Category: Miscellaneous

No matter what your age, you may, without realizing it, be enjoying the very last chapter of the relationships that matter most to you. Make it count.

A little post about the unintuitive notion that you may be 30% of the way through your life but 90% of the way through many of your best relationships.

I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.

Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.

It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time.

I see three takeaways here:

1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.

2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.

3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.

Source: The Tail End – Wait But Why

The war against genetically modified organisms is full of fearmongering, errors, and fraud. Labeling them will not make you safer.

Here’s what I’ve learned. First, it’s true that the issue is complicated. But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.

there are valid concerns about some aspects of GE agriculture, such as herbicides, monocultures, and patents. But none of these concerns is fundamentally about genetic engineering

it makes no sense to avoid GMOs based on standards that nobody applies to non-GMO food

By making cropland more productive, with less output lost to weeds and insects, GMOs reduce the amount of land that has to be farmed and the amount of water that’s wasted.

Pesticide vs. pesticide, technology vs. technology, risk vs. risk—it’s all relative. The best you can do is measure each practice against the alternatives.

Source: Are GMOs safe? Yes. The case against them is full of fraud, lies, and errors.

This spring, an 80-year-old Japanese chalk company went out of business. Nobody, perhaps, was as sad to see the company go as mathematicians who had become obsessed with Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk, the so-called “Rolls Royce of chalk.”

With whiteboards and now computers taking over classrooms, the company’s demise seemed to mark the end of an era.

This isn’t just a story about a dead chalk company—it’s the story of a dead medium, the chalkboard, now being superseded by whiteboards and tablets. But it’s not hard to see chalk having old-fashioned appeal, much like vinyl records and mason jars.

Source: Why Mathematicians Are Hoarding This Special Type of Japanese Chalk

The futures exchange wrote to Sarao on the day of the flash crash, telling him to stop spoofing, and he called them back “and told em to kiss my ass.” And then regulators pondered that reply for five years before deciding that they’d prefer to have him arrested in London and extradited to face criminal spoofing charges.

But the FBI’s and CFTC’s theory here is far more troubling: It suggests that existing algorithms are not just dumb enough to give spoofers some of their money, but dumb enough to give spoofers so much of their money that they destabilize the financial markets. It’s not especially confidence-inspiring to read that a guy with a spreadsheet can trick everyone into thinking that the market is crashing, and thereby cause the market to crash.

Source: Guy Trading at Home Caused the Flash Crash – Bloomberg View

Medium’s new features go straight for the heart of the Facebook-friendly web.

Each of Medium’s new features seem small individually, and the tech press is treating them like a minor product update. … Taken collectively, these features completely alter the feel of the site. Medium feels more like a social network than it ever has before.

But you can only flirt with being a platform for so long before you just become one. The description of Medium that’s most stuck with me is from Josh Benton again, this time on Twitter: Medium is now “YouTube for prose,” he said. In other words, it’s a platform. And I think with these product changes, it’s embracing that.

Source: What Blogging Has Become – The Atlantic