Month: July 2019

Shopify

This is how Shopify can both in the long run be the biggest competitor to Amazon even as it is a company that Amazon can’t compete with: Amazon is pursuing customers and bringing suppliers and merchants onto its platform on its own terms; Shopify is giving merchants an opportunity to differentiate themselves while bearing no risk if they fail.

Modeling Evolution

Barricelli programmed some of the earliest computer algorithms that resemble real-life processes: a subdivision of what we now call “artificial life,” which seeks to simulate living systems—evolution, adaptation, ecology—in computers. Barricelli presented a bold challenge to the standard Darwinian model of evolution by competition by demonstrating that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation. Until his death in 1993, Barricelli floated between biological and mathematical sciences, questioning doctrine, not quite fitting in. “He was a brilliant, eccentric genius”

BM 6 Degrees of Separation

Our experiment, incubated in Scalable Cooperation in collaboration with computer and network scientists, was a play on the Small World Experiment. We designed it with the same structure of Milgram’s original 1962 study, routing information through Burning Man’s social network with a series of parcels. These parcels, which we named “Vessels” (because everything at Burning Man can and should have a vaguely ritualistic name), were handed out on the first day of Burning Man 2018, containing information about a particular individual at Burning Man. The clearly stated goal of the vessel was to end up in the possession of this individual, so we refer to them as the Terminus. From hand-off to hand-off, these Vessels would collect a variety of information, stories, and data about their journey. We hoped these journeys would allow us to quantitatively map the connectivity of the Burning Man community and qualitatively understand how people engage with Burning Man culture. We hoped not only to count the number of hops of each successful chain, and compare that measure of social connectivity with Milgram’s 6 degrees of separation, but also to see what cultural, geographic, or attitudinal factors affect success rates. These are not questions that can be probed by scientific methods alone, so we enlisted the input of designers and artists in order to better explore the subjectivity of Burning Man’s magic.

Mittani Palace

the site of Kemune can be dated to the time of the Mittani Empire, which dominated large parts of northern Mesopotamia and Syria from the 15th to the 14th century BCE. The Mittani Empire is one of the least researched kingdoms of the Ancient Near East. The archaeologists now hope to obtain new information about the politics, economy, and history of the empire by studying cuneiform tablets discovered in the palace.

10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki

An exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the genius of Japan’s foremost living film director, Hayao Miyazaki — creator of some of the world’s most iconic and enduring anime feature films. Miyazaki allowed a single documentary filmmaker to shadow him at work, as he dreamed up characters and plot lines for what would become his 2008 blockbuster, “Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.” Miyazaki explores the limits of his physical ability and imagination to conjure up memorable protagonists.

Against tech populism

If your overall reaction to business progress over the last 15 years is even mildly negative, no sensible person will try to please you, because you are impossible to please. Yet our new anti-tech populists have managed to make themselves a center of pseudo-intellectual attention. Angry lamentation about the effects of new tech on privacy has flabbergasted me the most. For practical purposes, we have more privacy than ever before in human history. You can now buy embarrassing products in secret. You can read or view virtually anything you like in secret. You can interact with over 1B people in secret.

Lamarckism

Once a modern heresy, non-Darwinian inheritance, aka Lamarkism, increasing can be shown to sometimes happen in nature.

The traditional concept that heritability occurs exclusively from the transfer of germline-restricted genetics is being challenged by the increasing accumulation of evidence confirming the existence of experience-dependent transgenerational inheritance. Transgenerational inheritance is emerging as a powerful mechanism for robustly transmitting phenotypic adaptations to offspring. However, questions remain unanswered as to how this heritable information is passed from somatic cells. Previous studies have implicated the critical involvement of RNA in heritable transgenerational effects and the high degree of mobility and genomic impact of RNAs in all organisms is an attractive model for the efficient transfer of genetic information. Here we show, for the first time, robust transport of RNA from the brain of an adult male mouse to sperm, and subsequently to offspring. Our observation of heritable genetic information originating from a somatic tissue may reveal a mechanism for how transgenerational effects are transmitted to offspring.

Sargassum belt

Sargassum is a rust-colored seaweed that floats. In the Atlantic Ocean, the 2 dominant species have now expanded so much, likely due to agricultural runoff from the Amazon or Mississippi, that blooms practically stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to West Africa. The seaweed provides a habitat for 100s of species of fish and hatchling sea turtles, seahorses, crabs, shrimps, snails, and nudibranchs. But excessive amounts of it are washing ashore and blanketing beaches, with significant environmental and economic consequences.

The US is behind on 5G

No American company makes the devices that transmit high-speed wireless signals. Huawei is the clear leader in the field; the Swedish company Ericsson is a distant second; and the Finnish company Nokia is third. It is almost surprising that the Defense Department allowed the report to be published at all, given the board’s remarkably blunt assessment of the nation’s lack of innovation and one of the biggest impediments to rolling out 5G in the United States: the Pentagon itself. The broadband spectrum needed to create a successful network was reserved not for commercial purposes but for the military.