Capitalogix

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - February 28th, 2021

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

Lighter Links:

• Why Teaching Robots to Play Hide-and-Seek Could Be the Key to Next-Gen A.I. (DigitalTrends)
• AI Teaches Itself Diplomacy. (Spectrum)
• What is Web 3.0 and How Will It Help You? (MakeUseOf)
• Highest-Resolution Images of DNA Reveal It's Surprisingly Jiggly. (Gizmodo)
• Salesforce Says the 9-To-5 Workday is Dead' and Will Let Employees Go Fully Remote. (TheVerge)

 

Trading Links:

• Here's How Much Wealth You Need to Join the Richest 1% Globally. (Bloomberg)
• Thousands of Bots May Have Played Role In GameStop Hype. (Benzinga)
• Investors are Suddenly Obsessed With 'SuperCycles'. (Fortune)
• Dalio: How To Spot a Bubble. (Ritholtz)
• The Number of Public Listings By Zero-Revenue Companies Valued Above $1 Billion Currently Exceeds the Dot-Com Era. (Markets)

 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - February 21st, 2021

Click here to see some cool photos and videos from the Perseverance rover. 

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

Lighter Links:

• The Texas Freeze: Why the Power Grid Failed. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Two Hours that Nearly Destroyed Texas's Electric Grid. (Finance)
• After Days of Mass Outages, Some Texas Residents Now Face Huge Electric Bills. (NPR)
• For Better Health During the Pandemic, is Two Hours Outdoors the New 10,000 Steps? (WSJ)
• Countries By Life Expectancy. (WorldAtlas)

 

Trading Links:

• Here's Why 'Black Swan' Author Nassim Taleb Dumped Bitcoin. (Decrypt)
• Turns Out Meme Stocks Have Basically Been Around Since 600 B.C. (Marker)
• China Blocked Jack Ma's Ant IPO After Investigation Revealed Likely Beneficiaries. (WSJ)
• Top US Lawmakers Want To Make Cannabis Federally Decriminalized: What To Know. (CNet)
• Top Wall Street Analysts Say Buy Stocks Like Denny's and Cloudflare As Economy Reopens. (CNBC)

 

Why Is Tom Brady So Good?

In 2017, I wrote an article "asking" why the Patriots were so good. 

It's now 2021 ... Tom Brady and the Patriots have parted ways. The Patriots had a middling season – while Tom Brady, who is now the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, made it to his 10th Super Bowl appearance. 

There is a difference between 'luck' and 'skill'.

Both exist ... yet, luck favors the prepared.

In life, as in sports, hard work often beats talent (especially if talent fails to work hard).

Don't get me wrong - all the commentary about the Patriots in 2017 is true. Bill Belichick is an amazing coach with a storied career (even without Brady). 

But, when you see this picture from the 2000 NFL Combine, it's hard to believe that Tom Brady would be a 6-time Superbowl MVP taking the Buccaneers to the Super Bowl in his first year with them. All at the geriatric (for an NFL player) age of 43. 

via CBS Sports

When I talked about the Patriots, I focused on the fact that they were a well-oiled machine with a powerful framework of success that allowed individual greatness to shine. 

I think Brady's continued success is emblematic of that. 

Tom Brady is a paragon of culture, process, and hard work. Much of his approach was molded by his time with Belichick, but of course, he gets enormous personal credit as well. 

He expects the best of himself and brings out the best in his teammates. That's enabled him to stay a top-level competitor despite not being the strongest, fastest, or most mobile QB (and that was when he was young). 

The System is the 'system'; but, within it, you can measure what works, who contributes, and use it to identify the best things to try next.

Win, lose, or draw ... some things speak for themselves.

7 Levels of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

Sometimes insight and inspiration come from strange places. 

I stumbled upon a video of a Japanese man playing the lullaby "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" on the piano at 7 different levels of intensity. It has almost 5 million views. Check it out. 

 

hat-tip to David Kotok for the video via Cateen かてぃん

On top of being an impressive feat of skill, I couldn't help but relate it back to our tendency towards pattern recognition and heuristics. 

 

Even at level 7, it's not hard to hear the iconic lullaby. Whether you hear the simple version or a complicated version, somehow you know that the base is the same.  The human brain is great at recognizing patterns (sometimes too great, finding patterns that aren't there).

