May 2012
45 posts
“On the morning of March 15, Felix Baumgartner scooted forward, stood up, and...”
– The 120,000-Foot Leap | Flight Today | Air & Space Magazine
“All of this rumination is not intended to serve as a defense of Wall Street’s...”
– Information Was Meant To Be Expensive | The American Conservative
2 tags
Coffee Break - A/V Edition
Some movies and shows I’ve enjoyed in the past few months:
Senna - engrossing documentary about the Brazillian F1 driver Ayrton Senna. What makes this doc especially compelling is the depth of the behind-the scenes-footage, including Senna arguing with race officials over a course layout that eventually contributed to his death. Also interesting is how the story bridges purely analog and...
4 tags
“The military analyst Thomas P. M. Barnett has come up with a vivid thought...”
– China Airborne | James Fallows
The Chinese air transportation industry makes for an fascinating read.
Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for; can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow’s springs are the same. No mouth had, nor no mind...
“Intended to be a work of no redeeming social value and even less literary value,...”
– Mike McGrady, Known for a Literary Hoax, Dies at 78 - NYTimes.com
Great story.
“Because i did not have a design degree, many in the office felt that I...”
– Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter | PBS
1 tag
Things that lead to froth:
Celebrity angel investors
Pseudo-celebrity institutional investors
“Sure thing” incubators
A compelling narrative for why this time is different
Ready tales of overnight success
Things that lead to bubbles:
Hidden correlations
Rapid deregulation
A large, opaque, and poorly understood asset class
Human nature
$$$
“So what about Facebook? Like Blackstone, a great company and a leader in its...”
– Information Arbitrage: Is FB the next BX?
The FT oped Roger mentions in this post can be found here.
“Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter...”
– Rands In Repose: Please Learn to Write
“There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly.”
– There are no small changes | The Contrast Blog
“Manually RT-ing praise to “reply” to a follower/fan is the single most...”
– 11 Ways You’re Annoying On Twitter
Buzzfeed, I love you.
“A guy called Ray Kurzweil said a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to...”
– Youth: What is it like to be a young person (10 to 18 years old) now? - Quora
Everything about this answer gives me hope.
So how did we get to this point? Back in the 1920s, when blimps and other airships seemed like a useful military technology, the United States set up a national helium program. In the 1960s, it opened the Federal Helium Reserve, an 11,000-acre site in the Hugoton-Panhandle Gas Field that spans Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. The porous brown rock is one of the only geological formations on Earth...
“Modern societies need current, detailed social and economic statistics; the US...”
– A Future Without Key Social and Economic Statistics for the Country | Director’s Blog
“The aspiration of this blog is not cure the world of cognitive biases. Rather,...”
– Behavioral Macro
Love to see practitioners blogging
“17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the...”
– via Laws of Spacecraft Design…
These are all great.
WatchLightplot - Dancer Test (by Ben Cowell Thomas)
1 tag
“John Watson composes his blog in Times New Roman and Helvetica. Acceptable. But...”
– “A Scandal In Belgravia” | Sherlock | The A.V. Club
Bravo.
“It’s like the fellow who leads a huge bear on a chain into the town square...”
– The Inmates Are Running the Asylum | Alan Cooper
“Work from large to small. Always.”
– Getting Real: Ignore Details Early On (by 37signals)
“The world Conard describes too often feels grim and soulless, one in which art...”
– Romney’s Former Bain Partner Makes a Case for Inequality - NYTimes.com
Nope.
“Scrap comments sections, and add serious editors to filter the smartest emails...”
– The Feedback Firehose - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
This works nicely for the Dish. I suspect it’d work well for a number of pundits with personal brands.
“There are dozens of perfectly relevant features I haven’t added to NV because...”
– An interview with Notational Velocity developer Zachary Schneirov – Surat Says
Schneirov exhibits a special type of integrity when it comes to NV.
“Current advertisements for this cereal portray adults in some form unable to...”
– Cinnamon Toast Crunch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Text-only tv spots.
“It’s fairly difficult to overestimate how uncertain people are and how much they...”
– Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 9 Notes Essay
“Just as it’s a mistake to think that you’ll have multiple equal revenue streams,...”
– Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 9 Notes Essay
“The pundit’s fallacy is that belief that what a politician needs to do to...”
– The Pundit’s Fallacy | Matt Yglesias
Startup corollary: The power user’s fallacy is the belief that what a CEO needs to do to improve his or her product is do what the user wants substantively.
I, along with everyone else with a blog or twitter account, am surely guilty of this...
“Nobody wants to admit to being part of a bubble. It’s like asking people...”
– A Human’s Guide To The Tech Bubble
April 2012
34 posts
“The term “depressive realism” was coined by researchers back at the end of the...”
– Sadder but wiser - Jacob Burak explores how our mood influences the investments we make | Gründerszene
File under: sad but true.
“E&Y has stepped into the void, proposing three different models for social...”
– How Zynga, Facebook and Groupon’s Go-To Auditor Rewrites Accounting Rules - Forbes
“Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a...”
– Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations - NYTimes.com
“Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich” is the sexiest accounting term I’ve ever heard.