Dailies - Observations (Page 6)

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 estate and rental housing worldwide. Notable

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".

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

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 evolution of human bipedalism

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 HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/

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 at random and

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

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.

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 the bits I found most interesting: From Part I

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/

Bayes' Theorem Basics

A good introduction to Bayes' theorem:

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/ancient-earth#

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

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.

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.

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 that should feel long,

Life Lessons from Terraforming Mars

In the board game Terraforming Mars each player represents a corporation tasked with making Mars habitable for humanity. You make Mars habitable by raising three global parameters to the required level: oxygen to 14%, temperature to 8° C, and the number of oceans to

Bicycle Buses

Interesting experiment from NL: > These Dutch “bicycle buses” are transporting 50+ kids getting the kind of exercise that leads to better learning, who DON’T need to be driven & dropped off by parents adding lots of local car traffic. Nijmegen, NL video

Medieval Castle Toiletry

Interesting (and only mildly gross) article [https://www.ancient.eu/article/1239/toilets-in-a-medieval-castle/]from the Ancient History Encyclopedia on medieval castle toilets. Notable quote: > [...] there can be no doubt that a castle toilet stank to high heaven. Indeed, it was not uncommon to

Skyscaper Economics

A series [https://buildingtheskyline.org/economics-of-skyscraper-height-series/] of posts on the economics of skyscapers from the Skynomics blog. Moderately interesting.

A 19th Century Vision of the Year 2000

Via [https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-19th-century-vision-of-the-year-2000] The Public Domain Review, a collection of pictures from the early 19th century attempting to imagine life in the future. Some of the predictions have come true: electric scrubbing (Roomba), advanced sentinel in a helicopter, a house rolling

microCOVIDs

microcovid.org [https://www.microcovid.org/calculator] helps you understand risks of getting Covid with various activities based on current scientific evidence. Takeaways: eating indoors once a week is probably too risky for me (~3% chance of getting Covid in a year), but outdoor

Menu Engineering

Article [https://thehustle.co/meet-the-menu-engineers-helping-restaurants-retool-during-the-pandemic/] from The Hustle on the art and science of restaurant menus. Quote: > Say you unfold a two-page menu. Your eyes will almost always follow the same reverse “Z” pattern: Top right, top left, bottom right, bottom left. >

Ancient Scotland

This video by filmmaker John Duncan speaks for itself:

Stone Age Diet

This [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13590840310001619338]paper by J. A. J. Gowlett is a short overview of what we know about the diet of our species. I was surprised to learn we've been eating roots and tubers for