Hey, have a great week!
Articles to Read.
How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time
I've seen people make this mistake over and over. Hell, I've made this mistake myself. Change can be scary. It requires you to get out of your comfort zone. But, in my experience, staying too long is one of the worst mistakes you can make in your career.
—
You should use punctuation in Slack. You should also use complete sentences and proper grammar. You should expand acronyms[1] and — when communicating emotion — even mix in some emoji for effect. You should do that not just in Slack, but in all of your professional communication.
Written communication is hard, but in the digital world we work in it’s also vital. Sadly, the style of communication that services like Slack incentivize is awful.
To voice an opinion before the conversation moves on, you type fast and use abbreviations and hit send even with misspellings. You think one message at a time. You bounce between different threads and become easily distracted.
There are some obvious downsides to this fast and loose style. Most notably, it interrupts more productive work and deters deep thinking. But one large and often overlooked downside is the impact it has on others.
—
Meet the Excel warriors saving the world from spreadsheet disaster
Spreadsheets run the world. When they break, governments and companies turn to an elite group of experts to save the day.
David Lyford-Smith is an expert at solving spreadsheet mysteries. Once, in a previous job, he was sent a payroll form to look over for a new starter. It had the number 40,335 in a random box, and payroll wasn’t clear why it was there. “So they assumed it was a joining bonus for the employee and drew up a draft pay slip with a £40,335 bonus,” he says. But, when it comes to spreadsheets, assumptions can be costly.
Lyford-Smith isn’t just a spreadsheet enthusiast. He’s the technical manager for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), running its Excel community group — and as such has always been suspicious of numbers in that range. “That’s how Excel stores dates, as serial numbers,” he says. He was right: that wasn’t a generous signing bonus, but the new hire’s starting date.
Lyford-Smith is part of a community of accountants, auditors and Excel power users who have joined forces in a quiet battle against illogical formulas, copy-and-paste errors, and structural chaos that cause data carnage.
—
How to hide from a drone – the subtle art of ‘ghosting’ in the age of surveillance
The first thing you can do to hide from a drone is to take advantage of the natural and built environment. It’s possible to wait for bad weather, since smaller devices like those used by local police have a hard time flying in high winds, dense fogs and heavy rains.
Trees, walls, alcoves and tunnels are more reliable than the weather, and they offer shelter from the high-flying drones used by the Department of Homeland Security.
The second thing you can do is minimize your digital footprints. It’s smart to avoid using wireless devices like mobile phones or GPS systems, since they have digital signatures that can reveal your location. This is useful for evading drones, but is also important for avoiding other privacy-invading technologies.
The third thing you can do is confuse a drone. Placing mirrors on the ground, standing over broken glass, and wearing elaborate headgear, machine-readable blankets or sensor-jamming jackets can break up and distort the image a drone sees.
—
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).
I sent a screen capture to the author – who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.
At first I thought it was a joke – a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random – suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?
Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.
—
What if a Pill Can Change Your Politics or Religious Beliefs?
How would you feel about a new therapy for your chronic pain, which—although far more effective than any available alternative—might also change your religious beliefs? Or a treatment for lymphoma that brings one in three patients into remission, but also made them more likely to vote for your least preferred political party?
These seem like idle hypothetical questions about impossible side effects. After all, this is not how medicine works. But a new mental health treatment, set to be licensed next year, poses just this sort of problem. Psychotherapy assisted by psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in “magic mushrooms,” seems to be remarkably effective in treating a wide range of psychopathologies, but also causes a raft of unusual nonclinical changes not seen elsewhere in medicine.
Although its precise therapeutic mechanisms remain unclear, clinically relevant doses of psilocybin can induce powerful mystical experiences more commonly associated with extended periods of fasting, prayer or meditation. Arguably, then, it is unsurprising that it can generate long-lasting changes in patients: studies report increased prosociality and aesthetic appreciation, plus robust shifts in personality, values and attitudes to life, even leading some atheists to find God. What’s more, these experiences appear to be a feature, rather than a bug, of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, with the intensity of the mystical experience correlating with the extent of clinical benefit.
┄
More to Check Out:
- An easy way to learn to play the piano
- Hacked Billboards Can Make Teslas See 'Phantom Objects,' Causing Them to Swerve or Stop Abruptly
- A warning about Glassdoor
- Babies' random choices become their preferences
- How bridges were built in the middle ages
My Update:
Moving to LA on November 1. Will be there through the end of the year and early January (will be in AZ for a few weeks in November).
Fully stopped using Twitter a little over a month ago and has led to large improvement in my ability to focus.