In a November 2018 interview with Kara Swisher on the Recode Decode podcast (transcript), Musk referenced a modification of Occam's Razor from his friend Jonathan Nolan ("the most ironic outcome is the most likely"), then added his own twist:

Well, it'd be ironic if [I die on Mars, just not on landing]. I have to be careful about tempting fate, because I think often the most ironic outcome is the most probable.

It just very often seems like reality tries to... Actually, technically, there's a friend of mine, Jonah Nolan, who had this like modification of Occam's razor where he said he thinks "the most ironic outcome is the most likely." And then I think that there's some truth to that. And then also I think sometimes the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.

I believe that in this glitchy simulation we call reality, the timeline clearly forked when Israeli pop legend Svika Pick became Quentin Tarantino's son's grandfather - proving once again that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.

In November 2011, I ran four sentences through Google Translate. English to Hebrew.

The sentences:

• I wash the car
• I wash the floor
• I wash the kitchen
• I go shopping

Hebrew is a gendered language. Every verb has a masculine and a feminine form. The translator had to pick one.

It picked masculine for the car. Feminine for the floor. Feminine for the kitchen. Masculine for shopping.

The subject is "I" in all four sentences. The subject has no gender. The only thing that changed was the object.

I posted it to Facebook with the title מה את עושה מחוץ למטבח? The Hebrew idiom for "what are you doing outside the kitchen?". It's the kind of thing a certain kind of man says to a woman who has opinions.

Friends were quick to name it. Statistical sexism. And not just the kitchen. The floor gets the feminine treatment too. Both are inside the house.

Ten years later, I ran the same sentences again.

Hard Drive Speakers

Update: See them play the legendary Second Reality demo by Future Crew.

The kids and I disassembled roughly 40 hard drives.

That's where this started. A pile of old drives, a box of Torx screwdrivers, and kids who were absolutely willing to take things apart.

The goal: build speakers from the drives. Actual stereo speakers, using the read/write head coil as a voice coil. Wire it to an amplifier. The actuator arm vibrates. It makes sound.

It works better than it should.

The idea wasn't original. People have been wiring drive coils to amps for years. A quick search turns up dozens of experiments, ranging from quick tests to proper tutorials to someone asking the obvious question out loud. One person even went further and attached a speaker cone to the actuator arm to improve output.

Each speaker is a pair of drives on a panel. One handles bass, one handles treble. A passive crossover splits the signal. The drives are open, covers removed, platters exposed. In the mockup iterations, the panels were wood.

Later, 3D printed enclosures with a cleaner fit and attempted acoustics.

The enclosures were too large to print in one piece, so I split them into sections, connected them with screws hidden below the covers, and filled the gaps with black hot melt glue.

I designed a 3D printed chassis for a standalone RaspiBlitz appliance.

RaspiBlitz is a DIY Bitcoin full node running together with a Lightning node on a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen display. It was created by developer Christian Rotzoll and is backed by Fulmo, a Berlin-based Bitcoin startup that runs Lightning Network hackathons worldwide.

Running your own Bitcoin node means you don't have to trust anyone else as your source of truth. If you accept Bitcoin payments through someone else's node, that data can be spoofed. "Not your node, not your rules", as the RaspiBlitz docs put it. It's the infrastructure layer of financial self-sovereignty.

The Lightning Network runs on top of the full node as a second layer for fast, low-fee payments. Still experimental, but plenty of people are running it anyway out of enthusiasm and a desire to push the network forward.

Named my node Barracuda, a play on the words Barak (ברק) and Lightning.

There were a few non-obvious gotchas. The initial Bitcoin blockchain sync takes days, not hours. A Lightning channel can only be opened after that sync completes. Finding good peers and covering the on-chain fees for opening channels was more involved than expected. To receive Lightning payments, you also need inbound liquidity, channel capacity on the remote side. You can buy funded channels or use a looping service to rebalance. In total, my node forwarded 335,497 sats, for a 21.6 sat fee.

Update, June 2023: For gaining some hands-on experience with Lightning, I established a few channels and sent transactions between my node and a wallet hosted on BlueWallet's LNDHub. They apparently shut down the service, and users were expected to move funds out by end of May. I didn't get the memo. I filled out a form, but have little hope. Yet another reminder - not your keys, not your coins.

Components

A companion video for a 3D Printing lecture I gave at my kids' elementary school.

0:00:00 - Printing Baby Yoda (while setting up; special guest appearance: Mongo)
0:00:47 - How a 3D printer works
0:01:17 - Printing toys at home (computer modeling, printing, assembly)
0:02:54 - 3D printing food: pizza
0:03:23 - 3D printing food: vegan steak
0:03:49 - 3D printing food: maybe in the future we could print whatever food we want?
0:04:27 - 3D printing food: chocolate and candy 🍫
0:05:30 - Giant printers: printing a boat 🚤
0:05:51 - Giant printers: printing a house 🏡
0:07:05 - 3D printing on another planet: NASA's competition to 3D print a base on Mars
0:08:02 - 3D printing in medicine: replacement parts for the body
0:08:37 - 3D printing in medicine: prosthetics
0:09:22 - Nano-printing: printing a castle on the tip of a pencil ✏️🔬
0:10:51 - A few examples of objects we designed and printed at home

GEB turns 40 this year. Seven hundred and seventy-seven pages about how meaning works. And one of my favorites is about how it shouldn't. Language is magic.

The amazing thing about language is how imprecisely we use it and still manage to get away with it. People use words in a "spongy" or "rubbery" or even "Nutty-Puttyish" way. If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut; they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.

• Douglas Hofstadter, "Gödel, Escher, Bach"