Interesting links

Fermi calculations or how to extract good approximates of scarce data

• https://hapax.github.io/physics/hacks/mathematics/statistics/fermi-log-normal/ - How the properties of logarithms and geometric mean create a tool to guesstimate reasonable values from guesses of different orders of magnitude.

• https://hapax.github.io/assets/fermi-estimates.pdf - The same from the same author, but slightly simpler and different examples

• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsEppdvgRisz5xAHG/fermi-estimates - More examples and some of them based on knowing information about a phenomena, for example following a power law. This is the case for the interesting section 'Example 4: How many plays of My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow" have been reported to last.fm?

An operative system that could be used by the scavengers of a hypothetical future society

• https://collapseos.org/ -  I highly recommend following all, or at least a big part of the hyperlinks of the site. Also the Related efforts. I will just simple paste a part of his introduction to give a feeling of this interesting project: Electronics yield enormous power, a power that will give significant advantages to communities that manage to continue mastering it. This will usher a new age of scavenger electronics: parts can't be manufactured any more, but we have billions of parts lying around. Those who can manage to create new designs from those parts with low-tech tools will be very powerful.

Among these scavenged parts are microcontrollers, which are especially powerful but need complex tools (often computers) to program them. Computers, after a few decades, will break down beyond repair and we won't be able to program microcontrollers any more.

To avoid this fate, we need to have a system that can be designed from scavenged parts and program microcontrollers. We also need the generation of engineers that will follow us to be able to create new designs instead of inheriting a legacy of machines that they can't recreate and barely maintain.