Paul Hansel

Category: optimism

  • Follow-up on Clear Skies, Clear Minds @ UChicago Library (Feb 13, 2025)

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    This is a summary of my notes from the Clear Skies, Clear Minds geoengineering talk at UChicago this past Thursday (February 13, 2025). This was an event open to the public. I covered my own travel and accommodations to attend. The event page is here: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/conferences/clear-skies-clear-minds-harnessing-open-research-to-find-climate-solutions/. There were three 1-hour sections during the event. Professor…

  • In praise of open source hardware

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    This year, I plan to spend more time documenting the work I do that is accelerated by the use of open-source resources. To kick off that effort, I’ll describe a small project I finished this week. 3D-printing and open source hardware is eating the world. I don’t know who Sleighbells64 is, and given that their…

  • Are good things still happening?

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    Some excitement, past and future. From UNSW, new research: quantifying the urban heat island effect in cities like Sydney and Kolkata. Community Earth System Model 3: Incoming update to the CESM series of open-source planetary physics simulators, targeted for this summer. Potentially featuring better clouds. Upcoming NASA science missions: Including Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1…

  • Pack it up, Mark: a 15-year Thanksgiving retrospective

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    Way back in January 2009, I joined Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Poke! It’s now November 2024. I’m not yet 30, so 15 years is a majority of my life. In that time, Facebook’s valuation grew from $10 billion to $1,400 billion, Mark changed up his fit, Myanmar’s military exploited Facebook to execute an ethnic cleansing, and…

  • Silicon Valley Engineers: The Visionaries Who Are Changing Everything

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    Imagine if every cracked engineer in the world converged on Silicon Valley (which, let’s be real, is already happening). Intel would likely leapfrog TSMC. Apple’s phones might actually run cutting-edge AI models locally and boast solid-state batteries. We’d see mobile silicon fabrication units popping up everywhere – and spent units almost as common by the…