seems so insane. Meanwhile many states in the US finally roll out school vouchers…

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

Read more here: https://t.co/7D5H3OlTfS

[Daniel Fetz @danftz]

Excerpt from “The Case for K12 Domestic Talent Systems” by Carina Initiatives and the Polynera Fund