📖 Finished A Little History of Economics on audiobook.

A nice short summary of some of the key ideas throughout the development of Economics.

🙇🏻‍♂️ No More Gurus

There is a difference between an expert, whose talent should always be celebrated, and a guru, whose bad ideas should never be questioned.

With few exceptions we should praise e`xperts but be terrified of gurus.

Success has a way of making those around you question whether they should point out your flaws or question your crazy ideas.

🔬 Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher by Richard Feynman

Should we teach the correct but unfamiliar law with its strange and difficult conceptual ideas, for example the theory of relativity, four-dimensional space-time, and so on? Or should we first teach the simple “constant-mass” law, which is only approximate, but does not involve such difficult ideas? The first is more exciting, more wonderful, and more fun, but the second is easier to get at first, and is a first step to a real understanding of the first idea. This point arises again and again in teaching physics. At different times we shall have to resolve it in different ways, but at each stage it is worth learning what is now known, how accurate it is, how it fits into everything else, and how it may be changed when we learn more.

🏛 The 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, reconstructed

📺 Watching Watchmen on HBO

🎶 Vivaldi Recomposed by Max Richter

📍 Democrats Should Talk About Place-Based Policy

America should make it easier for people to move—toward new places and possibilities, toward better versions of themselves. And America should make it better for people who stay.

🤰🏼 More Pregnancy, Less Crime

A striking chart of crime rates before, during, and after giving birth. Most interesting is that the correlation extends to men as their spouses give birth as well.

🌗 What a Designer Need to Know About iOS Dark Mode When Working with a Developer

A good explanation and excellent sample app to see how iOS system colors change between light and dark modes.

💻 Gitmoji

A guide to emojis and their definitions for use in git commit messages.

📝 Lists: Best of the 2010s Decade

An aggregation of Best of 2010s lists. Just like all of those year-end lists, but for the decade!

🎶 Oyelo Atjazz Remixes

📚 Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record

• Worth reading, at times long-winded, but the amount of thought that went into the information releas is absolutely worth the coverage.
• Really loved the 2nd and 3rd Parts.
• History leading up to his decision to release documents. Many people overlook the televised hearing where James Clapper lied about these programs.
• Deeper technical detail about how documents were smuggled out and released to journalists, including Tor, Tails, Kismet

🧠 Unknown Unknowns: The Problem of Hypocognition

How do we combat psychological biases and unknown unknowns? Well this article doesn’t have too many suggestions but always a good reminder to remain cognizant of them.

🎃 Japan’s Jimi “Mundane” Halloween Contest of 2019

Starbucks face swap, “woman with glasses who drank a hot beverage” are my favorite, and “guy who is about to win in ‘Old Maid’” are my favorites.

🐕 Here’s a better way to convert dog years to human years, scientists say | Science

🎶 Apple Music’s Max Roach Essentials album

🌜 Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal: Program Alarms

We’ve been watching the new Apple TV+ show, For All Mankind. The 1201 and 1202 program alarms were covered thoroughly in 13 Minutes to the Moon, a fantastic exploration of the final 13 minutes of Apollo 11’s lunar descent. This article covers the technical detail of the alarms. I don’t remember the podcast mentioning the reboot + process restart that occurred when these alarms appeared but was mentioned in passing in the show.

🏔 Nirmal Purja Just Shattered the 8,000er Record + Project Possible

Over six months and seven days, [Nirmal Purja] summited all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks

Climbed Everest and Lhotse in one day and helped rescue a distressed climber on Annapurna. 🤯

🧠 Different Kinds of Stupid

Smart is the ability to solve hard problems, which can be done many ways. Stupid is a tendency to not comprehend easy problems.

There are a lot of kinds of smart. There are a lot of kinds of stupid, too.

1. Intelligence creep - thinking intelligence in one arena equates to all
2. Underestimating the complexity of past successes in a way that makes you overestimate their repeatability (Dollo’s Law)
3. Not believing that there are different kinds of smart based on different experiences
4. Persuasion is more important than having the “right” answer
5. “Closed-system thinking” - underestimating the external consequences of your decisions in a hyperconnected world

💵 Diaper rush: conquering a $9 billion market no one wants to talk about

The unglamorous industry of adult diapers. “A demographic shift that reconfigures modern economies” is one of the “big things” pointed out in the list of most important forces shaping the world.

🎶 Michael Kiwanuka - Paino Joint (This Kind of Love)

The Sweet Silence Of The Great Sand Dunes, On Track To Become The First ‘Quiet Zone’ In The US

Great Sand Dunes and the surrounding areas are some of my favorite parts of Colorado. Extraordinary scenery you can’t see anywhere else with few crowds.

Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World

Some interesting thoughts here about 3 primary macroscopic forces shaping our world today: - Demographic shift to a top loaded society - Wealth Inequality - Access to information closes gaps that used to create a social shield of ignorance

Why Aren’t We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About? > This function of curiosity — to heighten memory — is the key to understanding why we’re curious about some things and not others. We feel most curious when exploration will yield the most learning.

Denver scientists have been secretly working on a massive fossil cache for years that illuminates the aftermath of the dino-killing asteroid

• Rise of the Mammals
• Congrats to Ian and Tyler on this announcement! Nice to see DMNS featured on Nova.

MeFi: Eighteen cards, except just one

I’d never heard of Button Shy Games but I love the effort to create new ideas by limiting the size of the game pieces.

You’re Dying on the Street. A Drone Might Be Your Only Hope.

Photographer Spent Days Waiting For Museum Visitors To Match The Artworks They Observe, And it Was Worth It

When a player gets the game

These 7 Social Security myths just aren’t true, no matter how often you hear them - MarketWatch

Good debunking of common myths about Social Security

Melinda Gates: I’m Committing $1 Billion to Gender Equality

‘Big Bad Trusts’ Are a Progressive Myth

Some arguments against breaking up big tech.

Net worth taxes: What they are and how they work - Equitable Growth

TLDR Twitter Thread on the net worth taxes concept

Real Fake Cameras of Toy Story 4 -

Incredible details in Pixar’s animation. Makes sense that they would model real life lenses after watching this.

Inside Bill’s Brain: A Netflix limited series on Bill’s past and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

How Americans Spend Their Money - A good overview of the Consumer Expenditure Survey

How Untitled Goose Game adapted Debussy for its dynamic soundtrack - I’ve been enjoying Untitled Goose Game this week. The soundtrack is completely dynamic, reacting to anything the player does. This story describes the interesting story behind how it was made.

Elizabeth Warren Interview - Some nice bits about her teaching career.

Edward Snowden on Fresh Air - Some good updates and a couple of stories I hadn’t heard before. Just started reading the new book.

Fall of Civilizations podcast - Fantastic series with better production value than most.

Animated Pixel Art map of the US

Best iPhone 11 Camera Review from iphonedo

An alternative to Unicorns: Crickets

Rolling Stone profile on Mitch McConnell

It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it.

The need for new economic statistics (2018)

How Datacenter locations are driven by 19th century politics

Air Conditioning is Warming the Earth

Air conditioning is very greenhouse gas-intensive, which contributes to the warming of the planet. Which causes more people use air conditioning. And so on. In a long Guardian piece, Stephen Buranyi lays out how air conditioning came to be so ubiquitous and how we might escape this air conditioning trap we find ourselves in.

Phasing out the use of CFCs & HCFCs in new units and capturing the refrigerants in discarded units can prevent global warming to such a degree that it’s the #1 way to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The core idea is that we must be able to converse about how the digital economy is affecting our privacy.

A problem without a name cannot command attention, understanding, or resources—three essential ingredients of change.

While Social Media has probably led this charge, I can’t help but wonder how much more it will increase with a future AR layer and other connective technologies.

After the widespread adoption of social media and smartphones, the internet evolved from a tool that helped us do certain things to the primary surface for our very existence. And the more we depend on technology, the more it changes us.

The toothless FTC and incapable governments are mostly to blame for our present problems. Economic incentives or regulation could solve many of the privacy concerns.

Commercial forces are taking basic questions out of our hands. It is treated as inevitable that there must be billons of posts, billions of pictures, billions of videos. The focus is on business: more users, more engagement, and greater activity.”

…the common refrain of “We are just a platform for our users” is a decision by default. There can be no illusions here: corporate executives are making critical societal choices. Every major internet company has some form of “community standards” about acceptable practices and content; these standards are expressions of their own values. The problem is that, given their pervasive role, these companies’ values come to govern all of our lives without our input or consent.

Unfortunately, harassment and misinformation are much more difficult problems to solve.

…digital pollution is more complicated than industrial pollution. Industrial pollution is the by-product of a value-producing process, not the product itself. On the internet, value and harm are often one and the same. It is the convenience of instantaneous communication that forces us to constantly check our phones out of worry that we might miss a message or notification. It is the way the internet allows more expression that amplifies hate speech, harassment, and misinformation than at any point in human history. And it is the helpful personalization of services that demands the constant collecting and digesting of personal information.

Perhaps the online world will be less instantaneous, convenient, and entertaining. There could be fewer cheap services. We might begin to add friction to some transactions rather than relentlessly subtracting it. But these constraints would not destroy innovation. They would channel it, driving creativity in more socially desirable directions.

The World Is Choking on Digital Pollution