fitzwatermellow

Stanford CS 251: Cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and smart contracts

https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/syllabus.html

Article is indicative of the constant refrain in the business press for a $TSLA short narrative:

The 4 Horsemen Of A Teslapocalypse

http://seekingalpha.com/article/4007849-4-horsemen-teslapoca...

> Self-driving RVs

That is actually not a terrible idea!

Alternatively, don't learn from books, but the markets themselves. Open a Paper Trading account via Think or Swim. Begin a steady diet of Bloomberg / WSJ / CNBC every day. Whenever a word or idea is mentioned that you don't understand, Google it or consult Investopedia. Figure out what the Fed actually does. How debt and credit markets work. The microstructure of physical and electronic commodities trading. Maybe skim an online "Stochastic Calculus" class. Join Quantopian and master every algorithmic strategy known to humankind. Dive deep into cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.

And who knows, perhaps one day you'll invent something that obviates the need for a global system of monetary trust ;)

Can't believe you didn't input Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase ;)

Wow, this is an excellent list!

Apart from BBC Radio, I had no idea of the breadth of the revival in "radio" drama! It makes sense that an independent movement would flourish given today's ease of distribution. But I think the X-factor in radio drama's survival is just that it is such a fantastic medium for storytelling. The way the inner visual centers of the brain light up when you are fully immersed is certainly worthy of some kind of neurological fMRI analysis ;)

A much safer alternative would be circumnavigating Australia. By land via Highway 1 (the world's longest continuous road at 15,000 km). Or by sea in a luxury super yacht ;)

https://www.roadscholar.org/find-an-adventure/21421/circumna...

Counterpoint. The Halal Guys going from a single cart to 300+ restaurants: "How Halal Food Became a $20B Hit in America"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-14/america-lo...

In their case, it was certainly because of the overpowering yet enticing smell of fresh grilled spicy lamb kebobs wafting across the block that drew the "I wouldn't eat meat off the street in a million years" nabobs ;)

I believe the real dichotomy is "async/sync" rather than "remote/local". There are individuals who require constant micro-coordination on every decision and others who get the big picture immediately and can implement details without specific instruction.

My best decision was probably offloading team coordination to a dedicated "community manager". Even an undergrad working part-time and using mobile Slack / GMail can be trained in an afternoon and be 110% effective. The amount of bandwidth it frees up so you can focus on strategy and product is a Godsend ;)

My latest hack is to return to paper and pencil. After going paperless about a decade ago, re-wiring these particular neural pathways is quite an obstacle in itself. But in terms of retention and creative flow it is unparalleled. I bring it up because I think the foundation for the memorization and repetition feedback cycle begins with elementary school lessons in handwriting, cursive, the alphabet and spelling. And then onto basic arithmetic and mathematics. The idea that "digital native" students would eschew hours of rote hand writing practice altogether puts humanity in danger of losing something elemental.

That's a good question. I can easily foresee someone inventing a "vapable" alcohol solution that could be revolutionary ;)

For now, most of the capital is being allocated to distribution. "Uber for liquor" 1-Hour delivery model:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/10/the-new-age-of-alcohol/

Check out Robert Nystrom's Game Programming Patterns:

http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html

I posted a link to Candor[1] last week. Wharton's Adam Grant makes the compelling argument that "group ideation" tends to produce less innovative results. Creativity and shyness tend to be correlated after all. And consensus around a "winner" often forms prematurely due to "anchoring" and "clustering" biases.

