Ulysse Sabbagh

Sir George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, shows off how to mix a perfect dry martini. 

For example: Let’s assume the sole information I have about a gentleman is that he is 40 years old, and I want to predict how long he will live. I can look at actuarial tables and find his age-adjusted life expectancy as used by insurance companies. The table will predict he has an extra 44 years to go; next year, when he turns 41, he will have a little more than 43 years to go. For a perishable human, every year that elapses reduces his life expectancy by a little less than a year. The opposite applies to non-perishables like technology and information. If a book has been in print for 40 years, I can expect it to be in print for at least another 40 years. But – and this is the main difference – if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another 50 years.

Technology “ages” backwards, from Nassim Taleb’s new book “Antifragile”. An interesting perspective.

For example: Let’s assume the sole information I have about a gentleman is that he is 40 years old, and I want to predict how long he will live. I can look at actuarial tables and find his age-adjusted life expectancy as used by insurance companies. The table will predict he has an extra 44 years to go; next year, when he turns 41, he will have a little more than 43 years to go. For a perishable human, every year that elapses reduces his life expectancy by a little less than a year. The opposite applies to non-perishables like technology and information. If a book has been in print for 40 years, I can expect it to be in print for at least another 40 years. But – and this is the main difference – if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another 50 years.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany said progress in lengthening the duration of living and lowering the odds of death at all ages has been so swift that life expectancy rose faster than it did in the last 200 millennia, since we evolved from apes. 

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, looked at Swedish and Japanese men – two countries with the longest life expectancies today. It concluded that their counterparts in 1800 would have had lifespans that were closer to those of the earliest hunter-gatherer humans than they would to adult men in both countries today.

Those primitive hunter gatherers, at age 30, had the same odds of dying as a modern Swedish or Japanese man would face at 72. Scientists who worked on the study said it was unclear what the possible upper limit for life expectancy would be. “How much longer can we extend life?” said Oskar Burger, lead researcher on the study. “We just don’t know.”

Politically this poses a problem for leftists who do not support the elongating of work. Here is the general argument: the trend is that we live longer. This means we have to work additional years.

Is that so? Perhaps this relatively gained time should be used for leisure — but someone needs to pay and here lies the problem. 

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany said progress in lengthening the duration of living and lowering the odds of death at all ages has been so swift that life expectancy rose faster than it did in the last 200 millennia, since we evolved from apes. 

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, looked at Swedish and Japanese men – two countries with the longest life expectancies today. It concluded that their counterparts in 1800 would have had lifespans that were closer to those of the earliest hunter-gatherer humans than they would to adult men in both countries today.

Those primitive hunter gatherers, at age 30, had the same odds of dying as a modern Swedish or Japanese man would face at 72. Scientists who worked on the study said it was unclear what the possible upper limit for life expectancy would be. “How much longer can we extend life?” said Oskar Burger, lead researcher on the study. “We just don’t know.”

Politically this poses a problem for leftists who do not support the elongating of work. Here is the general argument: the trend is that we live longer. This means we have to work additional years.

Is that so? Perhaps this relatively gained time should be used for leisure — but someone needs to pay and here lies the problem. 

Cat decision-making tree.

What if your iPhone could be fully charged in 30 seconds? 

Solving battery life from the other side: instead of long charging cycles for supposedly long battery life; super short charging cycles for averagely long batter life. 

I’d do that any day. 

What if your iPhone could be fully charged in 30 seconds? 

Solving battery life from the other side: instead of long charging cycles for supposedly long battery life; super short charging cycles for averagely long batter life. 

I’d do that any day. 

A whimsical piece in the NYT uncovering the scientific reasons we love beautiful things:

Simple geometry is leading to similar revelations. For more than 2,000 years, philosophers, mathematicians and artists have marveled at the unique properties of the “golden rectangle”: subtract a square from a golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so on and so on — an infinite spiral. These so-called magical proportions (about 5 by 8) are common in the shapes of books, television sets and credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre Dame, the face of the “Mona Lisa,” the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod.

And

Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals — irregular, self-similar geometry — occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals — not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder — home is where the genome is.

