We employ millions of incompetent creeps who are failing at their jobs because they’d rather snoop around in classified information instead of using the copious open source intelligence.
Month: November 2017
Inferring lost cities
In a stunningly original paper Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem A. Coşar, and Ali Hortaçsu use the gravity model of trade to infer the location of lost cities from Bronze age Assyria! The simplest gravity model makes predictions about trade flows based on the sizes of cities and the distances between them.
Roman Industrial Revolution?
Historians have long argued that the ubiquity of the chattel slavery was an insurmountable barrier to the adoption of labor-saving technology. In response to this argument, Dale locates her Roman Industrial Revolution in the early and mid-2nd century BCE, before the large-scale influx of slaves from the conquests of Greece, Carthage, and Gaul. The Middle Republic provides a window in which, she argues, it is plausible to imagine a machine-based culture taking root. In the world Dale envisions, an industrialized Roman empire then follows a British-style path towards a constitutional monarchy (under Augustus).
Running a fake bar
that’s some interesting undercover work
When Zekman was poached by a rival paper, the feisty Chicago Sun-Times, she proposed a daring project that would go down in the annals of journalism history as both a feat of reporting and a focal point for ethics debates still raging today. For years, Zekman had been collecting tips about city employees extracting bribes from local businessmen, but couldn’t get sources to go on the record; she figured the only way to get the story would be to get inside the system. So she convinced her paper to buy a bar. They would staff it with newspaper workers, run it like any other watering hole (with some notable exceptions that included concealed photographers), and wait to see what happened.
Can energy pay for UBI?
Total cost of energy in the us is $1.1 trillion, or 6.2% of GDP. If you cut that by 90%, which is on the way, you pay for ~1/3 of US UBI. That does not factor in new uses of energy that will have dramatic value like vertical farming. Given cheap enough energy, UBI should become quite affordable for the economy.
PowerPoint History
In 1987, a company called Forethought, founded by 2 ex-Apple marketing managers, rolled out PowerPoint and business meetings have never been the same since. Over at IEEE Spectrum, David C. Brock tells the story: (Robert Gaskins) envisioned the user creating slides of text and graphics in a graphical, WYSIWYG environment, then outputting them to 35-mm slides, overhead transparencies, or video displays and projectors, and also sharing them electronically through networks and electronic mail. The presentation would spring directly from the mind of the business user, without having to first transit through the corporate art department. While Gaskins’s ultimate aim for this new product, called Presenter, was to get it onto IBM PCs and their clones, he and (Dennis) Austin soon realized that the Apple Macintosh was the more promising initial target. Designs for the first version of Presenter specified a program that would allow the user to print out slides on Apple’s newly released laser printer, the LaserWriter, and photocopy the printouts onto transparencies for use with an overhead projector… In April 1987, Forethought introduced its new presentation program to the market very much as it had been conceived, but with a different name. Presenter was now PowerPoint 1.0—there are conflicting accounts of the name change—and it was a proverbial overnight success with Macintosh users. In the first month, Forethought booked $1M in sales of PowerPoint, at a net profit of $400K, which was about what the company had spent developing it. And just over 3 months after PowerPoint’s introduction, Microsoft purchased Forethought outright for $14M in cash.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 