By decoupling the two regimes, and perhaps even anonymizing the idea from its creator, you've got a winning chance of allowing team members to unleash their inner Jungian Shadow, and give reign to the daemons of inspiration ;)

[1] http://www.usecandor.com/

There is some remarkable fiction coming out this season by some of the best:

Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am

Zadie Smith's Swing Time

Ian McEwan's Nutshell

Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad

Carl Hiassan's Razor Girl

Alan Moore's Jerusalem

Jonathan Lethem's A Gamber's Anatomy

Ha Jin's The Boat Rocker

T.C. Boyle's The Terranauts

Michael Chabon's Moonglow

Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger

I've got plenty of friends who never touch fiction because "it's not real". Preferring science, history, economics, biography and virtually anything else. But I think its obligatory at times. The soul requires it's own nourishment, if not more so than the body and the mind. Indulge yourself. If only because great writing will make your writing greater, as if by osmosis. But ultimately, because only fiction can uncover the truths that can't be revealed any other way ;)

Fantastic read! Now why can't all technical and scientific journalism hold itself to this standard? Instead of making the prevailing assumption that your average reader has the I.Q. of a parsnip and the scientific literacy of a kindergartener ;)

Have always felt single-crystal foundaries could be a great driver for building low Earth orbit microgravity factories. There has been extensive research in the labs on ISS dedicated to making highly spherical ball bearings, long macromolecular protein crystals and extreme density refractory metal composites. But is anyone contemplating large scale commercial production? With the cost of delivery dropping, it seems like it might be a idea worth re-considering!

Opera. Maria Callas singing "Un Bel Di". The overture from Wagner's "Tannhauser" ;)

Thnx ;)

The other day I pulled up behind a Tesla Model X with a SpaceX license plate frame. The driver looked to be no more than 22 years old. The Hyperloop competition drew more team designs than the last DARPA Grand Challenge. How much of doing what you do is about inspiring the next generation to take moon shots?

Follow up: how the blazes do you keep the SpaceX factory floor so pristine? I've been inside clean rooms that look worse ;)

My favorite scene, and it's an absolute masterclass in comedic technique, is from Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. The moment his Greek patient confesses: "Doctor, I'm in love with a sheep!" Without saying a single word, Wilder's expression goes from jesting to confusion to amusement to fright to intrigue and back again through the entire gamut of possible human response. He sputters and strains. It's all right there on his face! We feel the tortured struggle occurring within his mind, grasping for any semblance of assessing the situation and formulating the appropriate thing to say. It's truth is it's genius!

Good stuff, thanks! Recently saw this Nature article on the state-of-the-art in neuroscience imaging and it's amazing:

The Human Connectome Project's neuroimaging approach

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v19/n9/full/nn.4361.html

Might have been true a decade ago. When simulations performed on a laptop in Matlab were enough for dissertation quality research. But data set size has exploded. If you are currently in school, learn how to move your research to the cloud, and learn some best cloud practices. Best prep for the future to come. And if you decide to leave academia you can possibly nab an interview at Netflix ;)

Congrats! Stunning animation of the orbital deployment ;)

What data are you planning to collect from this cubesat network?

Just getting started on Electron myself. Used by Atom, Slack, Visual Studio... It's worth a look ;)

Electron - Build Cross-Platform Desktop Apps With HTML, JS, CSS

http://electron.atom.io/

Just ask Bill Ackman how well his activist naked short in Herbalife is going ;)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-27/icahn-mock...

Cool technique! Next step: add buoyancy vector ;)

Thanks for building leandot. Lot's of interesting finds, definitely bookmark'd!

What no "Zero to One"? No "Meditations of Marcus Aurelius"? Where's the "Innovator's Dilemma", or "Hard Things", or "Lean Startup", or "Creativity, Inc.", or "Black Swans", etc, etc, etc ;)

Thanks for the link. Excellent text book for speech and language processing.

Sunday Times Magazine is on it!

Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/inside-facebooks-...

The trend that bothers me most is seeing otherwise scientifically minded peers, paragons of rationality, who hew to the strictest standards of empirical rigour when it comes to their own research methodologies, sharing the most easily-debunked, inane conspiracy theories as if it were holy writ!

As an alternative, I would recommend something like Michael Kerrisk's The Linux Programming Interface in lieu of a survey of foundational CS. Gaining a deep understanding of memory, files, processes, threads, signals, sockets, etc. As well as strong Emacs-Fu and bash scripting ability. These are the first steps on the path to mastery ;)