Capitalogix

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - March 17th, 2019

The US grounded the Boeing 737 Max after similarities between two crashes. It's good they did, safety first, but it definitely caused some headaches coming back from Saskatchewan.  There's an interesting thought experiment here to understand the complexities that the airlines had to solve.

Imagine a 737 holds 200 people and does 4 or 5 flights a day. American has 24 737s in its fleet. That means each day ~24,000 people are displaced on American Airlines alone. They're replacing those planes with smaller regional jets – meaning more flights, more small airports, and more delays. The logistical/supply chain dynamics are a nightmare. 

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• DARPA's New AI, Machine Learning 'Breakthrough'. (Realcleardefense)
• Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life inside Tesla's Production Hell. (Wired)
• The Psychology behind Costco's Free Samples. (The Atlantic)
• The Fall of Rome and the Lessons for America. (Time)
• How Timeboxing Works and Why It Will Make You More Productive. (HBR)

 

 

Trading Links:

• Despite Store Closings, There's Still One Blockbuster Store Left in the World. (USAToday)
• Oracle's Larry Ellison Has a $1 Billion Stake in Tesla. (TheStreet)
• Mansa Musa: the Richest Man Who Ever Lived. (BBC)
• Amazon Go Cashierless Stores are Coming to Airports. (VentureBeat)
• Millions of Japanese Homes are Abandoned, and Owners are Giving Them Away for Free. (BusinessInsider)

Avoiding Death By Snowmobile: Part II

Last year, I recounted my humbling via snowmobile. 

I traveled to Saskatchewan, Canada and "sledded" with people who had been doing it since birth. 

When I got there, everyone was in great spirits. Apparently, this is a sport done with day drinking, lots of laughter, and semi-reckless abandon.

We split into groups: Insane, Merely Crazy, and the Turtles. I figured I was relatively safe with the Turtles ... I was wrong. 

 

 

The machines are capable of gliding over the snow at speeds exceeding 120 miles per hour.  I wasn't going nearly that fast ... but the beasts were harder to tame than I expected. 

Despite crashing numerous times, totaling a sled, and being sore for weeks ... I had so much fun on year one that I brought my son with me on year two. 

 

 

Last year, I recognized 2 things: 

1. Humans are deletion creatures. That means they can hold seven things (plus or minus two) in their memory. While they were focused on fun, I was focused on how to stay on the sled
2. You're supposed to stay on the sled, and leaning into the turn helps you do that ... who'd've thunk it? 

This year I learned a couple more: 

1. People don't forget. Everyone remembered my less than skillful sledding. 
2. Youth is wasted on the young. My son picked it up fast and was speeding as if he'd been on a sled his whole life (despite falls that would cause people with skulls that no longer have soft spots to proceed with caution). 
3. When you find the right group of people, the fun gets more fun, and struggles seem less challenging. 

 

While sledding is fun, it's the people that make the trip. 

Likewise, it's the people you take with you through life that makes it so worth it. 

Oh, and I did suck less this time ... Progress!

 

The Oxford Comma: Still Important, Even If Oxford Doesn't Think So

Grammar isn't everyone's cup of tea ... but it's something I spend a lot of time thinking about. 

Should I use an ellipsis here or a dash? Is this an unnecessary parenthetical?

Because of that,  the serial comma (commonly known as the Oxford comma) is surprisingly important to me. 

If you don't know what an Oxford comma is, it is the comma before the word "and" at the end of a list. 

I love it (and use it). I think it adds clarity in most situations, and while some lists make sense without it, it is helpful if not necessary in many lists.

Like below: 

 

Who wants that?

Use the Oxford Comma ...  Save yourselves the imagery. 

If you need a guide of when to use it, Check out this infographic ... Click it to see the whole thing. 

 

via PRDaily

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - February 17th, 2019

NASA's Mars Opportunity Rover has officially lost contact with earth after a fierce dust storm. Its last message was "My battery is getting low and it's getting dark." The rover's original mission was scheduled for 90 days ... it lasted 14 years. 

