Quick Notes!

I am not a car guy. I have little interest in F1 - except for when I hear stories of unbelievable design iteration speed. At this year’s ARIA Summit, Caroline Hargrove told of one of McLaren’s cars performing poorly in the Thursday practice in Monaco. By Friday, they designed and manufactured a new wing, to be installed in Monaco on Saturday. Caroline carried the wing on her BA flight, putting it in the seat next to her - not exactly inconspicuous!

F1 is an example of the UK excelling in engineering, they have brilliant specialist supply chains, engineering teams who can move at pace, and the budget to match it! What can we do to bring this excellence and speed to other areas? What would it look like to have a scientific team performing at the standard an F1 team is?

Very few of these F1 stories are available online - if you’ve got these stories, then I’d love to speak with you.

Everyone (?) loves French bread, and somehow it’s impossible to find in the UK. Somewhere between Calais and Dover, bakers lose the ability to create the perfect baguette. Fortunately, at 7:12 AM every morning (and every half hour after that), a train screams from Paris to London. Fill the luggage racks with baguettes, open a stall at the King’s Cross Market, and you’d make a killing from the only “real” French baguette in London.

When I think about post-singularity abundance, I think of this pavement in Sevres, Paris. For many years, we had to schlep along a tiny curb next to a busy main road, there was a clear need for a footpath. As you might expect, the Parisian approach was not to quickly put in a basic path but to spend five years creating the most decadent pavement ever seen. Fountains with Sevres porcelain tiles, statues, hand-placed cobblestones - this is what I imagine every footpath looks like with post-singularity abundance.

P.S. I am more interested in solving disease, hunger, and basic human needs than decadent pavements - but it’s a fun musing.

UKG are devolving more decision making and spending power to the regions (Mayoral Combined Authorities), but the ecosystem required to support policy making has not moved. In London there are clusters of thinktanks proposing and supporting new policy ideas. What would it look like to have a local South Yorkshire thinktank with inside views on policies for South Yorkshire?

I’ve always got a rogue pitch for something that I’d like to be built in Sheffield:

SYMCA should buy Stanage Lodge and turn it into an “investor retreat venue”. They should then wine and dine US VCs pitching Sheffield as the outdoor city with an engineering heritage.

I write this from the comfort of the 7AM Sheffield to London train. The journey has been an “offline Google Docs” only affair. Occasionally I get really fast mobile data and can attempt to quickly catchup with emails but communication with the outside world is limited. My understanding is that this is not a technological problem but one of market incentives.¹ Network providers are incentivised by UKG to install phone masts based on where people live. Changing these rules to cover major commuter routes could be a quick and cheap upgrade to the UK rail network.

Since 1995, melatonin has been a prescription-only drug in the UK, why is this and what would have to happen for this to change?¹ A full cost-benefit would consider the impact it would have on nightshift workers including doctors.

December 2016, after Church I sit excitedly in the Grindstone pub, pitching my friends on giving out mince pies to our whole engineering cohort. Without request Mark Russel whipped out £20 to pay for the idea. This small amount of money had a huge impact on me - Mark encouraged high-agency, funded me, and counterfactually made the mince pie handing out happen.

£100-1000 has a huge impact on students. I for one would have dedicated all my free time to something if given that much money. Should I have a tiny grant pot to incentivise people to pickup projects?

I’m often in conversations about how to help UK startups raise investment. A classic question is “how do we support founders who are too early for UK venture capital?”. As I spoke to one policy maker about this very question I realised I didn’t really know if these “unfundable” people or ideas existed. I want clear case studies for funding mechanisms failing - without these it is really difficult to properly diagnose what is going wrong. I fear that in discussions about startup funding people are talking over one another as they do not have a shared understanding of what ideas are not being funded.

Cambridge Consultants has spun out twenty-seven startups and four unicorns - a track record better than any UK venture capitalist or university.¹ If CC were in the Silicon Valley, we would all know how they achieved this, I want to tell this story better and bring more information about their heyday to the startup community. David Connell’s piece “Exploding the Myths of UK Innovation Policy” is a great reference text for this.

While moving house, I found a notebook from when I was 14. It contained a list of cycling related blog ideas, inspired by DC Rainmaker. I spent hours planning these posts but never had the courage to publish anything.

So, whilst I’d like to write essays, to break this pattern I’m now keeping some of my ideas in a public list. This doesn’t include my professional projects—for those, DM me for Google Doc access.

In 1973 NASA launched Skylab 3 - a 59-day, manned, orbital mission. Aboard this spacestation was an automated cell culture system - the “Woodlawn Wanderer 9”. Over the next 50 years no-one has cracked automated mammalian cell culture. What can we learn from their system?

If you’re working on a problem in science, engineering, or medicine then NASA has already thought about it. NASA’s work touches every part of STEM and fortunately for you they write about most of it on their technical report server (NTRS). No one should start a project without first checking there! And as a second shot - the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).