 

As an aside, I have three distinct sets of clothes in my closet.  I think of them as fat boy clothes, skinny boy clothes, and clothes.  If I look at Facebook, it's easy for me to see (simply by looking at my face) when I'm picking clothes from each of those sections in my closet. But how does a facial recognition software know that I'm still me (at weights ranging from 200 to 250 pounds)? Or that I'm still me in a profile picture taken eight years ago.  Somehow you have to recognize the match despite the mismatch.

 

Similarly, how does pattern recognition software recognize a pattern that might happen over a period of minutes versus that same pattern when it occurs over a period of seconds or days?

A simple video - but a great reminder. Hope you enjoyed it. 

 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - January 31st, 2020

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

Lighter Links:

• American is the First US Carrier To Use Digital Health Passport. (Simpleflying)
• Tim Cook On Why It's Time To Fight the "Data-Industrial Complex". (GQ)
• Wikipedia Turns 20. (MorningBrew)
• The 2500-Year-old Technique To Make Ice In the Desert. (Medium)
• The San Francisco School District's Renaming Debacle Has Been a Historic Travesty. (MissionLocal)

 

Trading Links:

• Public Market Verdict: the Unicorn Binge Wasn't Crazy; It Was Really Profitable. (Crunchbase)
• Bitcoin Investors May Lose Everything, Central Banker Warns. (Bloomberg)
• The SPAC Boom Rolls On Into 2021. (MorningBrew)
• FAA Clears Way For Commercial Drone Deliveries With New Rules. (ABCNews)
• Apple Overtakes Amazon To Become World's Most Valuable Brand, While Tesla is the Fastest-growing. (MarketWatch)

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - January 24th, 2021

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

Lighter Links:

• Meet the Man On a Controversial Mission To Preserve and Digitize Your Brain. (DigitalTrends)
• What is Consciousness? Scientists Compete To Find Out. (Bloomberg)
• Balinese Temple Monkeys are Sophisticated Thieves and Negotiators. (Economist)
• How Predictive Algorithms are Transforming Data Into Decisions. (JeffBullas)
• What is AI? The Human's Handbook to Computers that Think. (MorningBrew)

 

Trading Links:

• The Stock Market is At or Near the Most-expensive Levels Ever By Most Measures. When Will It Matter? (CNBC)
• Stock-Market Bulls Brace for Major Gut Check as Earnings, Fed and GDP Loom. (MarketWatch)
• David Einhorn Warns of Danger From Valuation-Indifferent Investors. (Forbes)
• How VCs and Founders See 2021 Differently. (TechCrunch)
• Virtual Reality Will Be a Trillion-Dollar Marketplace Within Five Years – Here's a Good Example Why. (MW)

 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - January 17th, 2020

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

Lighter Links:

• Are Humans Smarter or Stupider Than We Used To Be? (Freakonomics)
• Inside Twitter's Decision To Cut Off Trump. (New York Times)
• Robots Turn 100 and Still Enthrall Us. (Wall Street Journal)
• From Good To Great: How the Flywheel Can Be Your Company's Next Big Thing. (Entrepreneur)
• Clever New A.I. System Promises To Train Your Dog While You're Away From Home. (DigitalTrends)

 

Trading Links:

• An Old Foe of Banks Could Be Wall Street's New Top Cop. (Wall Street Journal)
• The 'Black Swan' Covid Catastrophe Shows Us Just How Fragile Our World Is. (TheGuardian)
• The Five Biggest Issues For Technology Companies In 2021. (WSJ)
• 5 Charts Show What the Global Economy Looks Like Heading Into 2021. (CNBC)
• 'I Don't See Anything On the Horizon that Can Stop the Growth of the ETF Market,' Invesco Official Says. Here are Her 2021 Predictions. (CNBC)

 

Elon Musk Is The Richest Person In The World

On the 7th, it was announced that Elon Musk's wealth passed Jeff Bezos's $185 Billion net worth to become the wealthiest person in the world. This is driven by Musk's many companies - SpaceX, The Boring Company, OpenAi, Neuralink, and of course, Tesla.

That valuation comes after Tesla's market value passed $700 Billion for the first time. His company is worth more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM, and Ford combined (despite not having nearly the distribution) based on Market Capitalization.

via EEAGLI

NIO, BYD, and Xpeng should be on the list, but their market cap has increased so rapidly it seems the list used missed it. 