A whimsical piece in the NYT uncovering the scientific reasons we love beautiful things:

Simple geometry is leading to similar revelations. For more than 2,000 years, philosophers, mathematicians and artists have marveled at the unique properties of the “golden rectangle”: subtract a square from a golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so on and so on — an infinite spiral. These so-called magical proportions (about 5 by 8) are common in the shapes of books, television sets and credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre Dame, the face of the “Mona Lisa,” the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod.

And

Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals — irregular, self-similar geometry — occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals — not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder — home is where the genome is.

Hans Rosling, founder of Gapminder, shows off the incredible progress of “developing” countries over the last decades. 

Hans Rosling, founder of Gapminder, shows off the incredible progress of “developing” countries over the last decades. 

Der Spiegel:

Intense price pressure from retailers and discounters is forcing food manufacturers to purchase ingredients from all around the world, including preprocessed foodstuffs. This has resulted in enormous flows of goods, and once these products have passed through the hands of three, four or more middlemen before they reach manufacturers, it becomes extremely difficult to trace their origins. This jungle of cross-border trading gives criminals a golden opportunity to re-label commodities. After all, the authorities have little control over what is stored and transferred in Europe’s cold storage warehouses.

A prime example is Werk II, a refrigerated warehouse in the western German town of Neuss, which served as a gateway for a large proportion of the allegedly tainted frozen convenience food to enter the country. In December and January alone, at least 14 shipments were unloaded here, and then sent to supermarket chains. The concrete complex in the district of Norf serves as a transshipment center for goods from across Europe. A sign in German, English, French, Spanish, Polish and Russian directs delivering drivers to the reception office.

And you know they don’t lie. 

Der Spiegel:

Intense price pressure from retailers and discounters is forcing food manufacturers to purchase ingredients from all around the world, including preprocessed foodstuffs. This has resulted in enormous flows of goods, and once these products have passed through the hands of three, four or more middlemen before they reach manufacturers, it becomes extremely difficult to trace their origins. This jungle of cross-border trading gives criminals a golden opportunity to re-label commodities. After all, the authorities have little control over what is stored and transferred in Europe’s cold storage warehouses.

A prime example is Werk II, a refrigerated warehouse in the western German town of Neuss, which served as a gateway for a large proportion of the allegedly tainted frozen convenience food to enter the country. In December and January alone, at least 14 shipments were unloaded here, and then sent to supermarket chains. The concrete complex in the district of Norf serves as a transshipment center for goods from across Europe. A sign in German, English, French, Spanish, Polish and Russian directs delivering drivers to the reception office.

And you know they don’t lie. 

The Lord of the Rings book covers designed by J.R.R Tolkien himself. 

“Clef”

“Clef”

clef.io

An interesting startup idea: Clef lets you log in to your websites using your smartphone, not a password. Scan a QR code and you’re logged in. 

Passwords are getting old indeed. 

In 1563, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne was invited to the King of France’s court to meet three Brazilian cannibals who were brought to France. After having been interrogated for hours by the 13 year old king, Montaigne sought to ask a few questions. And their answers were incredibly revelatory:

First, the Brazilians expressed surprise that “so many tall, bearded men, all strong and well armed” (i.e., the king’s guard) were willing to take orders from a small child: something that would have been unthinkable in their own society. And second, the Brazilians were shocked by the severe inequality of French citizens, commenting on how some men “were gorged to the full with things of every sort” while others “were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty.” Since the Brazilians saw all human beings “as halves of one another… they found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”

Montaigne records these observations in an essay entitled, “Des Cannibales.” Well ahead of its time, the essay challenges the haughty denigration of cannibals that was so common among Montaigne’s contemporaries, but not by arguing that cannibalism itself is a morally acceptable practice. Instead, Montaigne makes the more provocative claim that, as barbaric as these Brazilian cannibals may be, they are not nearly as barbaric as 16th-century Europeans themselves. To make his case, Montaigne cites various evidence: the wholesome simplicity and basic nobility of native Brazilian life; the fact that some European forms of punishment — which involved feeding people to dogs and pigs while they were still alive — were decidedly more horrendous than the native Brazilian practice of eating one’s enemies after they are dead; and the humane, egalitarian character of the Brazilians’ moral sensibility, which was on display in their recorded observations.