A harsh, but objective view on the new industry buzzword – the blockchain:

Nobody’s in charge, and you can’t change or delete anything, only view and input data.
The first, best-known – and practically only – use of blockchain technology is bitcoin, the digital currency that allows you to transfer money without the involvement of a bank.
There are now three mining pools which are responsible for more than half of all the new bitcoin (and also for checking payment requests). 
Blockchain generalises the bitcoin pitch: let’s not just get rid of banks, but also the land registry, voting machines, insurance companies, …
The only thing is that there’s a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release

https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/84495599980-95473476?mc_cid=ac542d3dec&mc_eid=6ff15a57b7

Just like Sheldon Cooper, I love lists. If I would make a list of things that I love, lists would be one of the first items. So here’s an awesome list of Laws, Principles, Mental Models, Cognitive Biases. One example:

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”

https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-concepts?mc_cid=5bdc7c6f5a&mc_eid=6ff15a57b7#cunninghams-law

Ronnie won his sixth World Snooker Championship. A week after, he sat together with Simon Hattenstone, the ghostwriter who helped him write his biography.

He was always regarded as the sport’s most naturally gifted player; now the consensus is that he’s the greatest.
Ronnie is called the Rocket for his speed and power. But there is also a sublime grace to his playing – the way he makes the cue ball dance, the delicacy with which he picks off balls and opens up the pack, his balance, the ability to swap from right to left hand depending on his shot or mood. In a sport not overly blessed with charismatic players, he has been the personality of snooker for a quarter of a century.
 In his 30s he became obsessed with middle-distance running. “A lot of the time I would think: ‘I don’t actually want to win this match because I’ve got a five-mile cross-country race I want to win back in Essex.’ Running became more important than snooker. 
Now, he is in a good place. He came off medication when he realised it was making him moody and he was taking it out on his son. He is sticking with natural serotonin – running. In lockdown he got himself a coach and has not looked back. “I can run for an hour, 7.45- to 8-minute miling. Running is my drug.” 
I ask him about the future, expecting him to talk about books, endorsements, punditry and a bit of snooker. “The one thing I thought I’d excel in was being in the care industry,” he says. Is he serious? He nods. “I can empathise with people in addiction”. 

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/23/i-was-the-king-of-sabotage-ronnie-osullivan-on-controversy-comebacks-and-becoming-a-carer

• 

3 reasons to go vegetarian/vegan/flexitarian

• It’s better for your health: https://www.netflix.com/lu-en/title/81157840
• It’s better for the non-human animal welfare: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LbbyQhLkcwAwWmBoj/why-eat-less-meat
• It’s better for the environment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/vegan_vs_flexitarian

Why do the helicopters crash more often?

• they are used in risky situations: search and rescue operations, military, medical evacuation, etc
• more vulnerable than planes to bad weather
• they fly at lower altitudes, so higher risk to hit obstacles and less time to recover in case things go wrong
• they take off and land more often than the planes (shorter routes)
• more moving parts, so more possibilities to fail
• can’t glide
• a bit more difficult to control than planes

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/10/why-are-helicopters-always-crashing.html

Why the commercial aircraft do not have a parachute?

Well, some of the small planes do. But the commercial aircraft don’t and are unlikely to have in the future because of how physics works:

• if there would be a single parachute, the shock when it will be engaged will simply destroy the aircraft structure
• multiple parachutes make things impractical: they would have to be deployed in the same time, would increase the total weight and significantly decrease the payload
• a parachute system would require a very complex maintenance process (periodic tests, replacements, etc).
• it would also require a complex safety system to prevent accidental deployment
• a parachute system for a large airplane (like the Airbus A380 – 850 people or Boeing 747 – 500 people) will have to ditch everything except for the pressurized passenger cabin. Again, not practical, and how do you control where the rest of plane ends when the pilot engages this system?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20131223-should-planes-have-parachutes

OK, then why don’t the airlines give parachutes to the passengers?

