Misc

Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.

Misc

Lessons from Gian-Carlo Rota

  • Twelve lessons from the famous mathematician and lecturer.
  • They relate largely to teaching and writing mathematics but, with Farnam Street’s magic commentary, they transcend to much of life.
  • A nice quote from Feynman as well – “Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”
Misc

74 NYT Facts

  • “Each day, our editors collect the most interesting, striking or delightful facts to appear in articles throughout the paper. Here are 74 from the past year that were the most revealing.”
  • Great list from NYT. A few examples:
  • “Brooks Brothers, which Henry Sands Brooks founded in Manhattan in 1818, is the oldest apparel brand in continuous operation in the United States.“
  • “Often, the screams we hear in movies and TV are created by doubles and voice actors. One stock scream is so well-used it’s got a name, the Wilhelm. It’s in hundreds of films.“
Misc

Parable of the Pottery Class

  • “The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.” (Source).
Misc

Climate Change Economic Impact

  • Fascinating read about who stands to benefit in the very long run from a warming world.
  • “Draw a line around the planet at the latitude of the northern borders of the United States and China, and just about every place south, across five continents, stands to lose out.“
  • “Incredible growth could await those places soon to enter their prime. Canada, Scandinavia, Iceland and Russia each could see as much as fivefold bursts in their per capita gross domestic products by the end of the century so long as they have enough people to power their economies at that level.“
Misc

Vanderbilt

  • Business lessons from a man who at one point commanded one in every nine dollars in the United States.
  • “Vanderbilt’s legacy provides timeless and universal lessons in business success. He thrived in an era of enormous technological change as railways revolutionised the American economy. Yet his approach to business is evident in many of the successful businesses we see today; tapping new markets through lower prices, respecting shareholders, sharing scale advantages and sacrificing short term profits for long term gains.“
Misc

Corporate Climate Goals

  • Bloomberg analysed how well companies fared against their 2020 climate goals (set in 2015).
  • “The good news is that most of these pledges—138, so far—have already been met or appear on track by year-end, in part because many companies set modest goals.“
  • Worryingly, data disclosure remains a big issue as many companies either don’t report or do so unevenly.
  • Looking forward many are now making stand out statements.
  • Microsoft has not just committed to going carbon negative (by 2030) they will, by 2050, remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.
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