I’m excited to be attending Polyhack 23 on 11 Septemeber 2019 at 6:30pm.
🎧 Lana Del Rey cover of Donovan’s Season of the Witch is awesome.
Hasan Minhaj on why public transportation sucks in the US.
In four weeks my long commute to Oakville will be at an end. I got a job located a twenty minute walk from home!
Apple spends more on R&D than the entire country of Spain. As in the entire country of Spain both public and private organizations. Spain the world’s 13th largest economy with a population of 47 million people.
Do boring speakers really talk for longer?
Robert M. Ewers in Nature:
The 34 interesting talks lasted, on average, a punctual 11 minutes and 42 seconds. The 16 boring ones dragged on for 13 minutes and 12 seconds (thereby wasting a statistically significant 1.5 min; t-test, t = 2.91, P = 0.007). For every 70 seconds that a speaker droned on, the odds that their talk had been boring doubled. For the audience, this is exciting news. Boring talks that seem interminable actually do go on for longer.
He also gives some good advice on giving a good talk:
To avoid banality, speakers should introduce their objectives early on and focus on pertinent information. They should avoid trite explanations, repetition, getting bogged down by irrelevant minutiae and passing off common knowledge as fresh insight.
Currently reading: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer 📚
Data-Driven Design Is Killing Our Instincts, valuing data over design instinct puts metrics over users by Benek Lisefski.
Ugly Gerry is a font created by US congressional districts.
Amazon Is Using a Twitter Army of Employees to Fight Criticism of Warehouses
This is some dystopian stuff.
Amazon Uses a Twitter Army of Employees to Fight Criticism of Warehouses:
Amazon is not the only company that relies on what publicists call “employee advocates.” Lizz Kannenberg, the director of brand strategy at Sprout Social, which advises companies on social media use, said that employee advocacy had developed over the last three to five years.
Bromwich, J. E. (2019, August 15)