Stealing clouds using balloons and acid | Cameron's July Newsletter

Hey everyone 👋

Welcome (back) to my monthly newsletter, where you can hear about what I’m working on and my favourite songs from the past month, all in one place! Enjoy!

Lessons from X

I just spent two weeks at X. A couple of months ago, I was given the opportunity to spend the last two weeks of July at X in California. As part of this trip, we formed teams to come up with new moonshots and pitch them to a panel of judges. This whole experience has taught me so much, below are three lessons I learned from the experience.

1. Perfect really is the enemy of good. My team spent so much time looking for a perfect solution that solved an important problem while incorporating some sort of “gimmick” to excite X. As you might imagine, we failed. A lot. We wasted over two days coming up with gimmicky ideas like “balloons that steal water from clouds using a superacid polymer.” If we had spent that time on a realistic idea, we would have been in better shape for the pitch.

2. The future is boring. We had a talk about ways to imagine realistic futures, and one thing they brought up is that people in the future aren’t the “main character”. Normal people use technology for normal, mundane things. That will never change, so we should try to imagine the organic growth of humanity towards some future state. The future might be existing to us, but for the people living in it, it’s boring.

3. Ask questions where you’ll learn something regardless of the result. It’s a bad idea to run an experiment where you’ll only learn something if a specific outcome happens. Knowing life, that outcome won’t happen and the entire experiment will be worthless. If you run an experiment that will teach you something regardless of the outcome, you know you’ll get some value out of it no matter what.

This experience was incredible and something I’ll remember for a long time. I’m so grateful to everyone on both the X side and the TKS side who helped organize it, and I’m so thankful I got picked to go. I hope many more students will have this experience in the future. I’ll be posting a medium article in the next few days going further into this experience, so stay tuned for that.

Some song recommendations

I always like to share my top three songs from the past month in every monthly newsletter. Here are my favourite July jams:

Automatic paper piracy

I really don’t like the academic publishing industry. I’m a broke student, so I don’t have the money to spend $50 on every paper I read. I don’t think anyone does. Enter SciHub.

SciHub lets you pirate almost any scientific paper ever written, with a better interface than many journals. It’s kinda annoying to have to copy-paste the link to the paper into SciHub every time you want to read an article, though.

A couple of days ago, I found a super useful extension called Sci-Hub X Now that lets you open the article in SciHub with one click. I found it useful, so I decided to share it here.

What’s next?

I’ve got a bunch of smaller and long-term projects that I’m planning to finish up on before the end of summer. After that, I’ve got a project in graphene and a project in ribozymes that I’d like to get started on. With that said, see you next month!