Month: June 2019

Fake Politician

A well-respected local politician is elevated to one of the most powerful positions in France, but keeps his head down and gets on with the job instead of making an international media personality of himself. The perfect target for a most audacious identity theft.

“Everything about the story is exceptional. They dared to take on the identity of a serving French minister. Then they called up CEOs and heads of government round the world and asked for vast amounts of money. The nerve of it!”

Fast Revolutions

Everything about this system is extreme. But it’s the stars themselves that get to me. Think of it this way: The Earth’s gravity is strong enough to keep the Moon going around it with an orbital period of a little over 27 days. At the same distance, J17062’s gravity whips its companion around over 1000x faster.

Quantum amplification

Their method achieves 50 times more precision than the previous best techniques, which also means that they can make measurements 50 times faster than before. Now they can narrow down the particle’s location to an atom-sized space in less than a second. The key to their method is to accept the noisiness decreed by the uncertainty principle, and control where it manifests itself. To measure the ion’s position, they basically transfer the uncertainty into its speed, a value they happen to care less about.

Very Italian NYC

New York has never had a shortage of old-school red-sauce spots or exuberantly expensive odes to Italian cooking, but the last few months have seen a serious uptick in restaurants and cafés from Italians eager to introduce New Yorkers to the way Italy eats now, whether that’s sandwiches served on the Florentine answer to focaccia, strong cocktails poured in a bar bedecked in dark wood and Carrara marble, or regional cooking from Piedmont, Tuscany, and Emilia-Romagna. Here are the new molto Italian restaurants that demand your immediate attention.

Positive creativity

people are more likely to maintain broader attention and solve problems when they’re in a positive mood. “The basic idea is that a positive mood loosens the grip of attention, so that stimuli and ideas that used to get filtered out can now have a greater impact on mental processing. Stress and anxiety have the opposite effect, narrowing attention, which can be good for focused analytic thinking—as long as you keep focus on the right information—but bad for broader creative thinking.”

Hal Varian

COWEN: But then you must think we’re not doing enough theory today. Or do you think it’s simply exhausted for a while? VARIAN: Well, one area of theory that I’ve found very exciting is algorithmic mechanism design. With algorithmic mechanism design, it’s a combination of computer science and economics. The idea is, you take the economic model, and you bring in computational costs, or show me an algorithm that actually solves that maximization problem. Then on the other side, the computer side, you build incentives into the algorithms. So if multiple people are using, let’s say, some communications protocol, you want them all to have the right incentives to have the efficient use of that protocol. So that’s a case where it really has very strong real-world applications to doing this — everything from telecommunications to AdWords auctions.

Speed Breeding

Combining speed breeding with gene editing and other technologies is the best way to improve crops. We already have test fields with 3x yield. Getting another 2x would feed more than 20B people. They trick the crops into flowering early by using blue and red LED lights for 22 hours a day and keeping temperatures between 16 and 22 degrees Celsius. They can grow up to 6 generations of wheat, barley, chickpeas and canola in a year instead of only 1-2 crops each year using old farming methods.

Dog eye evolution

dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans

Libra

What if the market for the underlying currencies and assets is (for a while?) more liquid than the market for Libras? Say the basket values adjust before Libra values do. What kind of arbitrage opportunities does that create? If we know Libras are due to depreciate, is there a higher nominal rate of interest on them, as with traditional currencies in an international multi-currency setting? What are the equivalents of covered and uncovered interest parity in this setting? Does a kind of “program trading” arise to perform the arbitrage? Can perfect redemption be offered credibly while the prices are still out of whack?

plus there are smart contracts

Another important aspect of the Libra Blockchain is Move, its new programming language. This programming language will allow users to define their own smart contracts in the future. Smart contracts are agreements written in code whose clauses are automatically enforced when a set of predetermined criteria is met.

and analysis by Matt Levine:

there are probably some things to say about regulation? Is this thing a payments processor? A money-market fund? A bank? I dunno, maybe, a little bit. 7 I cannot get too worked up about the regulatory framework applicable to it. For now I would prefer to be swept up by Facebook’s grand vision for it. That vision seems to involve competing with or even displacing national currencies, and if you’re going that far why not displace national regulatory regimes too? If we meet back here in 20 years and Libra has become the currency of the internet, we’re not going to be talking about whether Libra complies with banking regulation, we’re going to be talking about how the Libra Association regulates and stress-tests the Libra banks that it licenses

and a possible long game:

And this is when this bet would pay off for Facebook (and the second point I missed in my earlier analysis): the implication that digital currencies will do for money what the Internet did for information is that the very long-term trend will be towards centralization around Aggregators. When there is no friction, control shifts from gatekeepers controlling supply to Aggregators controlling demand. To that end, by pioneering Libra, building what will almost certainly be the first wallet for the currency, and bringing to bear its unmatched network for facilitating payments, Facebook is betting it will offer the best experience for digital currency flows, giving it power not by controlling Libra but rather by controlling the most users of Libra.

2022-01-29:

Facebook announced in 2019 with enormous fanfare that it was going to launch a stablecoin and work closely with all of the relevant regulators blah blah blah, and it went to the Federal Reserve and said “what do we need to do to launch a stablecoin,” and the Fed said “you must bring me the egg of a dragon and the tears of a unicorn,” and now the Facebook stablecoin is shutting down. One of the largest companies in the world devoted millions of dollars to figuring out how to launch a stablecoin and concluded that it was impossible. It is demonstrably not impossible! Tether did it! Tether has a hugely successful stablecoin! Tether does not care at all about working closely with all of the relevant regulators! That’s why!