I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner hold an incredible amount of political power. That's troubling considering their incredibly small amount of political experience.
The presidential election in France could determine the political future of Europe. John Oliver visits an excessively French bistro to deliver an urgent message to voters.
Lawmakers often reshape voting districts to shift the balance of political power. That's unfair to voters, even those of us with questionable judgment.
Gerrymandering has become a very precise science, and interestingly it’s one of the few remaining types of science in which the republican party currently believes.
For-profit dialysis companies often maximize their profits at the expense of their patients. John Oliver explores why a medical clinic is nothing like a Taco Bell.
The lack of humanity showed by these corporations is simply horrific. Certainly a market failure which is causing some painful externalities. We need something more significant to fix the inequities that are happening here.
I've been searching for the perfect monthly book club for years, one that could send me new science, math, philosophy, and technology books every month. I contacted several publishers, reached out to various existing companies, and nobody seemed to be interested. Finally, earlier this year, after he...
I have no singular destiny, no one true passion, no goal. I flutter from one thing to the next. I want to be a physicist and a mathematician and a novelist and write a sitcom and write a symphony and design buildings and be a mother. I want to run a magazine and understand the lives of ants and be a philosopher and be a computer scientist and write an epic poem and understand every ancient language. I don't just want one thing. I want it all.
I believe that tech companies should make a commitment to their employees, a commitment that they will act ethically, legally, responsibly, and transparently with regard to harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and other unlawful behavior. In my opinion, this commitment requires five things: ending forced arbitration, ending the practice of buying employees' silence, ending unnecessarily strict confidentiality agreements, instituting helpful harassment and discrimination training, and enforcing zero-tolerance policies toward unlawful and/or inappropriate behavior.
Without further ado, here is a list of those five things, the reasons they're important, and how companies can implement them.
This sounds like for solid advice for all companies, not just those in the tech sector.
Some interesting analysis of what we’re loosing with the death of video stores. In particular, we’re losing some of the same type of recommendations and serendipity we’re loosing with the rise of e-books and less use of libraries/librarians. In particular, loosing well-curated collections is a big issue as we replace them with streaming services which don’t seem to have the same curatorial business models.
I particularly enjoyed this quote:
A great video store’s library of films is like a little bubble outside the march of technology or economics, preserving the fringes, the forgotten, the noncommercial, or the straight-up weird. Championed by a store’s small army of film geeks, such movies get more traffic than they did in their first life in the theater, or any time since. Not everything that was on VHS made the transition to DVD, and not every movie on DVD is available to stream. The decision to leave a movie behind on the next technological leap is market-driven, which makes video stores the last safety net for things our corporate overlords discard.
📖 Read loc 1440-2080 of 12932 (16.08%) of American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Examples and discussion of how markets can manage to fail and why we need good government to fill in the (gaping) holes.
There’s also some good discussion of rent seeking behavior here too. The more I read, the more I think this should be required reading for everyone. I could see a need for taking just the first three chapters and expanding them out into their own book.
The big day finally arrives and the children enter the chocolate factory with Mr. Willy Wonka. We see the chocolate waterfall and river and see the first Oompa-Loompas.
I’m not quite sure how Mr. Wonka (and interestingly he’s always called Mr.), managed to get sunlight down into his underground chocolate room–I’m presuming all the edible plants grow somehow.
During the G20 conference, Elizabeth worries about Henry who was sent to Israel to intercept the VFF's bio-weapon. Blake reveals a secret to former colleagues. Elizabeth goes behind Stevie's back to get her off the Harvard Law waiting list.
Blake’s reveal that he’s bisexual was a nice bit of cultural touchstone to put into the episode.
The wrap up of the ongoing secondary story arc with the religious nuts and the biological weapon was done too quickly and too neatly given how much of the season had been dedicated to it thus far.
Hard to believe the next episode is the season ender already.
Blake’s reveal that he’s bisexual was a nice bit of cultural touchstone to put into the episode.