- Is it skills I have never heard of or should I double down on things I am already good at?
Possibly Focusing.
Why is sleep so universal among animals?
Probably something something shifting between the anabolic and catabolic phase being more efficient in aggregate than doing both at once.
How did pink become a color associated with girls?
Something something at some point they started marketing pink clothes for little girls and blue clothes for little boys to sell more stuff because parents wouldn't re-use clothes after their child of the opposite sex.
How much more or less rich are the languages of remote cultures?
Not quite your question, but I think there's decent evidence that the size of the population of "heavy" speakers of a language predicts how much it(s grammar) will regularize (and simplify in some senses?), at least compared to its less common kin. E.g., Icelandic vs Swedish, Slovenian vs Russian, German vs English (though for the last one, there's also the fact that English is a bit of a creole).
What advice/concrete instructions would a future superintelligence send down to me that would completely transform my life
This is tricky, because there is a tradeoff between how good the advice is, and your ability to use it properly.
When I thought about an advice I could give (using some kind of time machine) to my younger self, I thought "but there is little chance that my younger self would interpret these instructions correctly". It would be cheating to post the entire Sequences. I am not sure if I could make a useful extract, especially one that cannot be easily misinterpreted by a teenager.
So similarly, if suddenly a portal opened and my older (post-Signularity?) self gave me some good advice, I would probably start screaming: "I need more details!"
Why is the number of different vegetables not exploding?
Map vs territory: are we really missing new vegetables, or only new names for vegetables? I mean, are there some things that we just call "adjective1 X" and "adjective2 X" because they appeared relatively recently, but we would have separate names "X" and "Y" for them if they appeared millennia ago?
I mean, who decides that red / yellow / green bell pepper are considered the same kind of vegetable, or white / yellow / red / purple raddish, but e.g. broccoli and cauliflower are considered different vegetables?
How exactly did we bootstrap ourselves to smaller and smaller computer hardware?
Not sure I understand the question. We started with big. But if you try making things faster, you are limited by the speed of light (or electricity) in you circuits. These days, with gigahertz speeds, it's literally centimeters. Though I am not sure whether this was the actually the first reason for computers getting smaller.
I am tired, but haven't given up on Halfhaven yet, so I am lowering my standards and will probably just write more unstructured brainstorming exercises. Today I am just posting 25 questions that interested me that I came up with while looking around my room.