Why Fall is the New Summer. Musk And SBF Get Bio-Failed. And How To Win a Nobel Prize When Life Kicks You In The Teeth. Plus More! #181
Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck – welcome!
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1️⃣ Hotter Than July? It’s Called September
The month that shows the shape of falls to come.
Last month won two prizes. It was the hottest September ever recorded. It was also the most freakishly warm month on record.
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather called it “gobsmackingly bananas.”
Here’s how he explained what it means:
“One way I like to think about this is we have this long-term human-driven warming.
“And then on top of that, there’s plus or minus two tenths of a degree Celsius in any given year due to internal climate variability, primarily due to La Niña or El Niño.
“So when we have all the stars align, as we do this year, we get a peek of what the new normal is going to be a decade from now.”
So farewell mists and mellow fruitfulness. Hello heat and molten leaflessness.
⏭ Chinese scientists say 2023 could be the hottest year yet recorded.
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2️⃣ Bungling Biographers
Michael Lewis gets deep fried by Sam Bankman-Fried.
Michael Lewis’s The Big Short ruthlessly picked apart the 2008 financial crisis. Now – like Walter Isaacson – he has a biography out. His subject? Crypto-collapse boy-blunder, Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF to his creditors.
SBF, whose fraud trial starts this week, ran a crypto-currency exchange into the ground. As the FT notes:
The exchange — remember this isn’t a bank — held just $900mn in easily sellable assets against $9bn of liabilities the day before it collapsed into bankruptcy.
Lewis, who excoriated the money men behind the Great Financial Crisis, offers this kindly take on SBF’s business:
“This isn’t a Ponzi scheme. Like, when you think of a Ponzi scheme, I don’t know, Bernie Madoff, the problem is – there’s no real business there.
“The dollar coming in is being used to pay the dollar going out.
“And in this case, they actually had – a great real business.
“If no one had ever cast aspersions on the business, if there hadn’t been a run on customer deposits, they’d still be sitting there making tons of money.”
Hmm. What is a Ponzi Scheme?
The Los Angeles Times concludes:
“In Michael Lewis, Sam Bankman-Fried found his last and most willing victim.”
⏭ For a more skeptical SBF take, try Zeke Faux’s ‘Number Go Up.’
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3️⃣ Elon Musk’s Life Story In 79 Words
Another new biography promises heat but no light.
No time to read Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk? The FT’s Bryce Elder has you covered with a brake-neck version:
“Musk drops out of college, sells a listings website, starts a payments processor and crashes a McLaren F1 while trying to impress Peter Thiel...
“Musk then catches malaria, takes flying lessons, impregnates his first wife at the Burning Man festival and spitballs a plan to send mice to Mars using decommissioned Russian missiles.
“Rockets are built, then cars... Targets are missed. Holes are bored. Rockets fail to launch. Monkeys play Pong. A cave explorer is slandered. Funding isn’t secured.”
Elder slows down a bit bringing you up to the present day, but he does mention one nugget that doesn’t merit a peep from Isaacson: “the $5bn+ of revenue Tesla has booked from claiming then selling carbon offset credits.”
As Autoweek reported in 2021:
“The government is essentially giving credits to Tesla to sell to other automakers for cash.”
⏭ The Billionaire went toe to toe with Germany’s Foreign Ministry this week.
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4️⃣ Demoted? Demotivated? Don’t Despair.
Don’t let a few hurdles stand in the way of that Nobel Prize.
Katalin Karikó shared the Nobel prize for Medicine this week.
Karikó is a scientific warrior, pursuing her intellectual field despite demotion by her university, a demotivating lack of funding, and a dismal lack of enthusiasm from peers.
Here’s the mic drop moment when she left the university that failed to recognise her work.
⏭ The winners of the Physics Nobel also have lessons for medicine.
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5️⃣ Solar Panels That Work When it Snows?
It’s *snow* joke... (walks slowly away)
⏭ There’s likely to be less snow around than usual this winter.
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6️⃣ Setting a River Free!
Water is being allowed to wander and that’s good news for wildlife.
⏭ England’s waterways have another threat to manage – sewage!
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7️⃣ Life on Mars? IKEA Moonbase?
There’s a 3-D printer for that.
There could be buildings on the moon by 2040.
That was the message the NYT gleaned from NASA scientists in a big take out on 3-D printing.
Their biggest problem is also the biggest building material – moon dust.
⏭ China is looking at lunar caves as a smarter place for a moon base.
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If you enjoy this newsletter – please recommend it!
Best,
Adrian