With Tesla's almost meteoric rise, it raises the question of whether the value is based on the ongoing global expansion, or speculation driven primarily by traders believing other traders want it as well.  To put it in perspective, Tesla's revenue has been rising 50% a year, which is impressive, but the stock has increased 800% in a year. Its P/E ratio is over 1400. As well, Tesla's revenue is less than a tenth of many of the companies on this list - and many of the companies are launching their own electric vehicles. 

To better compare the companies, a much better test is enterprise value which takes into consideration the company's debt obligations. 

via Radiatin

This shows that Tesla is still very impressive - just slightly less impressive than the markets would have you believe. They have clearly taken on less debt than many of those companies, and their market cap likely helps them take on cheaper loans when they do pursue more debt. 

I have a lot of faith in the future of Tesla as a company - but as a reminder, at the height of the 1990s tech bubble, Yahoo was worth more than all of the newspaper companies in the US. Toyota alone brings in 10x the revenue that Tesla currently does, and manufactures 25x as many cars. 

Regardless - congratulations to Musk for the achievement. If you were curious how he intends to use his "newfound" wealth, Musk is committed to using his money for two major goals 1) Sustainable energy and 2) extending life/consciousness beyond Earth. 

I guess you have to shoot for the stars ... or at least planets.

The Shapes of Stories

Seemingly complex things are often simpler when understood.

This applies to many things.

For example, great writing is diverse and nuanced ... but its underlying structure isn't.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a number of "Classics", including Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Sirens of Titan.

For all his great writing, and all the complexities, he simplified stories into a few basic story shapes.

Here is a graphic that explains the concept.

Here is a 17-minute video of Vonnegut discussing his theory of the Shape of Stories.  You can get the basic concepts in the first 7 minutes ... but he is witty and the whole video is worth watching. 

 

 

You can explore a bit more elaborate version of his "Shapes of Stories" from his rejected Master's thesis from the University of Chicago.

Vonnegut's idea was fulfilled not too long ago--a computer was used to identify story shapes. Researchers extracted the emotional trajectories of 1,327 stories and discovered that there are six core emotional arcs:

• Rags to riches (a rise)
• Tragedy (a fall)
• Man in a hole (fall, then a rise)
• Icarus (rise, then a fall)
• Cinderella (rise, then a fall, then a rise)
• Oedipus (fall, then a rise, then a fall)

 For more on writing from Kurt Vonnegut:

• How To Write With Style
• Eight Rules For Writing Fiction

 

Why We Don't See Aliens

This week, a former senior Israeli military official proclaimed that we've been contacted by Aliens from a Galactic Federation - and that not only is our government aware of this, but they are working together. 

How naive to think that election news would be the craziest stuff you'd hear this holiday season ...

Back to aliens (for the record, that was a sentence I haven't typed before).  There are many stories (or theories) about how we have encountered aliens before and just kept them secret. In contrast, I have found it more realistic and thought-provoking to consider theories about why we haven't seen aliens until now.

For example, the Fermi Paradox considers the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and the various high-probability estimates for their existence. 

To simplify the issue, there are billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy (which is only one of many galaxies), which are similar to our Sun.  Consequently, there must be some probability of some of them having Earth-like planets. It isn't hard to conceive that some of those planets should be older than ours, and thus some fraction should be more technologically advanced than us. Even if you assume they're only looking at evolutions of our current technologies - interstellar travel isn't absurd. 

Thus, based on the law of really large numbers (both in terms of the number of planets and length of time we are talking about) ... it makes the silence all the more deafening and curious. 

If you are interested in the topic "Where are all the aliens?"  Stephen Webb (who is a particle physicist) tackles that in his book and in this TED Talk.   

 

via TED

In the TED talk, Stephen Webb covers a couple of key factors necessary for communicative space-faring life. 

1. Habitability and stability of their planet
2. Building blocks of life 
3. Technological advancement
4. Socialness/Communication technologies

But he also acknowledges the numerous confounding variables including things like imperialism, war, bioterrorism, fear, moons' effect on climate, etc. 

Essentially, his thesis is that there are numerous roadblocks to intelligent life - and it's entirely possible we are the only planet that has gotten past those roadblocks. 

What do you think?

Here are some other links I liked on this topic.  There is some interesting stuff you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand or enjoy. 

• 75 Reasons We Don't See Aliens 
• Wait But Why: The Fermi Paradox
• A New Theory on Why We Haven't Found Aliens Yet
• A List of Solutions to The Fermi Paradox
• Dissolving the Fermi Paradox, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University

To Infinity and Beyond!