Paul Hansel

Category: optimism

  • Technology in the 22nd century

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    Everything learns 24/7 Is your refrigerator simulating how long a package of cheese can sit on its top shelf before molding, burning power and inflating your power bill? Only if you ask it to. Your new office printer learns. As it ages, its injection-molded parts creep a few microns per millimeter; that’s cancelled out in…

  • The wild Thimble-rose

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    I There was once a province with a secret treasure. In the bedrock beneath the land on which humans lived, a substance far too powerful to mention in public was concentrated. The locals knew little of this material. When they traipsed through the forests and slogged through the marshes, looking for mushrooms and flowers to…

  • Predictable

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    Are you exploring enough? Be honest. You’ve been exploiting again, haven’t you. You’ve been working the same reliable vein of coal that’s kept the boiler fed for years. Have you really resigned yourself to never step outside the mine again? You know it isn’t going to last forever. At some point the roof will cave…

  • The untapped potential of whale brains: FishBux(tm)

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    [The authors do not condone exploitation or abuse of wildlife.] Introduction Whales are an underappreciated part of the marine ecosystem. On the basis of their brain-to-body mass ratio, they have a similar capacity for learning as humans or elephants. Dolphins and killer whales, in particular, can collaborate via intentional acoustic communication to achieve tasks like…

  • 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…