 

via XKCD

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links

• A Quantum Future Awaits. (Science)
• Can We Make Artificial Intelligence Ethical? (Washington Post)
• Life's Secret Ingredient: A Radical Theory of What Makes Things Alive. (NewScientist)
• What Does "Dead" Mean? the Debate Continues Some 50 Years after Harvard Defined Death. (Forbes)
• Scientists Have Built a Real Star Trek 'Replicator' that Builds Objects with Light. (ScienceAlert)

 

Trading Links

• Warning: Stocks Have Only Been Stretched this Thin Once in the past 150 Years. (MarketWatch)
• From the Year When Nothing Worked in the Financial Markets to the Month When Everything Did. (CNBC)
• Mark Zuckerberg Adds $6.2 Billion in a Day, Vaulting to No. 5 Richest in World. (OCRegister)
• American Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Has Spent $700M on Personal Real Estate in Five Years. (CNW)
• There's a New Movie Coming out about High-speed Trading on Wall Street, and It Looks Bonkers. (BizInsider)

 

 

A Beautiful Rendition of Hallelujah

Sometimes the real thing is worth paying attention to ...

In a world of fake news and technologically enhanced music, this performance of Hallelujah should do the trick. 

Watch and listen to K.D. Lang sing Leonard Cohen.

 

 via Tower of Song: A Memorial Tribute to Leonard Cohen

Masterful!

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - January 27th, 2019

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links

• Giving Algorithms a Sense of Uncertainty Could Make Them More Ethical.(TechReview)
• How Musicians Communicate Non-Verbally While Performing.(PsychCentral)
• Welcome to the World's Largest Gathering of Humans. (NPR)
• The Evolutionary Advantages of an Addictive Personality. (Scientific American)
• George Orwell Predicted Cameras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Never Imagined We'd Gladly Buy and Install Them Ourselves.(OpenCulture)

 

 

Trading Links

• The Weaponization of Artificial Intelligence. (Forbes)
• Apple Named 'World's Most Admired Company' for 12Th Year in a Row.(MacRumors)
• The Government Shutdown May Ripple through the IPO Market for Months. (Quartz)
• Billionaire Ray Dalio Shares a 3-Step Formula for Anyone to Start Investing.(CNBC)
• Ex-Goldman Banker Describes Finance as "Dark Art," Advocates Running McDonalds Franchise Instead. (News)

 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - January 20th, 2019

Most citizens don't have big savings account to buffer them against an unexpected expense or loss of income.

The Government Shutdown is one of the curveballs most workers haven't planned for adequately.

 

Actions have consequences.

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links

• Full Translation: China's 'New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan' (2017). (Newamerica)
• Apple Buys 50 Business Class Seats from San Francisco to Shanghai Every Day. (MacRumors)
• Ford Built a Sweaty Robot Butt to Simulate Your Sweaty Human Butt. (BGR)
• Intimate Portraits of People over 100 Years Old Reveal the Beauty of Aging Bodies. (MyModernMet)
• Costco is Selling a 27-Pound Tub of Mac and Cheese that Lasts 20 Years. (BusinessInsider)

 

Trading Links

• Fear of Algorithm Trading is Really Just the Fear of the Unknown. (Quartz)
• Hedge Funds Suffer Worst Year since 2011. (FT)
• Nearly Half of Workers Earn Less Than $30,000. (Ritholtz)
• Michael Dell Gets $12 Billion Richer with Break from Public Eye. (Fortune)
• The New Impossible Burger 2.0 Won Everyone's Mouth at CES 2019, but That's Just the Beginning. (Forbes)

How Long Does It Take To Get 50 Million Users?

Cool tech often gets adopted by porn and gambling before more mainstream uses.

Porn was the launchpad for video streaming, mobile-enabled sites, VR, and (unfortunately) pop-up ad technologies. 

With that said, the next chart surprised me.  It shows the number of years it took for various products to gain 50 million users.

 

 

Pornhub tracks data like its business depends on it.  Well, it is the number one site for pornography.  What does that mean? In 2018, over 5,517,700,000 hours of porn was watched on their site. That’s approximately 6,298 centuries of video.

Moreover, last year, it got  33.5 BILLION visits. That’s 1,064 people a second, or 92 million a day.  To put that in perspective, that's more people than live in the entire country of Germany.

Here are some additional factoids about its use.

• 4403 Petabytes of data transferred (574 MB of data for every person on earth)
• Consumed more bandwidth than the entire internet in 2002
• Stormy Daniels was the number 1 "trend" search in 2018  (followed by Fortnite ...)
• 4k ultra-hd overtook 1080p in search trends

 

via Pornhub

For the full list of stats click here. 

They are so popular, it is almost obscene.

Gil Brandt and the Innovation of Modern Football

I'm regularly surprised by the levels of innovation and strategic thinking that I see in football.

