Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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Don’t fly during Ramadan (if you’re not white and stuff)

Don’t fly during Ramadan:

I barely noticed the irony of the situation – that the TSA and NYPD were clearing me for takeoff, but JetBlue had decided to ground me. At this point, I could think of nothing else but how to inform my family, who were expecting me to be on the other side of the country, that I wouldn’t be meeting them for dinner after all. In the meantime, an officer entered the room and told me to continue waiting there. “We just have one more person who needs to speak with you before you go.” By then, I had already been “cleared” by the TSA and NYPD, so I couldn’t figure out why I still needed to be questioned. I asked them if I could use my phone and call my family.

“No, this will just take a couple of minutes and you’ll be on your way.” The time was 12.35.

[Amazingly sad. These processes don’t work at all at the individual level. They protect no one, harm innocent people, and give people who don’t care, or who want to exercise power over others, the freedom to do so with impunity. It all needs to change, stop, and go away.]

via @GlennF

Hedgefox Buys Metayacht

Hedgefox Buys Metayacht:

Amazon isn’t a store. It’s a system for making other systems, some of which sell things. He has a meta-platform from which he can, with a wink and a wave, fabricate any media platform he could imagine. Still he buys a big old paper?

[snip -ed]

Again—not Bezos. He could slip leaflets into every Amazon box and have a greater reach than any paper in the world. As to the Post, aren’t there cheaper, more efficient ways to find power in Washington, D.C., and without alienating your customers? For example Bezos could buy Politico and destroy it utterly, then salt the ground on which it sits while grinding its web servers into powder, and we would all celebrate this gift to humankind way more than the future descendants of our parched hellworld will celebrate some oddball clock in the desert.

People hate the media and with good reason; it tells them things, often without first asking their permission (self-link; deal). And usually the writers take the brunt of popular hatred; after all the words are theirs. But sooner or later people figure out who really owns the paper and pays the salaries and start to yell and scream and promise boycotts. In order to stomach running a paper, an owner needs to take a near-erotic pleasure in being: (A) hated; and (B) sued. Newspaper employees sometimes hate their owners, too, and will humiliate them. It’s the inverse of a compliment sandwich. The owner of a mass-market news publication is typically the money cream in an Oreo of hate.

[Love the viewpoint. Delicious writing and descriptions. ]

Zoë Goes Running

Zoë Goes Running | Running Le Tour de France for World Pediatric Project:

When I finally did finish, at 1:05 am, my knees and elbows were crusted with blood, and my palms dotted with blood blisters from falling down, my skin pickled and covered in a sun rash, my ankles swollen red and hot, dirt everywhere, and my face completely flushed with fever.  It was, after so many runs in my life, the first time I felt so deeply that I could not possibly have gone one extra step.  So often people have commented upon seeing me after a 30 mile day that I look great, considering.  I’ve always felt conflicted about that – sure it’s nice I can run that much and not look awful, but on the other hand, I want to look awful!  I want to look like I’ve been through something.  And finally, at 1 am on Friday morning, I looked like I had been through something.  23 hours, 110 degree heat, 8000 feet of elevation gain, all of it was written on my face, etched in my body.  Finally, I looked like hell.   And it felt great.

[It’s amazing anyone ever thinks of these things… let alone complete them.]

Why We Should Care About 4,000th Ichiro Pro Hit

Why We Should Care About 4,000th Ichiro Pro Hit — Daily Intelligencer:

But in at least one way, it doesn’t matter whether 4,000 professional hits is exactly as impressive as we’re trained to think it is because a lot of them came in Japan. Sports fans love round numbers, and we especially love large round numbers — the kind that take a career to accumulate. We make a big deal when a pitcher gets to 300 wins, or a slugger hits his 500th home run, or a hitter gets his 3,000th (or 4,000th) hit, and the main reason we do so is because it allows us a natural opportunity to reflect on the player’s career, which almost by definition is an impressive one. All-time greats like Ichiro deserve this sort of treatment; he and players like him ought to be celebrated as their careers wind down. New York fans have been through this a lot lately, with future Hall of Famers Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera reaching significant milestones in recent years. The prime of Ichiro’s career happened outside of New York, of course, but he’s in that class of player.

And so too much debate about the legitimacy of Ichiro’s 4,000 hits would obscure what should be (and for the most part is) happening now: a celebration of one of the most iconic baseball players ever. Yankee fans are watching an Ichiro whose best days are behind him, but even if we focus just on his American career, his time in Seattle was incredible. (At least his unorthodox-but-effective slap-swing — the one that helped him pick up an insane 262 hits in 2004 — still remains.) Ichiro’s American numbers are plenty good enough for induction into Cooperstown — he has a .320 career average thanks to a steady stream of singles — but it’s possible he won’t reach any major round-number milestones. (He’s 278 major-league hits away from 3,000, but he turns 40 this fall.) Which means this might be our best opportunity to collectively celebrate his career before it ends. Let’s be sure to take it.

[Let’s not forget this article that says a lot about how he went about this. With the recent debate over 10,000 hours (genetics vs. practice) let’s not forget that there’s always a practice component. There’s always relentless, focused, efficient practice involved.]

Source: Gruber

Sports, Complexity, and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule : The New Yorker

Sports, Complexity, and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule : The New Yorker:

As it happens, I have been a runner and a serious track-and-field fan my entire life, and I have never seen a boy who was slow become fast either. For that matter, I’ve never met someone who thinks a boy who was slow can become fast. Epstein has written a wonderful book. But I wonder if, in his zeal to stake out a provocative claim on this one matter, he has built himself a straw man. The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us “The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no. It does not invalidate the ten-thousand-hour principle, however, to point out that in instances where there are not a long list of situations and scenarios and possibilities to master—like jumping really high, running as fast as you can in a straight line, or directing a sharp object at a large, round piece of cork—expertise can be attained a whole lot more quickly. What Simon and Chase wrote forty years ago remains true today. In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.

[Gladwell and Epstein go at it. Looking forward to reading the book. And don’t miss this either.]

Fukushima leak is ‘much worse than we were led to believe’

BBC News – Fukushima leak is ‘much worse than we were led to believe’:

The Japanese nuclear energy watchdog raised the incident level from one to three on the international scale that measures the severity of atomic accidents.

This was an acknowledgement that the power station was in its greatest crisis since the reactors melted down after the tsunami in 2011.

But some nuclear experts are concerned that the problem is a good deal worse than either Tepco or the Japanese government are willing to admit.

They are worried about the enormous quantities of water, used to cool the reactor cores, which are now being stored on site.

Some 1,000 tanks have been built to hold the water. But these are believed to be at around 85% of their capacity and every day an extra 400 tonnes of water are being added.

“The quantities of water they are dealing with are absolutely gigantic,” said Mycle Schneider, who has consulted widely for a variety of organisations and countries on nuclear issues.

“What is the worse is the water leakage everywhere else – not just from the tanks. It is leaking out from the basements, it is leaking out from the cracks all over the place. Nobody can measure that.

[How many times do we need to go down this road? And guess where that sea water is headed?]

The danger that all reporters now face

David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face | Alan Rusbridger | Comment is free | The Guardian:

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government’s intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. “We can call off the black helicopters,” joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won’t do it in London. The seizure of Miranda’s laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald’s work.

The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like “when”.

[We have no idea what we’ve done. We’ll find out. After the fact.]

How Athletes Get Great

Interview with David Epstein: How Athletes Get Great:

How did Gladwell misconstrue it?
Aside from not having copied the numbers from the actual paper correctly for his book? He says that there is a perfect correspondence between practice and the level of expertise a person attains. And you can’t tell that from the paper. The 10,000 hours is an average of differences. You could have two people in any endeavor and one person took 0 hours and another took 20,000 hours, which is something like what happened with two high jumpers I discuss in the book. One guy put in 20,000 and one put in 0, so there’s your average of 10,000 hours, but that tells you nothing about an individual.

Now, Gladwell doesn’t say there’s no such thing as genetic talent. I think other writers are stricter than him. [Matthew Syed’s] Bounce is a book that minimizes talent. Gladwell does say elite performers are more talented. One of the things that Ericsson criticizes Gladwell about is to say that 10,000 hours is some kind of rule. The paper just says that these performers by the age of 20, these performers have accumulated 10,000 hours but there’s no where that says it’s a magical number where that’s when they become elite or anything like that. These people, by the time they go into their professional careers, have way more than that. That’s just where they were when they’re 20 as an average, not even to mention their individual differences.

[It’s a meaningless quantifier. Opportunity looks a lot like hard work. Not every journey needs an ending. Some devotions are categorical imperatives.]

Rebuilding

ē Rebuilding the world technology destroyed:

The Washington Post was headed for bankruptcy, and was finally sold for a pittance. Its buyer began his career on Wall Street, only to move into a burgeoning new industry, where he truly made his wealth. The newspaper he bought has a noble history, but will certainly earn losses for years to come.

I’m talking not about Jeff Bezos, who bought the Washington Post yesterday, but rather Eugene Meyer, who bought the Post in 1933. Meyer left a lucrative career on Wall Street in 1920 to seize the burgeoning opportunity in industrial chemicals and founded Allied Chemical (today’s Honeywell).1 After making millions, Meyer spent the rest of his life both in public service and building the Post, spending millions of his own money in the process.

Meyer was in many ways following the established playbook for industrial magnates. Families like the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies, who made their fortunes in railroads, oil, and steel, respectively, plowed money into universities, museums, and a host of other cultural touchstones.

It’s this tradition that makes Bezos’s purchase feel momentous, a crossing of the Rubicon of sorts. The tech industry is now producing its own magnates, who are following the Rockefeller playbook. See Mark Zuckerberg giving $100 million to the Newark school district, or Chris Hughes buying the New Republic. Neither though, feels as momentous as Jeff Bezos, the preeminent tech magnate, buying the Washington Post, the nation’s third most important newspaper.

[snip -ed]

Influence lives at intersections. Yet, as an industry, it at times feels the boundaries we have built around who makes an effective product manager, or programmer, or designer, are stronger than ever, even as the need to cross those boundaries is ever more pressing. It’s not that Thiel was wrong about what types of degrees push progress forward; rather, it’s the blind optimism that technology is an inherent good that is so dangerous.

Technology is destroying the world as it was; do we have the vision and outlook to rebuild it into something better? Do we value what matters?

[I think a lot of us do. Whether we’re the ones that will earn the kind of wealth that makes it easier to affect change of that quality is yet to be seen.]

Source: Feed: stratēchery by Ben Thompson