Links - July & August 2023

Published Sep 2023

Richard Diebenkorn, Lemons and Jar, 1958

Here are some interesting links I found in July & August:

1. Should you cut your loses early, and let your profits run?
2. Book review: The laws of trading.
   Bell Labs developed a syllabus of graduate-level courses and taught it to any interested employee. They didn’t outsource the curriculum or the teaching.
   If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.
3. Economists use a gravity model to find ancient lost cities.
4. Napoleon was the best general ever and the math proves it.
   
5. Taped conversations among German nuclear physicists after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
   HEISENBERG: I don't believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their £500,000,000 in separating isotopes; and then it's possible.
   
   WEIZSÄCKER: If it's easy and the Allies know it’s easy, then they know that we will soon find out how to do it if we go on working.
   
   HAHN: I didn't think it would be possible for another twenty years.
   
   ...
   
   HEISENBERG: We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the Government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up.
   
   WEIZSÄCKER: I believe the reason we didn't do it was because all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded.
   
   HAHN: I don't believe that but I am thankful we didn't succeed.
   ...
   
   WEIZSÄCKER: If we had started this business soon enough we could have got somewhere. If they were able to complete it in the summer of 1945, we might have had the luck to complete it in the winter 1944/45.
   
   ...
   
   HEISENBERG: Yes. (Pause) About a year ago, I heard from SEGNER (?) from the Foreign Office that the Americans had threatened to drop a uranium bomb on Dresden if we didn't surrender soon. At that time I was asked whether I thought it possible, and, with complete conviction, I replied: 'No'.
   
   WIRTZ: I think it characteristic that the Germans made the discovery and didn't use it, whereas the Americans have used it. I must say I didn't think the Americans would dare to use it.
6. Australia's 'worst female serial killer' freed after her children's deadly gene mutations come to light.
7. Moriori genocide.
   Younger members argued that the Moriori could fight back as they outnumbered Māori two-to-one. Elders, however, argued Nunuku's Law should not be broken. Despite knowing Māori were not pacifist, Moriori ultimately decided to stay pacifist against the invaders, describing Nunuku's Law as "a moral imperative"... The invaders killed around 10% of the population in a ritual that included staking out women and children on the beach and leaving them to die in great pain over several days... the Māori invaders forbade the speaking of the Moriori language. They forced Moriori to desecrate sacred sites by urinating and defecating on them. Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori or Māori or to have children.
8. Our explosive past.
   One of the most shocking results of a 2008 paper that sequenced several men from South Africa, including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is that any two San Bushmen had more differences across their three billion DNA bases than a European has from an Asian.
9. Explaining Y Combinator.
   In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum. But in practice that never happens. Having to hit a growth number every week forces founders to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of succeeding. Nine times out of ten, sitting around strategizing is just a form of procrastination.
10. Skill vs luck in games.
    We find that poker contains about as much skill as chess when 75% of the chess results are replaced by a coin flip. Furthermore, the amount of skill we find in poker is comparable to that of a deterministic game when 85% of the results are replaced by chance.
    
11. $125K/year starting pay for a car wash manager in the US.
    
12. Britain is a developing country.
    Americans could stop working each year on September 22nd and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year.
    If the UK continues with the same rate of growth it has enjoyed over the last decade, then Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time.
13. What happened when Oregon decriminalised hard drugs.
    In the two years after the law took effect, the number of annual overdoses in the state rose by 61 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase nationwide. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.
    The state audit found that, during its first 15 months in operation, the treatment-referral hotline received just 119 calls, at a cost to the state of $7,000 per call.
14. Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall.
    
    Crinkle crankle walls resist horizontal forces, like wind, more than straight wall would. So if the alternative to a crinkle crankle wall one-brick thick is a straight wall two or more bricks thick, the former saves material.
15. The Covid lab-leak deception.
    On March 17, 2020, the journal Nature Medicine published a paper by five scientists, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that dismissed “any type of laboratory based scenario” for the origin of the pandemic. It was cited by thousands of news outlets to claim that the virus emerged naturally. But Slack messages and emails subpoenaed and released by the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic suggest that some of the authors didn’t believe their own conclusions.
16. Dictator book club: Putin.
    Mrs Putin recalls how she got proposed: “One evening we were sitting in his apartment, and he says ‘ Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected.”
    Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne know little more about him than you do. Berezovsky told me he never considered Putin a friend and never found him interesting as a person ... but when he considered Putin as a successor to Yeltsin, he seemed to assume that the very qualities that had kept them at arm’s length would make Putin an ideal candidate. Putin, being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest, would be both malleable and disciplined.
17. David Garrow on Obama.
18. Ketamine: WD-40 for the brain?
19. Ancestral Europeans and their meaning.
    In their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending had suggested that Europeans were dark until relatively recently, because pale skin would only have become advantageous when people adopted agriculture. Hunter-gatherers enjoyed a high protein diet, but after the switch to cereals rickets would have become a serious problem, and so mutations for fair skin – which absorbs Vitamin D from sunlight more efficiently – would have spread quickly.
    Interestingly, they suggested that this would have happened far quicker than we have traditionally imagined, because the advantage was enormous. As they wrote, ‘If it is indeed that recent, it must have had a huge selective advantage, perhaps as high as 20 per cent. It would have spread so rapidly that, over a long lifetime, a farmer could have noticed the change in appearance in his village.’
20. Book review: The mind of a bee.
    The waggle dance is a line dance performed by honey bees - an individual bee discovers a food source, and boy, is she excited (the vast majority of bees are female). She arrives back in the hive, and begins ferociously waggling while running in a line, then does a semicircular loop and starts the dance again. The angle that the bee runs in relation to the vertical is the angle that the food source is relative to the sun. If a bee runs straight upwards, the food source is in the direction of the sun. The distance the bee runs is proportional to the distance to the food source.
    As you may have surmised at some point, the sun moves. The dancers factor this in, and as they spend longer performing the dance, they change the angle of their dance in order to factor in the movement of the sun. And if the sun is behind a cloud? Bees are sensitive to polarised light, and can infer the location of the sun from this light.
    
21. Chinese youth unemployment rate might be around 45%.
22. Dell's capital expertise.
23. How Air Canada pilots glided their plane to safety after it was filled with insufficient fuel.
    Pearson and Quintal had determined the fuel weight by multiplying the the number of dripsticked liters by 1.77, as indicated by the documentation. However, unbeknownst to the pilots and the fuel crew, this multiplier provided the weight in imperial pounds; the new, all-metric 767 was based on kilograms, and required a multiplier of 0.8. As a consequence of this documentation disconnect, Flight 143 had left Montreal with roughly half the necessary fuel.