☞ The Orthogonal Bet: Season Two
And now on its own RSS feed!
Many of my readers know that I hosted a Lux podcast series last year called The Orthogonal Bet.
Well, beginning today The Orthogonal Bet is now a standalone podcast, with its own feed, and better than ever! We are now the sister podcast to Lux’s flagship Riskgaming podcast.
The Orthogonal Bet is still guided by my personal philosophy, that “the world is combinatorially weird and fractally interesting. And therefore, omnivorous curiosity is the only proper response.”
As I noted then:
If it’s hard to predict what will help move progress forward, let’s optimize instead for the interesting, the strange, and the weird. Ideas and topics that ignite our curiosity are worthy of our attention, because they might lead to advances and insights that we can’t anticipate.
And we tried really hard to optimize for the interesting, strange, and weird.
Last season this resulted in talking science fiction and evolutionary biology with Adrian Tchaikovsky, the failures of the Soviet space program with John Strausbaugh, AI and human cognition with Alice Albrecht, the history of SimCity with Chaim Gingold, the nature of biology with Philip Ball, world-building and magic with Lev Grossman, and so much more.
It’s been a wild ride but it’s only going to get better. Our first episode of this season kicks off with Niko McCarty who explores publishing, biology, and more with me.
The entire back catalog is available in the feed and we have a lot of great new episodes lined up as well. Stay tuned for discussions of antimimetics, rest and leisure in the tech world, sending radio broadcasts into outer space, the friendship between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, computer programming and humility, and much more.
So get excited for some weirdness and subscribe. ■
The Enchanted Systems Roundup
Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):
🜸 The Handoff to Bots: “The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.”
🜚 The hardest working font in Manhattan: “It’s hard to believe today that there was a time before I knew of Gorton and all its quirks and mysteries. The first time I realized the font even existed was some time in 2017, when I was researching for my book about the history of typing.”
🝳 Setting up the studio for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television house
🝤 How Workplace Tech Has Changed Over the Years, From the WSJ Archives: “It’s easy to forget that the fax machine was once a breakthrough technology. Or how mind-bending ‘electronic mail’ was. Not to mention the elevator…”
🜹 Global internet grid could better detect earthquakes with new algorithm
🝊 A Defense of Weird Research: “Government-funded scientific research may appear strange or impractical, but it has repeatedly yielded scientific breakthroughs — and continues to pay for itself many times over.”
🜸 Logarithmic Maps of the Universe
🝤 Uh so about that asteroid: “The asteroid is currently moving away from the Earth obliquely. Measurements of its trajectory are tricky so the impact probability keeps changing.” (not really relevant any longer, but an interesting read)
Until next time.