Dailies - Observations (Page 14)

Airline Economics

The YouTube channel Wendover Productions has an interesting series of videos on the economics of airlines: * How airlines price flights [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72hlr-E7KA0] * Why flying is so expensive [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Oe8T3AvydU] * How budget airlines work [https:

The Fermi Paradox Is Silly

The Fermi Paradox [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox] basically goes like this: the universe is billions of years old, there are a huge number of planets (\(10^{24}\) according to this article [https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/01/05/how-many-planets-are-in-the-universe] ) in the

How To Value Things

A while ago I was wondering how you could decide how much to pay for a cash producing asset. For example, how do you decide how much to pay for a stock (that produces dividends) or an apartment (that produces rental income)? Investors assess

The Advantages of Monorepos

This [https://danluu.com/monorepo/] blog post is a good introduction to the advantages of monorepos.

City Of London Corporation

In the centre of London is a small area around one square mile in size called the 'City Of London'. This is where most of the financial services sector of London lives. It seems to have a bizarre and fascinating history. From

Sleeping In Unfamiliar Places

Some research [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-toss-and-turn-in-an-unfamiliar-bed/] suggests we may find it difficult to sleep well in an unfamiliar environment. The brain stays half awake for the first night or two, apparently as a safety precaution.

Epistemic Learned Helplessness

Scott Alexander on why [https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/] it's often bad to be easily convinced by (seemingly) rational arguments.

The Fourth Dimension

This simulation [https://ciechanow.ski/tesseract/] demonstrates the tesseract, which is roughly speaking a four dimensional cube. i.e., just as a cube (a three dimensional object) is made of six equally sized squares (two dimensional object), the tesseract is an object in four

Gears

Really fun interactive essay [https://ciechanow.ski/gears/] on how gears work.

Area Of A Circle

Here's [https://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Geometry/RABH.shtml] a really elegant proof for the area of a circle. We assume the circle is made up of an infinite number of circular lines. We then straighten the lines out and stack them

Why HS2?

The HS2 (High Speed 2) is a really expensive (~100 billion GBP) rail project in the UK to build a new line connecting London to Birmingham, and eventually to other cities further North like Manchester and Leeds. The project has been controversial due to

How Were the Homeric Poems Composed?

Interesting article [https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/01/17/having-had-no-predecessor-to-imitate/index.html] on how the Homeric poems might have been composed and eventually written down. Nothing too surprising here – the author claims Homer did not compose the Iliad and the Odyssey entirely by himself (as

Why Train Travel Isn't Getting Faster

This article [https://mappingignorance.org/2020/01/22/the-limits-of-high-speed-rail/] by a railway engineer goes into the limits of train speeds and why speeds of most commercial trains seem to have stagnated at the 350 kmph mark for decades. Trains with diesels engines are slower

Cooking As A Service

Interesting article [https://alexdanco.com/2019/05/09/cooking-as-a-service/] on how cooking is likely to increasingly be done by professionals and delivered to the end user as a service, almost like how Uber is replacing driving. I enjoy cooking but this feels like a

Measuring Prediction Accuracy

We all love to make predictions, but how good are we really at making them? The Brier score [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score] is an easy way to quantify the accuracy of your decisions. It's quite simple to calculate: BS

Sermons and Signaling

This [https://meltingasphalt.com/here-be-sermons/] essay helped me understand why sermons exist. The goal of a sermon is not to moralize to or to inform the listeners. Rather the goal is to allow people to gather around the sermon, so they can signal their

Compounding

Compound interest and exponential growth in general can be difficult to understand intuitively. This [https://wealth.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-power-compound-interest/] infographic helps visualize what it looks like.

Rewriting From Scratch

When I was still new to programming I would always be excited about rewriting things from scratch. I'd scrap all the work I'd done on a half-complete project, starting again just so the code could be refactored to be slightly

The Evolution Of Trust

This [https://ncase.me/trust/] is a fun simulation that demonstrates how trust evolves in groups of people. Basically life is one big, messy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner's_dilemma] .

Hacking Google Maps

Someone [http://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html] hacked Google Maps' traffic density detection by filling a cart with ~100 phones running Google Maps, and walking down streets with it. The maps system assumes the high density of slow-moving phones is due to a

Infinite Primes

About 2400 years ago Euclid found an incredibly elegant proof [https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/cyc/p/primeprf.htm] that there were an infinite number of primes.

Are You Living In A Simulation?

The idea that we might be living in a computer simulation began to gain popularity when Elon Musk began talking about it publicly. I believe this paper [https://fermatslibrary.com/s/are-you-living-in-a-computer-simulation] by Nick Bostrom was the one that really kicked off this discussion.

ASICs for Machine Learning

Special chips for ML applications are gaining popularity these days. Google has an interesting article [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-at-googles-first-tensor-processing-unit-tpu] on their ASIC, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). It seems like the primary things these chips do well is matrix

Most Abandoned Books

This [https://www.gwern.net/GoodReads] blog post tries to calculate the books that are most likely to be abandoned after a reader has started them using data from GoodReads.

Creativity And Age

"Creative Life Cycles : Three Myths" [https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016-28.pdf] is a paper / essay on the relationship between creativity and age. The three myths the author wants to debunk are all around that theme: * that creativity is greatest in