FreakTakes
I want to help people start historically great labs. Operational histories on history's best R&D orgs. Click to read FreakTakes, by Eric Gilliam, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
- Posts
- 64 from 30 Jan 2021 to 13 Oct 2026
- Posting
- monthly (7 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://www.freaktakes.com/feed
2026 7
2025 8
- An Interview with Jano Costard, Head of Challenges at SPRIN-D
- Wanted: New Instruments to Fund BBNs
- An Oral History Interview with ARIA CEO Ilan Gur
- An Oral History Interview with ARIA CEO Ilan Gur [Transcript]
- My Appearance on the Foresight Institute Podcast
- A Category Theory-Inspired BBN
- A New Chapter At FreakTakes
- Edwin Cohn and the Harvard Blood Factory
2024 6
- A Note on the Changing Faces of (D)ARPA
- A Scrappy Complement to FROs: Building More BBNs
- Everything Old is New Again: Old research models for new-era semiconductor research
- Managing Lockheed’s Skunk Works
- Lessons Answer.AI can learn from history’s greatest R&D labs
- An Interview with Chuck Thorpe on CMU: Operating an autonomous vehicle research powerhouse
2023 15
- “The Third University of Cambridge”: BBN and the Development of the ARPAnet
- The Autonomous Land Vehicle, Pilot's Associate, and Battle Management
- Mosis
- Strategic Computing's Machine Acquisition Program
- ILLIAC IV and the Connection Machine
- Coming Soon...Diving into ARPA History
- The Past and Present of Computer-Augmented Hypothesis Generation
- An Alternative Approach to Deep Tech VC
- How Recent Innovation in Jiu-jitsu Helps Us Think About OpenAI’s Future
- Math and Physics’ Divorce, Poetry, and the Scientific Slowdown
- Thomas Edison, Technical Entrepreneur
- Tales of Edison's Lab
- Bonus: More details on how Bell Labs operated
- How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?
- A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology
2022 24
- What would you like to know about how the new science orgs are run?
- Update: What is FreakTakes "about"?
- How fast can a bureaucracy grow in a government scientific department?
- Birds, Frogs, and...Squirrels?
- Feynman on journal reviews, conferences, and the open-mindedness of the physics profession
- Four fun anecdotes from the Feynman Oral Histories
- Irving Langmuir, the General Electric Research Laboratory, and when applications lead to theory
- How Karl Compton believed a research department should be run
- A Progress Studies History of Early MIT — Part 3: The end of the beginning
- A Progress Studies History of Early MIT— Part 2: An Industrial Research Powerhouse
- A Progress Studies History of Early MIT — Part 1: Training the engineers who built the country
- Coming pieces from the Engineering Innovation Substack
- Unpacking the ‘idea’ of entrepreneurship: A case study in successful translational medicine
- We won the war on infectious diseases, but now we need to learn from it
- When do ideas get easier to find?
- Engineering Innovation Updates
- Bombs, Brains, and Science
- Watson’s Double Helix, one small clue, and the importance of knowing what you don’t know
- John von Neumann: A Strange Kind of Bird
- New ideas for making optimal use of experts in grant-funding
- The Industrialist: An applied R&D lab bringing the insights of development economics to Indian factories
- Is America’s applied and basic research really “applied” or “basic”?
- What should new-age research organizations be optimizing for?
- Creating a New Ecosystem of Research and Innovation