Skip to main content

February 14, 2018

From The Economist:
Distraction is a constant these days; supplying it is the business model of some of the world’s most powerful firms.

From The Economist:
Depending on the study you pick, smartphone-users touch their device somewhere between twice a minute to once every seven minutes.

From Harper's:
A six-year-old Moroccan girl who presented with difficulty breathing was found to have a leech living in her throat.

From Harper's:
Delta waves were recorded in the brain of a Canadian man ten minutes after he died.

From Jean-Luc Godard:
To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 24, 2018

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...
Post a Comment
Read more

January 30

From  University of Virginia Working Paper : This paper studies how collecting offender DNA profiles affects offenders’ later recidivism and likelihood of getting caught by exploiting a large expansion of Denmark’s DNA database. We find that DNA profiling increases detection probability and reduces recidivism within the following year by as much as 43%. We estimate the elasticity of criminal behavior with respect to the probability of detection to be -1.7, implying that a 1% higher detection probability reduces crime by almost 2%. We also find that DNA profiling changes non-criminal behavior: profiled offenders are more likely to engage in a stable relationship, and live with their children. From Iris Murdoch : Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. From  Iris Murdoch : I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time. From  Iris Murdoch : Of course reading and thinking are impor...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 26, 2018

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...
Post a Comment
Read more