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Slow

michaelnotebook.com

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Re: Slow

#71

Post by tim333 »

ljlolel wrote: post #60
lubujackson wrote: post #26

I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…

Literally what they do for Norte dame?

>Rebuilding Notre-Dame’s “forest” also meant selecting 1,300 oak trees from across France that were “as close as possible to those of the 13th century”, that is, “very straight and very slender”, according to Desmonts, with “no defects”. Jean-Louis Bidet, the technical director of Ateliers Perrault, remembers the rush to harvest the trees in autumn so the carpenters could begin squaring the green wood from “dozens of truckloads” before the end of 2022.

Re: Slow

#72

Post by wazoox »

mathattack wrote: post #30
lubujackson wrote: post #26

I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…

I have no idea if this story is true, but it should be.

As said in Italian "si non è vero, è ben trovato".

Re: Slow

#74

Post by dang »

Related by content (OP says "This page is a riff on Patrick Collison's list of /fast projects"):

Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912 - July 2023 (298 comments)

Fast (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 - March 2022 (97 comments)

Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec 2019 (291 comments)

Fast · Patrick Collison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (5 comments)

--

Also related, if only by title, this from yesterday:

Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (418 comments)

Re: Slow

#75

Post by wwarner »

Regarding LIGO, if anyone finds the sensitivity of LIGO as shocking as I do, here's a 2002 lecture from Kip Thorne explaining how it's achieved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGdbI24FvXQ&t=495s

This video is one of about 60 recorded in a year long series of lectures that were delivered at Caltech early on in the project. They are archived by Pau Amaro Seoane at this address https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/

Re: Slow

#76

Post by saulpw »

snarf21 wrote: post #39
tombert wrote: post #4

In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture. People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generatio…

Reminds me of Stewart Brand and the Clock of the Long Now (and other longer time horizon projects they are working on). Reminds me of a statement he made during a Tim Ferris interview that I think is quite profound for our mental health. ".... being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know."

Proud of your work, not proud of yourself. The latter is quite a reliable source of unhappiness, I've found.

Re: Slow

#77

Post by hermitcrab »

vik0 wrote: post #70
hermitcrab wrote: post #10

Most democracies have elections every 4 or 5 years. That is good, in that we can get rid of underperforming politicians and parties. But it is bad, in that there isn't a lot of incentive for politicians and parties to plan over a longer timescale than 4 or 5 years. China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.

Long-term planning on a colossal scale (like nation-state-level) (or even on a not-so-colossal scale - think of how many plans YOU have made and how they turned out) is pointless because of black swans Sure, having a general idea of where you want things to go is fine, and everyone already does that; but when a government starts thinking that they should set a concrete goal X and they should do Y to achieve it, it's…

"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." (variously attributed)

Definitely not advocating for "not having elections, or bigger election cycles" BTW.

Re: Slow

#78

Post by brudgers »

cubefox wrote: post #53
brudgers wrote: post #9

The Art of Computer Programming has been a work in progress since 1962. That’s longer than some of the list items.

Thanks. I was going to ask about long book (or film etc) projects like that. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias took decades to finish. The "Deutsches Wörterbuch" by the Brothers Grimm was started in 1838 and it got finished only in 1961, long after their death.

Unlike most of the list items or a dictionary, Knuth’s work is an ongoing personal creative process rather than an independent mechanism or a collection of data.

Re: Slow

#79

Post by neilk »

I personally find these examples underwhelming. Most of them are processes that require time, like the pitch drop experiment.

I suspect that the things in our lives that truly have value and take a long time aren’t easy to identify as projects. No one person starts it with a clear idea of where it will end. Investment in future capabilities. Knowledge gathering without clear application or business model. Strengthening institutions and traditions of human rights to ensure that no one group can arrest history.

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