I've written posts about how much regular businesses could learn from watching football teams. That post talks about how even high school teams have a position-by-position depth chart. They have a game plan for their next opponent. They practice plays on both offense and defense. They watch game film of their past games and future opponents. And, they coach the team as a team, and the players individually. 

Often, simple ideas, applied consistently, are enough to win.

Last night I was at a Dallas Cowboys playoff game (note that is not an oxymoron) ... and I took a picture with this guy.

 

 

I see him at every game ... and every game he wears a different creative and well-thought-out costume. He sits on the 50-yard line, He wears Ferragamo shoes and a nice watch. Yet, something about this game captures his imagination.

Yesterday, I also had the honor of meeting Gil Brandt at the game. For those of you not familiar with him, he was the vice president of player personnel (or Chief Scout) of the Dallas from 1960 to 1989.  He helped Dallas grow into one of the most powerful and popular sports franchises in America. His innovative management and personnel systems are standard operating procedure today for many teams at the professional and collegiate levels nationwide. 

  

 

Many consider him the architect of the Dallas Cowboys. I'm not talking about the stadium or headquarters, I'm talking about their teams and ideas that were the catalyst to "America's Team".  I took this from his Wikipedia page.

He helped pioneer many of the scouting techniques used by NFL clubs today,^[2] such as:

• Creating a new scouting and evaluation system for prospects, which would later spread throughout the NFL. In the NFL Films' documentary series Finding Giants, Ernie Accorsi mentioned how then-general manager George Young built the New York Giants scouting process based on the Cowboys system.^[3]
• Using computers for scouting and talent evaluations. To achieve this level of automatization, the Cowboys had to systematically define which were the traits, measurable qualities and skills that could be expressed into numbers and formulas in order for a computer to understand them.^[4]
• Finding potential prospects in other sports such as: Bob Hayes, Cornell Green, Peter Gent, Toni Fritsch, Percy Howard, Ken Johnson, Ron Howard, Wade Manning, Manny Hendrix and Mac Percival. The Cowboys also set up hospitality suites for coaches at the NCAA basketball tournaments.^[5]
• Brandt was one of the first talent scouts to look outside of the United States and Canada for potential players. Kicker Toni Fritsch was discovered during a European tour.^[6]
• Made unconventional draft choices in lower rounds based on potential, even though at the time it wasn't known if the players would ever be a part of the National Football League. For example: Roger Staubach, Herschel Walker and Chad Hennings.
• The use of psychology tests to identify the mental and personality make-up of prospects.^[7]
• Finding players in the undrafted free agent and small college talent pool, such as Drew Pearson, Cliff Harris, and Everson Walls.^[8]
• Helped to create the NFL Scouting Combine as a centralization of the scouting evaluation process.

 

Gil Brandt is one step closer to joining the NFL's ultimate pantheon – The Pro Football Hall of Fame.  He has been nominated as a contributor finalist for the Class of 2019. The contributor category recognizes "individuals who made outstanding contributions to professional football in capacities other than playing or coaching."

He's an inspiration. Not only did he innovate how teams draft and measure talent ... he's the guy who figured out how to make cheerleaders an iconic symbol of a team and the game itself.

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - December 30th, 2018

Christmas Eve saw Dow's historic low ... but it was immediately followed with a 1086 point rally (its largest single-day gain). The S&P and Dow both rallied approximately 5%.

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links

• A Nobel Prize-winning Psychologist Says Most People Don't Really Want to Be Happy. (Quartz)
• There is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought. (Scientific American)
• Automated Cyber Attacks are the next Big Threat. Ever Hear of 'Review Bombing'? (Entrepreneur)
• NASA's Scientists Formed a Club to Dream up Uses for AI like Self-replicating Robots and Harpooning Comets. (Quartz)
• A Chinese Company Said It Created a Photo with Such a High Resolution that You Can Zoom from Thousands of Meters Away to See People's Facial Expressions. (BusinessInsider)

 

 

Trading Links

• Alan Greenspan: Investors Should Prepare for the Worst. (CNN)
• 5 Charts that Explain the Global Economy in 2018. (WEForum)
• The 7 Most Anticipated IPOs in 2019. (Fool)
• Wall Street Quietly Shelves Its Bitcoin Dreams. (Bloomberg)
• After a $2 Billion Company Bonus, Every Employee at Juul is Now a Millionaire. (RobbReport)