Rocket Science
Apollo 11 was the spacecraft that carried 3 astronauts to the moon and back in 1969.
“Now in 2020 USB-C is here. Many USB chargers have a microcontroller with a CPU. Some are less capable than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. Some are more capable than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. Most of them with at least ~10x faster clock speed. USB-C Power Delivery solves problems and gives us new capabilities. But it is another step toward increasing complexity.”
forestheller.com
(H/T Ben Evans)
Peer Presence
We’ve all heard of Peer Pressure. Turns out Peer Presence is a thing too…
“Drivers did not make their decisions entirely alone. Sometimes the friends they had brought were in the room with them. Sometimes the friends were in the next room visible on a monitor but unable to communicate with the driver. The results were striking. With friends in the room watching, adolescents regularly took more chances. Adults did not. With friends out of the room but nearby, watching on a monitor but unable to communicate, adolescents still took more chances. In that situation, it wasn’t possible for the friends to exert verbal peer pressure, but it didn’t matter. “When teenagers knew their friends could see their performance, it increased the amount of risk taking they engaged in compared to when they were alone,” Steinberg told me.”
The Atlantic
Paper Towns
In the 1930s, Otto Linberg and Ernest Alpers worked as mapmakers. They used an anagram of their initials (Agloe) to create a fictitious town at a dirt-road intersection in the Catskill Mountains of NY. The town was designed as a “copyright trap”.
In the 1950s, a general store was built at the intersection on the map, and was given the name Agloe General Store because the name was on the Esso maps.[3] Later, Agloe appeared on a Rand McNally map after the mapmaker got the name of the “hamlet” from the Delaware County administration. When Esso threatened to sue Rand McNally for the assumed copyright infringement which the “trap” had revealed, the latter pointed out that the place had now become real and therefore no infringement could be established.
Wikipedia
I learned about the town of Agloe while watching this talk by John Green.
Quality in Journalism
Its a new age for journalism.
“In contrast, experts spend years studying their craft before they ever write online. When the right story hits, they can share their experience with no constraints on the spread of their distribution. In the days after the second Boeing 737 Max crash, no-name pilots and independent writers with obscure blogs out-explained many of the world’s best newspapers. The variance in quality between journalists outside a field and experts within it is largest for technical or scientific fields.”
David Perell
Fusion Cuisine
Until I read this, I always assumed the tomato was from Italy.
“For most of the pasta sauces that we know today, the country had to await the tomato, which originated in Latin America and probably arrived in Europe only with the return of the Spanish conquistadors from Peru in the 16th century. Italians named it the “golden fruit or apple” – pomo d’oro (the modern version is pomodoro) – and for a while its main use was decorative. At the time, some Europeans thought that tomatoes were related to deadly nightshade, and were therefore poisonous. It was not until the late 17th or early 18th centuries that the tomato was slowly incorporated into Italian cuisine.”
1843 Magazine
Snowflakes
A 52 year old Navy Seal attends Yale University and shares his thoughts on “snowflakes”:
“Think about that for a second. These students are first generation Americans. Their fathers immigrated to this country and started out by being taxi drivers. Now, their children are attending college at Yale University. I’m a patriotic man and those are the stories that help me understand how, in spite of the seemingly endless stream of negativity surrounding it, the American Dream is still alive and kicking. It makes my heart sing every time I see those kids.”
James Hatch