Blog
I'm interested in climate, and this is where I write about it. Carbon capture is my latest focus, so start there, or open any section and begin with the post marked 'Start here.'
Carbon capture and conversion· 5 posts
Assessing climate tech· 4 posts
Biochar· 5 posts
All posts by date
🧪Switching From Glucose To Formic Acid 🧪
Why I'm starting with formic acid as a profitable first step toward glucose
Different Pathways To Make Glucose
Two failed attempts to make glucose from CO₂, and what they taught me
🌎 Best Way To Scale CO₂ Capture 🌎
Comparing products made from captured CO₂, and why glucose looks like the winner
💸 Why Carbon Pricing Fails 💸
Carbon taxes and credits collapse because nobody wants to pay and get nothing back
The Case For Carbon Capture
96% of excess CO₂ is already in the air, so removing it is the solution
🚀 How Should I Scale This Tech? 🚀
Why a short payback period beats raising billions for your first factory
🚀 Will This Tech Scale? 🚀
Land, raw materials, and profit decide whether a cheap climate technology can scale
💸 Will this tech be cheap? 💸
Using basic chemistry to find the lowest possible cost of a climate technology
🤖 Should I Look Into This Tech? 🤖
Questions to ask before spending your time on any climate technology
🤔 What Is The Goal? 🤔
A good life goal is positive, never-ending, and pursued for its own sake
😎 A Cool Summer With A Smart Guy 😎
Two physics rules that expose bad climate ideas, plus what analogies are really for
What I Learned From One Of The World's Smartest Engineers
Lessons from Antora Energy on judging climate tech with first principles and basic physics
Life is The Greatest Teacher
What 1,000 cold emails, three calls, and a new view of marketing taught me
What I Learned From Spending 2 Weeks in Egypt
Observations from two weeks in Egypt on business, culture, bargaining, and small talk
Why It is Important to Review Your Thinking
Rereading my startup roadmap revealed ordering mistakes I'd never have caught otherwise
Mechatronics Fundamentals - Microcontrollers
How microcontrollers talk to other devices using serial communication and UART
Mechatronics Fundamentals - Sensors
How sensors, filters, and analog-to-digital converters turn the physical world into data
Mechatronics Fundamentals - Electronics
The electronics basics behind an algae device: microcontrollers, circuits, and components
Turning Algae Into A Value Add Product
Turning dried algae into biochar, bio-oil, and diesel, powered by heat stored in sand
Reducing Cost of Drying
Using solar greenhouse dryers to remove nearly all of the cost of drying algae
Reducing Cost of Dewatering/Harvesting
Using fungi to separate algae from water with almost no energy cost
Reducing Cultivation Cost of Algae
Using wastewater, flue gas, and in-reactor lights to cut algae growing costs
Understanding the Cost Factors
Where the money goes in indoor algae farming, and how much land algae would need
Important Variables and Performance Indicators of Chlorella Vulgaris
The light, temperature, pH, and other settings that help Chlorella vulgaris grow best
Algae CO2 Capture Mechanism
How algae pull CO₂ from the air through photosynthesis, step by step
2021 Annual Review
My biggest lessons from 2021 on identity, time blocking, failure, and climate
When Biochar Works and When it Does Not
What 20 years of research says about when biochar boosts crops and when it doesn't
How Pyrolysis Works
The four stages of turning dried biomass into biochar inside a pyrolysis reactor
Talking to Farming Organizations and Understanding How Biochar Stores Carbon
What Iowa farmers need before trying biochar, and how long biochar stays in soil
How Biochar Helps Plants Grow
How biochar's carbon and nitrogen feed photosynthesis, and whether it could scale
How Soil Affects Plant Growth
How soil type, water, and pH control the nutrients a plant can absorb
Carbon Capture Explained
A tour of how carbon capture works, from solvents to direct air capture
Setting your Team Up for Success
Pre-mortems, trust-building, and coaching questions that help managers bring out their team's best
Style Transfer using VGG19
How a pretrained CNN can repaint a photo in the style of a famous painting
How to Create A Successful Company with Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel's case for building a monopoly by starting small and avoiding competition
Using Neural Network to Classify Clothes and Shoes
Building a PyTorch neural network that learns to recognize clothing in Fashion MNIST images
How do Neural Networks Work?
How neurons, weights, and biases let a network learn to recognize handwritten digits
Creating Self-Healing Roads
How steel fibers and induction heating could help asphalt roads repair their own cracks
Cultivating Our Worldview With Habits
How building a clear worldview and good habits shapes who you become
Understanding Our Emotions
Why your emotions aren't you, and how noticing what's behind them helps you respond
The Perfect Conversation Starter
Breaking the ice and leaving an impression from a single question
Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm
The first algorithm to show a quantum computer beating a classical one, explained simply
The Flow State
What the flow state is and practical ways to reach it at work and school
Ahmed Hassan | Oct 2020
October 2020: learning quantum computing, and lessons from a bad presentation and hackathon
Why You Should Think Like A Poker Player
What a poker champion teaches about thinking in probabilities and learning from failure
Quantum Computing For The Curious
How the double-slit experiment explains superposition and the qubits in quantum computers
September 2020 Newsletter
How a calendar, reading, and joining TKS changed my September 2020
Are You Happy?
Why getting more things won't make you happy, and what might instead
How I Stopped Procrastinating
Why we procrastinate, which type of procrastinator you are, and three ways to stop