Biohack is just a fancy buzz-word for common-sense advice about improving your life. The most important ones are:

• sleep well
• eat well
• move
• spend time in nature
• socialize

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I am currently reading Solenoid, by Mircea Cartarescu, a surrealist novel that shows, among others, the challenges of growing up in Bucharest during the communist era.

In a nutshell, the novel is presented as a manuscript of a failed writer who teaches Romanian at an elementary school in Bucharest, hates his job and wishes to find an escape route from the confinement of his body and the three-dimensional world around it.

https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/solenoid-solenoide-solenoid-by-mircea-cartarescu/

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MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) seem to be the faulty mechanism behind the Boeing 737 Max recent failure.
If an outside sensor measuring the angle-of-attack reports that its nose is aimed too high, the MCAS is programmed to automatically lower it, allowing the plane to regain speed and lift. But if this sensor is broken (and it looks like there was no redundancy), then the MCAS will be incorrectly trigerred, causing the aircraft to dive.
A longer explanation here.

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– If you could convince an organization to take only one action to be more secure what would it be?
– Collect less data and get rid of it faster.

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That’s why I love the dark theme: pic.twitter.com/3iLD5VhEiK

— Dorin Moise (@dorinmoise) March 14, 2019

I believe that the Airpods success can be explained by the bandwagon effect: “the rate of uptake of […] trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others“. They slowly made their way from mockery to status symbol.

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At first sight, a bank card with a built-in fingerprint reader seems to be an excellent idea, right? You trade the PIN code (something that you know) for your fingerprint (something that you are). From an usability point of view, it’s a major step forward (PIN codes can be forgotten, misplaced, shoulder-surfed, reused, social engineered, etc). But from a privacy point of view things don’t look so good anymore. The initial plans indicate that the users still have to walk in a branch to enroll their fingerprints – which
(probably) means that the bank will get to know your biometric data. Which cannot be reset, as we all know.
A possible alternative is to ditch the bank card altogether and use something that you have with you all the time: your smartphone (see Apple Pay, Google Pay) – in addition to your biometric data which never leaves your device. But this solution is not inclusive: not everybody owns a smartphone.

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The results of this study are really sad and shows that in reality, we are far, far away from secure-by-design principles. “Researchers asked 43 freelance developers to code the user registration for a web app and assessed how they implemented password storage. 26 devs initially chose to leave passwords as plaintext ” (via)

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So @lyft is paying $8m/mo to @AWS — almost $100m/yr! Each ride costs $.14 in AWS rent. I keep hearing they could build their own DC & save. My early days at @Google cloud, heard the same from customers: "at scale, owning is cheaper". It wasn't – they all came around. Here's why:

— Hemant Mohapatra (@MohapatraHemant) March 4, 2019

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1. The misinterpretation of the Mehrabian theory
2. The four stages of competence
3. How to avoid death by PowerPoint

There is a theory attributed to Albert Mehrabian according to which the non-verbal communication (NVC) accounts for 93% of the overall communication. In other words, what you say has virtually no importance, while how you say it (the tone and the body language) is almost everything.
Without negating the importance of the NVC, it is quite clear that the Mehrabian theory only applies in limited cases. In fact, the theory itself states that it applies only to communication about feelings or attitudes. This video does a pretty good job to debunk the 7% myth.
That being said, I strongly believe that the delivery can make or break a presentation. Take the same content and have it presented by two random people and you’ll understand what I mean.

The learning circle (or the 4 stages of competence) is a very useful way to visualize the learning process:

Finally, a presentation about how you should do your presentations 🙂 If you only have time to watch one video about improving your presentation skills, it should be this one:

In a nutshell, keep in mind the following simple principles when working on your next slides:

• use a dark background
• add a single message per slide
• use keywords or images, not sentences
• use size to highlight the important elements
• don’t use more than 5 objects per slide

That being said, you can deviate from the principles above in case you don’t present your slides on a stage in front of an audience. A slide like the one below could still make sense during a meeting where you brainstorm with other technical colleagues: