samovar_booth

Wow, this reads just like the story of the internet. And even California itself.

Started out as a strange, insular place that attracted a bunch of exuberant people who cultivated a unique and highly creative culture.

But once the capital class realized that all of these clowns created a huge opportunity, the place was occupied by powerful and unaccountable players who choked all of the joy and creativity out of it in their quest to transform it into a finely tuned and perfectly predictable money making machine.

For the record, individual atoms were imaged for the first time back in 1955:

http://pubsapp.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8348atoms.html?

> On Oct. 11, 1955, Pennsylvania State University physics professor Erwin W. Müller and Kanwar Bahadur, who at the time was a Ph.D. student working with Müller, made history by being the first people to image individual atoms. The scientists were using a relatively simple and inexpensive instrument, and with it they directly observed individual tungsten atoms at the tip of a sharply pointed tungsten specimen.

Wow, thanks for that link, that's an amazing essay.

Very cool!

Do folks feel like there would be value in a hosted service that provides a backend for spaced-repetition apps? It's a bit niche, but feels like there would be demand for a service that would let folks build memorization apps without having to manage their own spaced repetition implementation.