This is crazy:

An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950.

(source)

If anyone is wondering what blockchain technology could be used for in the financial industry, it’s cleaning up this mess:

“Even the brokers mostly don’t own the shares they hold for customers in ‘street name.’ Instead, they’ve all agreed to put their shares in one place, called the Depository Trust Co., which owns all their shares for them. This makes transfers even more convenient; instead of moving around physical share certificates between brokerages, everyone can just move around entries in DTC’s central computer. It does make voting one level more complicated: Delightfully, DTC (or, strictly, its nominee, Cede & Co.) is the record owner for state law purposes, while the brokers are the record owners for federal law purposes, with the odd result that Cede (the Delaware owner) has to give proxies to the brokers (the federal owners) so that they can vote. By proxy. On behalf of their customers.”

How do people map expressions of probability (like “very good chance”) onto actual numerical probability? (Source: zonination on Github)

All of this gives me a headache: People have spent over $1M buying virtual cats on the Ethereum blockchain

From Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs:

Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s hasn’t kept up with the demands of contemporary corporate finance units. Errors can bloom because data in Excel is separated from other systems and isn’t automatically updated.

This is certainly true, but the other problem is that there is no good way to code review formulas and no version control with the ability to diff formulas. This allows errors to sneak in with no mechanism to detect them.

Perhaps something is fundamentally broken with your platform if there are third party services popping up specifically to solve frustration caused by a major use case of your platform.

→ threadreaderapp.com

Getting the seed out of an avocado is…the pits.

Some great quotes from Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will - Issue 52: The Hive - Nautilus:

How do the Internet and social media apps threaten democracy?

Democracy assumes a set of capacities: the capacity for deliberation, understanding different ideas, reasoned discourse. This grounds government authority, the will of the people. So one way to talk about the effects of these technologies is that they are a kind of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the human will. Our phones are the operating system for our life. They keep us looking and clicking. I think this wears down certain capacities, like willpower, by having us make more decisions. A study showed that repeated distractions lower people’s effective IQ by up to 10 points.

​

Most of the systems that we have in society—whether it’s news, advertising, even our legal systems—still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention. There wasn’t really anything obstructing people’s attention at the time it was written. Back in an information-scarce environment, the role of a newspaper was to bring you information—your problem was lacking it. Now it’s the opposite. We have too much.

​

If you get distracted by the same thing in the same way every day, it adds up to a distracted week, distracted months.

​

This is awesome:

A Japanese company is granting its non-smoking staff an additional six days of holiday a year to make up for the time off smokers take for cigarette breaks. (source)

New icon for the iOS Kindle app (and other changes) are 💯

Rothman is right on the mark (source / read for free):

Today it is typical to train epidemiologists to use regression models as their first approach to data analysis. Such training fosters the idea that regression modeling is the primary, and perhaps the only approach to use in analyzing epidemiologic data. As a result, the rift between epidemiologists and their data, and more so between readers and the data, is growing. We should reverse this trend, one paper at a time.

Data science has the same problem: jumping to fancy algorithms obscures basic exploratory data analysis, and this leads to bogus results.

I have been waiting for this day

An important iPhone X question: what’s the Guided Access shortcut with no home button? It’s triple-clicking the home button on current phones.

It’s been less than 12 hours, but the iPhone X notch is not growing on me. I would love to have that screen size in such a small phone body though. Maybe next year.

Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano

I’ve used SuperDuper! for local backups for years, but the scheduled backups inexpicably stopped working for me. I then tried Carbon Copy Cloner – and it’s better in pretty much every way! I strongly recommend checking CCC out if you’re a SuperDuper! person.

Jeez:

LinkedIn’s Chris Cutter found a West Virginia company where “up to half of applicants either fail or refuse to take mandatory pre-employment drug screens.”

—Steve LeVine for Axios

Amazon is buying Whole Foods (?!)

“If you want to do broad ambitious things, you need to be accountable to articulate why it is the right thing to do. You need to be able to write down your basic thesis and the evidence behind it and then defend it. In fact, the more power you hold, the more accountable you need to be to open yourself to honest challenge on either facts or logic. This is even more critical in times of rapid change because the facts and consequential logic might change. Accountability and transparency means you are able to reassess your conclusions and react quickly.”

— What Really Happened with Vista – Hacker Noon

The one and only item on my iOS 11 wishlist: when I get a call from a number not in my contacts, send it directly to voicemail.

Via NPR, scientists think that contracting measles may erase adaptive immunity. This would cause increased rates of subsequent infections from other diseases.

Yet another reason to get the MMR vaccine!

From the Duh Dept. at the American Academy of Pediatrics: “Children under 1 year old shouldn’t drink any fruit juice, a revision from the previous recommendation that infants under 6 months shouldn’t be given juice.”

(via Axios)

May 18, 2017, Denver, CO.

Huge news in the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit: www.axios.com/judge-ban…

I’ve been annoyed by sound balance drift on my Mac for years. Finally wrote an AppleScript to fix it.

Really glad that Kaleidoscope is not abandoned. Still my favorite diff app for Mac.

I’m heavily back into RSS, especially for YouTube. I vastly feedbin.com + reederapp.com to the YouTube web interface.

This is some serious phishing.

Temporarily lost my box of new Tiles ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Last week of April, Denver, CO.

On Wed 26 Apr 2017, the WHO said Liberian health authorities were taking rapid precautionary steps after 8 people died of a mystery illness, 10 months after the end of a 2-year Ebola virus outbreak. —ProMED-mail

Yikes.

Uploading ≈5000 files to box.com through Safari. What could go wrong? (So far it is working surprisingly well.)

I now know what I want to do when I retire: Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego (by Jacques Mattheij)

(My favorite part of this is that he prototypes with Lego, of course!)

I can’t believe Lyft is getting away with using push notifications for advertising. This is a clear violation of “4.5.3 Do not use Apple Services to spam, phish, or send unsolicited messages to customers, including Game Center, Push Notifications, etc.”

Everyone a person needs has long been on messengers. It’s pointless and time-consuming to maintain increasingly obsolete friend lists on public networks. Reading other people’s news is brain clutter. –Pavel Durov, founder of Russia’s Facebook equivelant and Telegram

Did you know you can jump start a car with 10 AA batteries in series? You can!