Know everything or die trying

Happy Tuesday! I’m back from my coffee hiatus and it feels so good to be back. This newsletter is less of me drooling over coffee and more of just trying to learn more about everything in general. The main reason I started this newsletter in the first place was to share random bits of useful information that I find informational or amazing. So today there are three things on my mind.

In this issue

🏛 Multiple classes from Google that everyone should take just because.

🎥 A mini-documentary about AI and protein folding.

🎻 Now relax with some beautiful music you uncultured swine.

Google launched Coursera classes for a bunch of things

The trendline that I see with education in the future is a hybrid model, like everything else. The panorama showed that a lot of what we do can move to, or at least be supplemented by, the internet. This includes higher education. There will always be some classes that need to be explained in person, but there are many more that can be done outside of a university at the students’ own pace.

A while back Google announced a few online classes that anyone can take and at the end of it you’ll get a certificate that you can put on your LinkedIn or resume and they just recently launched. Aside from just learning valuable skills, Google (and a number of others) will also accept the certificate as the equivalent of a four-year degree in their hiring process.

AlphaFold is dope

Back in the day before humanity figured out that DNA was the building blocks of life, there was a strong case to be made for proteins. Proteins are insanely complicated and it’s a lot easier to believe that they’re responsible for the insane diversity of life instead of the four basic-ass components of DNA. We now know (thanks to Oswald Avery and his famous bacteriophage experiment) that it is DNA that holds the key to heredity. But what about proteins?

Turns out that unlike DNA, predicting the shape and function of. protein just by knowing what it’s made of is really, really hard. It’s something that the team at DeepMind have been working on for years, and using AI and machine learning they finally managed to do it. This entire paragraph was both a crazy over-explanation and a dramatic over-simplification so it’s probably best to just watch the video.

Enough learning. Ladies and gentlemen, Yo-Yo Ma

Yo-Yo Ma is one of the most famous cellists in the world, and while I’ve listened to some of his pieces I’ve never taken the time to search him on YouTube for some reason. Recently, I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR Tiny Desk concerts and the algorithm surfaced the one that Yo-Yo Ma did back in 2018.

I’ve never seen him speak and had no idea how he looked, so I immediately clicked play. Along with some fun life-lessons he just absolutely kills it. It’s definitely worth checking out.