It turns out that many people have only a limited appetite for “leisure” in the sense of spending their days at the beach or on the golf course. Rather, they’re interested in pursuing creative or philanthropic activities that, when pursued in earnest wind up looking a lot like having a job.
Author: neil
Forecasting
It’s budgeting time where I work, & I found this quote pertinent: “You might call this species of cocked-up forecasting the tyranny of significant digits; more broadly, it is the cardinal mistake of dressing up uncertainty—an incalculable unknown—with risk, a highly calculable gamble with discrete odds. Risk is gambling on a flush in poker, knowing the odds are one in four of drawing the suit that you need; uncertainty is playing poker without a clear idea of the rules or the distribution of cards in the deck.” from Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise. (emphasis mine)
Life On Money [Pictures]
You don’t see much of cash & coins in these days of plastic money & internet banking, but here are pictures of what stuff is really on them! (Good reason why you shouldn’t put it in your mouth!)
The Cobra Effect [Podcast]
The unintended consequences of trying to control ….”[T]he “cobra effect” refers to a scheme in colonial India where the British governor, or whoever, the person in charge in Delhi, wanted to rid Delhi of cobras. Apparently in his opinion there were too many cobras in Delhi. So he had the bounty placed on cobras. And he expected this would solve the problem. But the population in Delhi, at least some of it, responded by farming cobras. And all of a sudden the administration was getting too many cobra skins. And they decided the scheme wasn’t as smart as initially it appeared and they rescinded the scheme. But by then the cobra farmers had this little population of cobras to deal with. And what do you do if there’s no market? You just release them. And so this significantly, by a few orders of magnitude, worsened the cobra menace in Delhi.” – Vikas Mehrotra
The Other Son [Movie}
This is a movie I will watch (& I don’t watch too many). The two boys in “The Other Son” have been raised to resent and hate each other, and now find out that they are each other. The “Jewish” boy is not Jewish, the rabbi explains to him, because his mother was not Jewish. The boy protests that he has been an observant Jew for every day of his life. Not good enough, the rabbi regrets. The boy has only to take a few more steps and he can convert. The boy is outraged–he, a lifelong Jew, must convert to Judaism?
What if money was no object? [Video]
The History of the Profile Pictures [Article]
Andrew Sullivan links to two articles that trace the history of the now common profile picture
Microbes & Immune Systems [Book Review]
In these days of instant everything, we need evidence to support any claims (forget centuries-old, traditional ways of life), while propaganda (of all sorts) is quickly accepted as fact (Doubt it? Do you use toothpaste? How much do you know about what’s in it?). Author Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a sufferer of asthma, hay fever, food allergies & alopecia (hair loss, in case you wondered!), & fascinated with the prevalence of allergies in recent times despite improved sanitation, hygiene, vaccines & antibiotics, crossed over into Tijuana, Mexico, to infect himself with hookworms in an attempt to cure himself. He came out of it with a book, “An Epidemic of Absence”, a cure for his sinuses, no extra hair growth, & demonstrating among other things that:
- “microbes are neither good nor bad, but can be either or both depending on the context in which we encounter them. And the real cause of the allergy and autoimmune epidemic is that we have severely screwed up that context, both inside our guts and outside in the rest of the environment . [linked via Ars Technica]
- Allergic and autoimmune conditions are far more frequent in rich countries than poor ones, even among genetically identical populations [linked via NYTimes]
Felix Baumgartner’s jump visualised [Image]
You’ll have already heard of Felix Baumgartner’s incredible jump from the edge of outer space [click here if you haven’t seen it yet, without any of the nuisance commentaries from news anchors, & to know how painstakingly elaborate the whole procedure was!]. And to get a visual idea of how high he really was, check out image created by Johnnie Manzari.
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Tubes – aka Internet [Book Review]
Wired Magazine’s Andrew Blum is the author of a book called Tubes – as this review of the book by the New York Times assures, it is an interesting journey through this relatively recent, addictive, & fascinating invention of modern times.