Dailies Ransomware Negotiations Journalist Bob Sullivan on negotiating with ransomware gangs [https://redtape.substack.com/p/whats-it-really-like-to-negotiate]. Three interesting bits: There is a reputation system for ransomware gangs: > It can sound strange, but during a recent lecture at Duke University, Ehuan
Dailies Bell Labs Records Sixty years of records (1925 to 1984) from Bell Labs have been digitized and are now free to read [https://worldradiohistory.com/Bell_Laboratories_Record_Issue_Key.htm]. I opened a random issue from 1961 [https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Bell-Laboratories-Record/60s/Bell-
Dailies Economics Of Airline Loyalty Programs Here's [https://marker.medium.com/why-the-survival-of-the-airlines-depends-on-frequent-flyer-programs-2509bd3f25d0] Bryan Hobart on the bizarre economics of loyalty programs. Some learnings: Loyalty programs are the most valuable asset many airlines own. Delta would have a
Dailies Life At Low Reynold's Number On [https://science.curie.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Purcell_life_at_low_reynolds_number_1977.pdf] the tough life of tiny organisms who experience the same difficulty moving through water that a human would swimming though tar. The paper is quite dense,
Dailies A 5700 year-old human genome and oral microbiome from chewed birch pitch The authors of this paper [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31848342/] managed to extract an incredible amount of information from a 5700 year-old chewed up piece of birch pitch (a kind of tar used for a variety of things by early humans)
Dailies Recent Low Tech Inventions A list [https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/136886/ten-recent-low-tech-inventions-that-have-changed-the-world/] of low tech inventions over the last few decades that have changed the world. I didn't realize oral rehydration salts were a
Dailies On Being The Right Size A wonderful essay [https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/Haldane.pdf] by biologist J. B. S. Haldane on why organisms are the size they are. It's only four pages long, but it might be the best piece of
books What I'm Reading, September 2020 Edition * A Rising Man [https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/A-Rising-Man-Audiobook/B01ES481ZE] , Abir Mukherjee: Crime novel set in early 20th century colonial India. The first of a four-part series and quite good. I plan to start part two soon. * Moral Mazes:
Dailies Why Don't Rents Go Down? This article [https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/do-concessions-throw-off-the-market] puts forward a theory of why rents for commercial real-estate in New York City haven't gone down during the pandemic. I suspect similar dynamics apply to commercial real
Dailies The Great Medieval Bake Off The British Library's attempted [Great medieval bake off]to replicate some medieval baking recipes. The most tempting dish IMO is sambocade, "a curd tart flavoured with elderflowers".
Dailies Why Middle Management Exists These two Tweets made the value of middle managers to an organization click for me a few days ago: > In a way, this is kind of the function of middle management (and middle men more broadly) in an organization: making the messy details
Dailies The Scars Of Human Evolution The team at Fermat's Library have a knack for digging up interesting papers across all of science and mathematics. The Scars Of Human Evolution [https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-scars-of-human-evolution] is one such paper: a discussion on how the
Dailies Cooking With Hot Springs MIT News published an article [https://news.mit.edu/2020/early-human-hot-springs-food-0915] recently hypothesising that early humans may have cooked their food in hot springs. They didn't have any compelling evidence, so I was sceptical, but people on
Dailies A Bizarre Mathematical Result Via [https://fermatslibrary.com/s/pick-the-largest-number]the Fermat's Library, a paper that describes a really strange mathematical result: * Write two distinct numbers on slips of paper and give them face down to a friend. * Your friend chooses one slip
Dailies Indian History In Colour I stumbled across a project [https://historyin.co/] to convert black and white photos from Indian history to colour using machine learning based colourisation: > History in Color contains 1200+ Old and Historic Photographs of India from (1800s to 1940s) restored using advanced image
Dailies Limits Of Lean Thinking Blogger Venkat Rao on [https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/lean-thinking-vs-fat-thinking] the tradeoffs between lean (in the lean startup [http://theleanstartup.com/] sense) and fat thinking.
Dailies Ancient Agriculture Historian Bret Devereaux [https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux] has a great four part series [https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/] on ancient agriculture. Highly recommended if you're interested in the subject. Some of
Dailies Duck Army Thai rice farmers use armies of ducks to clean their fields of pests. Absolutely mesmerising to watch: > DUCK ARMY: Drone footage captures 10,000 ducks “cleaning” rice paddies in Thailand. Farmers use the ducks to remove pests from the fields. pic.twitter.com/
Dailies Ancient Earth Globe A globe [https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240] that lets you see what the Earth looked like tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. One interesting thing I learnt was that during the dinosaur extinction event (~66 million years ago [https://dinosaurpictures.org/
Systems Culture Over Intelligence What sets humans apart from other animals? Why have we been so successful? Most people would say it's our intelligence. Here I want to argue that the secret of our success [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/
Dailies The State Of Social Science Research Alvaro de Menard read a couple thousand social science papers to understand their quality. His conclusions are that things haven't gotten much better since the start of the replication crisis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis]: > It is difficult to
Dailies Cold Water Science Marine biologist Alexander Semonov has put together a collection [http://coldwater.science/]of stunning photographs of sea creatures, most of whom were unknown to me.
Dailies Bronze Age Battle This [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle] ScienceMag piece covers an amazing recent discovery: A battle, over three thousand years ago, involving thousands of warriors in what is now Germany.
Dailies Living Subjectively Longer How [http://theoryengine.org/life/tips-for-a-longer-life/] to live a longer life, subjectively rather than objectively. Notable quotes: > But why does a week long foreign holiday, which is not routine, feel like it has flashed by? Surely a week like
