Engineer, Author, and Father of 5 📕 Rocket Science for Kids Book🚀 📚 Caltech, SpaceX, and Reader of Books
El Segundo, CA
Joined July 2012
- Tweets1.9K
- Following1.2K
- Followers467
- Likes28K
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
In most schools kids learn the same material at the same time.
If a kid gets it early, they wait.
If they need more time, they move on anyway with a gap.
Self-paced learning fixes both problems because the kid moves when they're ready.
Would your kid have done better if school let them move at their own pace?
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
Just when I thought I was done... Thanks to reader feedback, I've updated the map that appeared in Space Dirt🚀 last week.
With well over 300 companies, this is officially the 8th version of my SoCal Hard Tech Landscape Map.
If you'd like a copy...
Comment "map" below, and I'll send it over.
(DMs work, too.)
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
>$0.016/W: amortized power cost – best in North America. Not bad!
> built in 2 months
hooooly
At @TerraformIndies we're often asked how, as a tiny start up in California, did we manage to build the cheapest utility scale solar array in North America? I asked @buildmattw to write a post on how he did it.
terraformindustries.wordpres…
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
At @TerraformIndies we're often asked how, as a tiny start up in California, did we manage to build the cheapest utility scale solar array in North America? I asked @buildmattw to write a post on how he did it.
terraformindustries.wordpres…
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
If you're not physically reconfiguring atoms at massive scale with enormous quantities of energy. You're not going to make it.
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
I wrote an update on what we've done at Terraform this year, and what's next (roadmap.terraformindustries.…) terraformindustries.wordpres…
It's a good day to make synthetic fuels.
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
If you are an ambitious young person
I still believe joining @SpaceX is one of the best career decisions you can make
The world is pivoting from bits to atoms and there is no better training ground for atoms than SpaceX
It may feel late but it's early
Also the mission! 🚀🌕
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
Things overheard today at SpaceX:
Small teams with big ambitions have always been the ones that change the world.
The people who say "that's impossible" are usually just describing their own limits.
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
Love this image on the site
Read highagency.com by @george__mack
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
The craziest academic growth I've ever seen from a student
This student blew Bloom's TwoSigma Problem out of the water; they added 61 RIT points in a year (11 SDs of Growth).
A huge part of this is that they did math work 7 days a week (not just on weekdays) and that they did math 7 days a week over the summer
When most kids lost ~5 RIT points, he added ~10 over the summer for a delta of 15 RIT points compared to peers.
He's also constantly reinforcing his math with other engineering and science topics, so getting repeated exposure to existing knowledge and new ideas.
LMK if anyone wants an in-depth post of exactly how much math he does per day, which curriculums he uses...etc
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
The most hard-hitting 2 sentences in all of talent development research:
The best career advice for young people is to just focus relentlessly on 3 things:
1. Get skilled. Technical skills, writing skills, people-orchestration skills, everything.
2. Get involved contributing to a mission you're aligned with. It doesn't have to be pure bliss and your contribution doesn't have to match your top strengths exactly. But at the end of the day you have to feel some pride in what you did or what you learned. If you can find something like that while becoming skilled in a number of different ways then you'll find ways to increasingly wrap your skill profile around it (and you'll find/develop strengths in your skill profile that you never expected).
3. Pick up momentum. If you do (1) and (2) right then you've got direction and potential and all that's left is to sprint forwards and achieve it. The more momentum you pick up, the better you get, the more real value you produce, the more opportunities you create, the more you get noticed, the more value you capture into your own life, the more effort you want to put in... you create a virtuous cycle with so much momentum behind it that it becomes an unstoppable virtuous cyclone.
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
This is a very expensive offering, you should only take it if you're interested in your kid doing calculus by ~12 and loving math
That kind of acceleration is not interesting or relevant to most families, and I do not recommend buying this product unless you're obsessed with your kid getting into MIT at 15 or 16 (should they choose to want that).
If you are obsessed with that idea and want your kid to be tutored by uniquely talented tutors and to leverage an AI that uses way too many tokens to add marginal gain
it could be a good product for you
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
Have a 10th kid. Go into debt if you have to.
(Not pictured: Baby #10, born in March. This shot is from summer 2024.)
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
This is too much fun. A render of how the quilted hyperbolic isotensoid Mars city structure might work.
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
It's a lot easier to put forth a massive volume of intense work when you
1) love what you do
2) are heavily incentivized to do it
3) know that you're learning a lot and are continuing to skill up at a rapid pace
4) have so much and such a high diversity of work to do that you can take a break from one thing by working on another task that is very different in nature
Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚 retweeted
I've been storing this one for quite a while!
We now officially supply chemically pure grade methane in California with our partner @westairgases. Photos are with our first externalized six pack during the spring.
An insane amount of hard work went into making this happen. I try not to think too much about the blood sweat and tears of the last five years but this milestone makes it particularly sweet.
westairgases.com/news/terraf…
Terraform is hiring! If you're an ambitious technically minded savant, Terraform is an incredible place to get exposed to every aspect of building a hardware business from sales and hiring to design test and analysis!
