‘Indigestion’

One of the most alarming things about sexual assault on college campuses is how little we know about it. Is there really an epidemic of campus sexual assault? Or are college-age women just at a risky point in their lifetime, regardless of their campus environment?

https://www.vox.com/2014/12/11/7378271/why-some-studies-make-campus-rape-look-like-an-epidemic-while-others

A charming word that I learned today.

Doxastic logic is a type of logic concerned with reasoning about beliefs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxastic_logic

We have no way to define extinction—or existence—other than through the limits of our own perception. For many years, an animal was considered extinct a half century after the last confirmed sighting. The new standard, adopted in 1994, is that there should be “no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died,” leaving us to debate which doubts are reasonable.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/02/the-obsessive-search-for-the-tasmanian-tiger

I may have posted this back when it came out, but if so, it’s worth posting again. A fascinating example of unusually long-term consequences…

Hale County in west central Alabama and Bamberg County in southern South Carolina are 450 miles apart. Both counties have a population of 16,000 of which around 60% are African American. The median households and per capita incomes are well below their respective state’s median, in Hale nearly $10,000 less. Both were named after confederate officers–Stephen Fowler Hale and Francis Marion Bamberg. And although Hale’s county seat is the self-proclaimed Catfish Capitol, pulling catfish out of the Edisto River in Bamberg County is a favorite past time. These two counties share another unique feature. Amidst a blanket of Republican red both Hale and Bamberg voted primarily Democratic in the 2000, 2004, and again in the 2008 presidential elections. Indeed, Hale and Bamberg belong to a belt of counties cutting through the deep south–Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina–that have voted over 50% Democratic in recent presidential elections. Why? A 100 million year old coastline...

http://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/

(2016)

WHAT are the most dysfunctional parts of the global financial system? China’s banking industry, you might say, with its great wall of bad debts and state-sponsored cronyism. Or the euro zone’s taped-together single currency, which stretches across 19 different countries, each with its own debts and frail financial firms. Both are worrying. But if sheer size is your yardstick, nothing beats America’s housing market.

It is the world’s largest asset class, worth $26 trillion, more than America’s stockmarket. The slab of mortgage debt lurking beneath it is the planet’s biggest concentration of financial risk. When house prices started tumbling in the summer of 2006, a chain reaction led to a global crisis in 2008-09. A decade on, the presumption is that the mortgage-debt monster has been tamed. In fact, vast, nationalised, unprofitable and undercapitalised, it remains a menace to the world’s biggest economy.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/08/20/nightmare-on-main-street

Attention conservation notice: only of interest to computer science nerds. The web page discusses a number of topics, but the section on Chaitlin is all I’m really suggesting here.

So, amazingly complex things can be compressed into fairly little information. You can’t help but wonder: how complex can something be?

The answer: arbitrarily complex! At least that’s true if we’re talking about the Kolmogorov complexity of a string of bits: namely, the length of the shortest computer program that prints it out. Lots of long strings of bits can’t be compressed. You can’t print out most of them using short programs, since there aren’t enough short programs to go around.

Of course, we need to fix a computer language ahead of time, so this is well-defined. And we need to make sure the programs are written in binary, so the comparison is fair.

So, things can be arbitrarily complex. But here’s a more interesting question: how complex can we prove something to be?

The answer is one of the most astounding facts I know. It’s called Chaitin’s incompleteness theorem. It says, very roughly:

There’s a number L such that we can’t prove the Kolmogorov complexity of any specific string of bits is more than L.

Source: surprises

Very cool! And highly useful for some things.

Former Google designer Nicholas Jitkoff, who’s now the vice president of design at Dropbox, has created a really nifty new web tool he’s calling itty bitty sites, or self-contained microsites that exist solely as URLs. You can create your own by following this URL: itty.bitty.site. From there, you can fill the equivalent of about one printed 8.5 x 11-inch page with any combination of plain text, ASCII characters, or emojis. The actual byte limit depends on where you’d like to share it; Twitter and Slack allow for around 4,000 bytes, while the Mac version of Chrome can accommodate up to 10,000 bytes.

The site isn’t actually hosted anywhere — the entirety of the webpage exists as a URL compressed using what’s known as the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm. In an explanation page for itty bitty sites — stored, of course, as an itty bitty site — Jitkoff says this allows for a “significant reduction in size for HTML, and allows for a printed page worth of content in many cases.” From there, the compressed content is converted from binary into a string of characters that can function as a standard web link. The actual data is stored in the end of the link, comprised of everything after the # symbol. You can also share itty bitty sites as QR codes as well, so long as the site can be compressed into about 2,610 bytes.

Source: This amazing new web tool lets you create microsites that exist solely as URLs – The Verge

Here’s a fantastic collection of useful mental models. Covers a pretty diverse range. About 1/4 of it is oriented toward business and startups, but most of it is useful for life in general. For example, here’s one section:

Communication

• Story arc – human beings are wired to respond to storytelling. A story arc is a way to structure ideas to tap into this response, typically by describing a change in the world.
  Example: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

• Writing well – use arresting imagery and tabulate your thoughts precisely. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it’s possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Don’t hedge – decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.

• Charitable interpretation – interpreting a speaker’s statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. Charitable interpretation makes conversations (and relationships) go better.

• Nonviolent Communication (aka NVC) – a communication framework that allows expressing grievances and resolving conflicts in a non-confrontational way. Structuring difficult conversations as described in NVC makes the process dramatically less painful. NVC contains four components: (1) expressing facts, (2) expressing feelings, (3) expressing needs, and (4) making a request.
  Example: You didn’t turn in the project yesterday. When that happened I felt betrayed. I need to be able to rely on you to have a productive relationship. In the future, could you notify me in advance if something like that happens?

http://www.defmacro.org/2016/12/22/models.html

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture-exploration/2018/07/graphic-united-states-immigration-origins-rings-tree-culture/