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Articles to Read.
“Why did it take so long to invent X?”
In seeking to understand the history of progress, I keep running across intriguing cases of “ideas behind their time”—inventions that seem to have come along much later than they could have, such as the cotton gin or the bicycle. I’ve started collecting a list here, and will update that page with new analyses as I find them.
A related question: how surprised should we be that it took X years for invention Y after enabling technology Z? Inventions do not spring forth immediately upon becoming possible: ideas and information take time to spread, experiments are required, funding must be secured, laboratories organized, materials obtained; and at end of the day all this is performed not by automata or some clockwork mechanism, but by unpredictable individuals with their own vision, inspiration, hopes and fears, operating in complex network of teams, contracts, partnerships, and other social structures. Even in the best of circumstances, a gap of a decade or more from a key enabling technology to the commercial release of an invention is not surprising; if the enabler is a scientific discovery, two or three decades does not surprise me. And chance can intervene—the path to an invention can be derailed by a sudden disease, a financial panic, a war.
In general, I think we should be more surprised at long gaps for inventions that have obvious, predictable impact on major industries. For this reason, the cotton gin and the flying shuttle are more compelling gaps to me than the wheeled suitcase, role-playing games, or the bicycle, which merely offer convenience or entertainment. I think we should also expect longer gaps in places and times that had lower population, less education, less economic surplus (to fund R&D), fewer or less effective financing mechanisms (such as venture capital), less political stability, etc.
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Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?
As the number of coronavirus infections approaches 100,000 people worldwide, researchers are racing to understand what makes it spread so easily.
The new virus spreads much more readily than the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS (also a coronavirus), and has infected more than ten times the number of people who contracted SARS.
To infect a cell, coronaviruses use a ‘spike’ protein that binds to the cell membrane, a process that's activated by specific cell enzymes. Genomic analyses of the new coronavirus have revealed that its spike protein differs from those of close relatives, and suggest that the protein has a site on it which is activated by a host-cell enzyme called furin.
This is significant because furin is found in lots of human tissues, including the lungs, liver and small intestines, which means that the virus has the potential to attack multiple organs, says Li Hua, a structural biologist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. The finding could explain some of the symptoms observed in people with the coronavirus, such as liver failure, says Li, who co-authored a genetic analysis of the virus that was posted on the ChinaXiv preprint server on 23 February2. SARS and other coronaviruses in the same genus as the new virus don't have furin activation sites, he says.
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Wells Fargo “collected millions of dollars in fees and interest to which [it] was not entitled, harmed the credit ratings of certain customers, and unlawfully misused customers’ sensitive personal information,” according to the Justice Department, which announced on Feb. 21 that the banking company has agreed to pay an additional $3 billion to settle potential charges stemming from its unauthorized creation of several million customer accounts between 2002–16. Fees and penalties in relation to this scam alone had already totaled more than half a billion dollars.
Good news, right? That looks like accountability, and $3 billion is a lot of dough. But that $3 billion represents only a small part of the bank’s takings from just this one scam—customer money to which, by its own admission, it “was not entitled.” From that perspective, the DOJ basically caught a gang of thieves and let them scoot right back to their den with most of the loot. Worse still, criminal prosecutions—for a bank that openly admits it stole money from its own customers—are off the table for now: “The criminal investigation into false bank records and identity theft is being resolved with a deferred prosecution agreement in which Wells Fargo will not be prosecuted during the three-year term of the agreement.”
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CAMBRIDGE – It is too soon to predict the long-run arc of the coronavirus outbreak. But it is not too soon to recognize that the next global recession could be around the corner – and that it may look a lot different from those that began in 2001 and 2008.
For starters, the next recession is likely to emanate from China, and indeed may already be underway. China is a highly leveraged economy, it cannot afford a sustained pause today anymore than fast-growing 1980s Japan could. People, businesses, and municipalities need funds to pay back their out-size debts. Sharply adverse demographics, narrowing scope for technological catch-up, and a huge glut of housing from recurrent stimulus programs – not to mention an increasingly centralized decision-making process – already presage significantly slower growth for China in the next decade.
Moreover, unlike the two previous global recessions this century, the new coronavirus, COVID-19, implies a supply shock as well as a demand shock. Indeed, one has to go back to the oil-supply shocks of the mid-1970s to find one as large. Yes, fear of contagion will hit demand for airlines and global tourism, and precautionary savings will rise. But when tens of millions of people can’t go to work (either because of a lockdown or out of fear), global value chains break down, borders are blocked, and world trade shrinks because countries distrust of one another’s health statistics, the supply side suffers at least as much.
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You have a choice. You can be a specialist, or a generalist. Which route should you choose?
Specialist means your skills are 80% ONE THING, one field. You dedicate 80% of your time to that, and you have no interest in expanding your knowledge outside of it. Generalist means you have your hands into 4 different broad topics, and you dedicate 25% of your energy to each of them.
Some companies only hire specialists. If you’re Google, it makes little sense to hire a generalist, I think. They have entire teams doing that very specific thing. An early-stage startup might hire a few generalists instead, because they are more flexible and ready to change their focus at need.
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On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems, the guy who made Zork, the NTP guy, and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix. The problem was simple: there were 455 hosts on the ARPANET and the situation was getting out of control.
This issue was occuring now because the ARPANET was on the verge of switching from its original NCP protocol, to the TCP/IP protocol which powers what we now call the Internet. With that switch suddenly there would be a multitude of interconnected networks (an ‘Inter... net’) requiring a more ‘hierarchical’ domain system where ARPANET could resolve its own domains while the other networks resolved theirs.
Having a single file list every host on the Internet would, of course, not scale indefinitely. The priority was email, however, as it was the predominant addressing challenge of the day. Their ultimate conclusion was to create a hierarchical system in which you could query an external system for just the domain or set of domains you needed. In their words: “The conclusion in this area was that the current ‘user@host’ mailbox identifier should be extended to ‘user@host.domain’ where ‘domain’ could be a hierarchy of domains.” And the domain was born.
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Of the many techniques you’ll pick up over the course of your career, one worth investing in early is journaling. Journaling might not seem like a worthy endeavor at first. Capturing important moments of your life on a daily basis might even seem like extra work on top of everything else you are juggling in your life but, in time, journaling will pay dividends if you stay disciplined and detailed. As you grow older, the details of earlier experiences will grow foggy in your mind. Being able to reconstitute past experiences in order to apply to them to present situations will help you make more informed decisions.
Additionally, journaling serves a dual purpose as it makes you a better writer. This is a wonderful skill to have which shouldn’t be underestimated. In addition to technical expertise, being able to express your thoughts succinctly, supported with documented details, is a sought after skill. Inadvertently exercising this part of your mind, on a regular basis, will allow you to keep this skill sharp.
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More to Check Out:
- Spot the drowning child (being a lifeguard is hard!)
- Cool product design portfolios
- How I write (from a writer)
- Is It the End of the IPO as We Know It?
- Why All the Warby Parker Clones Are Now Imploding
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My Update:
Working.