Simply put, they are unlikely to save lives.

• first problem: at which stage of the flight do you tell the passengers to use the parachutes? Life vests are simple, everybody knows when to use them. But parachutes?
• the physics laws prevent the hatch to be opened at high altitudes. So an explosives system would be needed if you want to jump at 35000 feet (10700m)
• if you still want to jump at that altitude, you would likely enter a thermal shock (negative 60 degrees Celsius) and lose conscience in a few seconds due to the lack of oxygen. Unlikely to land alive.
• so you will have to blast the door and jump somewhere lower, maybe 15000 feet (4500m). Except – you’re not alone. A few hundreds passengers will try to do the same thing before the plane hits the ground.
• assuming that the passengers can jump in an orderly manner, and allocating 10 seconds per jump, you would still need around 40 minutes for a 250 passenger plane to be evacuated in mid-air. Only 20 minutes if you open 2 doors.
• if you manage to jump, you will hope to avoid being sucked into the engines (if you use the front doors) or sliced by the horizontal stabilizers (if you use the back doors). More importantly, you will pray to avoid fatal injuries when the parachute deploys: your plane will probably fly way past the safety jump speed limit
• BTW, did you ever strap your parachute and actually jump from a plane? And did you ever land by yourself?
• You see, the chances of coming down alive using a parachute are becoming increasingly small. Not to mention that you might land in the middle of a freezing ocean, with the parachute coming down on you.
• Also, most of the aircraft accidents happen during takeoff and landing, when the parachutes simply won’t work

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/why-commercial-airlines-dont-have-parachutes-for-passengers

(more…)

It seems like we, humans, have the strange ability to worry about little things and to procrastinate or ignore the big, important ones. NN Taleb explains this in his essay ‘The Black Swan’:

What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect; if they were, things would be easier for us today, but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about it—my counterfactual, introspective, and hard-thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a lion while his nonthinking but faster-reacting cousin would have run for cover. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do—except, of course, when we think about it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan – The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Exhibit A: Superbugs

Superbugs will kill someone every three seconds by 2050 unless the world acts now, a hugely influential report says.
A global revolution in the use of antimicrobials is needed, according to a government backed report.
Lord Jim O’Neill, who led the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, said a campaign was needed to stop people treating antibiotics like sweets.
It is the first recommendation in the global plan for preventing medicine “being cast back into the dark ages”.
The report has received a mixed response with some concerned that it does not go far enough.
Superbugs, resistant to antimicrobials, are estimated to account for 700,000 deaths each year.
But modelling up to the year 2050, by Rand Europe and auditors KPMG, suggests 10 million people could die each year – equivalent to one every three seconds.
BBC: Global antibiotics ‘revolution’ needed

Exhibit B: Climate change

In spite of reports, evidence, climate refugees and general consensus in the science world that climate change is starting to affect our lifes, there are still top level politicians arguing that everything is just ‘peer-pressure’ and that ‘everybody is a scientist’:

Ex-Alaska governor promotes Climate Hustle film and calls for intervention to stop the ‘peer pressure’ as world leaders agree global warming is a serious threat.
The former vice-presidential nominee admitted she did not believe scientists about anything any more – and appealed to presidential contenders to intervene, somehow.
The Guardian – Climate change denier Sarah Palin: ‘Bill Nye is as much a scientist as I am’

As a side note, there is a nice response to the statement above.
But unfortunately, we’re doing very little to fight climate change. Hopefully it won’t be too late.

Exhibit C: Colonizing other worlds

I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space (Stephen Hawking)
We should do it soon, because colonizing other worlds is our best chance to hedge our bets and improve the survival prospects of our species. Sooner or later something will get us if we stay on one planet. (Princeton professor J. Richard Gott)
In the long run a single-planet species will not survive (Nasa Administrator Michael Griffin)
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html/2

Apparently, in this case at least, someone is thinking big. There is hope 🙂