Work Harder, Do More

Welcome to?The?Art?of?The?Impossible, a weekly newsletter where I unearth five pieces?of?content which I hope will both inspire?and?embolden you.

PODCAST

This week's guest on the podcast is Anil Ananthaswamy - an award-winning science writer and former staff writer and deputy news editor for New Scientist magazine. He is a 2019-20 MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow and has been a guest editor for the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and organizes and teaches an annual science writing workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India.

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts from.

He is a freelance feature editor for PNAS Front Matter. He writes regularly for New Scientist, Quanta, Scientific American, PNAS Front Matter and Nature, and has contributed to Nautilus, Matter,?The Wall Street Journal, Discover?and the UK’s Literary Review, among others.

He has written four award-winning books including The Edge of Physics: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology - voted book of the year in 2010 by UK’s Physics World,

The Man Who Wasn’t There: Tales from the Edge of the Self - was long-listed for the 2016 Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award,?

Through Two Doors at Once: The Enigmatic Story of our Quantum Reality- was named one of?Smithsonian's Favorite Books of 2018 and one of?Forbes's 2018 Best Books About Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics.

And his latest book, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI which Geoffrey Hinton labelled "A masterpiece."

In this episode, we discuss his start in life, why he went from a career in software to writing and dig deeper into Why Machines Learn including a history of neural networks. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts from.

Also, worth checking out the Complexity Podcast - the great Melanie Mitchell will be co-hosting this series, kicking off this Wednesday.

QUOTE

“But even as a young child, I understood something critical: What I lacked in natural ability, I could make up for in effort. I could work harder, put in more hours, do more, and do it with greater care.” Katalin Karikó

You can listen to Katalin interviewed on the Joe Walker podcast here.

INTERVIEW

This is a great interview with the fantastic Daphne Koller - CEO and founder of insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery and development company. Daphne was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, the co-CEO and president of Coursera, and the recipient of numerous prestigious prizes in computing and engineering, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Interviewed by Joel Hellermark - founder and CEO of Sana. An enterprising child, Joel taught himself to code in C at age 13 and founded his first company, a video recommendation technology, at 16. In 2021, Joel topped the Forbes 30 Under 30.

Watch the interview here.

BOOK

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari

Currently on my reading list! The story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Sapiens Stories brought us together. Books spread our ideas – and our mythologies. The internet promised infinite knowledge. The algorithm learned our secrets – and then turned us against each other. What will AI do? NEXUS is the thrilling account of how we arrived at this moment, and the urgent choices we must now make to survive – and to thrive.

Have you read it yet?

Buy the book here.

FILM

Vitalik: An Ethereum Story

Vitalik: An Ethereum Story is a feature documentary chronicling tech visionary Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum’s community of builders as they fight for an open internet accessible to all.

Check it out here. Catch one of the world premiers here or wait until 2025 for worldwide release.

Thank you so much for reading?the?newsletter?and?for listening to?the?podcast, and?if you enjoy them, please do share with your network - my goal is to have these stories reach as many as possible so that others can be inspired too. And if you have two minutes, please do leave a review for the podcast - it would mean the world to me and helps others to find it too.

Danielle