Carnival Spirit arrives in Sydney waters.
Understanding in Debates [link]
Lest we in the rest of the world naively believe that the US-promoted style of democratic electing a government is the best in the world, here’s the Memorandum of Understanding that the campaigns signed. A carefully constructed document that ensures that the candidates sponsors interests’ never come up as questions. And if you didn’t get a chance to watch the 2nd debate, watch it here.
Galactic neighbours [article]
European astronomers say that just outside our solar system they’ve found a planet that’s the closest you can get to Earth in location and size.
2nd US Presidential Debate
The second debate starts at 9:00pm at Hofstra University, Long Island, New York. The moderator is CNN’s Candy Crowley. You can watch the debate here, if you’re interested. Check here for your local time (if you’re in Sydney or Delhi).
Are Chinese telecom firms really a danger to national security?
Lifespan
How long will you live? & how long will it seem like? Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist, has some interesting observations on the correlation between heartbeats & lifespans. He says “…larger animals have predictably slower heartbeats than small animals. … The whale is a hundred million times bigger than a shrew, but its heart rate is just a hundred times slower. …..larger animals having a longer life span than smaller animals. These two laws together say, essentially, that there are the same number of heartbeats in your lifetime whether you are a shrew or a whale. It gives rise to the idea that big animals live very long but very slowly, and little ones live very fast but over a very short period of time.” Read more here
Work & Leisure
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.
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