Month: January 2020

50% crazy

When I invest in biotech, I have a sort of a model for the type of person I’m looking to invest in. There’s sort of a bimodal distribution of scientists. You basically have people who are extremely conventional and will do experiments that will succeed but will not mean anything. These will not actually translate into anything significant, and you can tell that it is just a very incremental experiment. Then you have your various people who are crazy and want to do things that are going to make a very big difference. They’re, generally speaking, too crazy for anything to ever work. You want to find the people who are roughly halfway in between. There are fewer of those people because of these institutional structures and whatnot, but I don’t think they’re nonexistent. My challenge to biotech venture capitalists is to find some of those people who are crazy enough to try something bold, but not so crazy that it’s going to be this mutation where they do 100 things differently.

ICS hacking

p0wnto0wn comes to industrial control systems

Pwn2Own’s new focus on industrial control systems also brings public scrutiny to software that has long lacked it. Most of the companies here typically don’t make that code available to security researchers, and only agreed to provide it at the S4 conference’s request. (2 major industrial control system software makers, GE and Siemens, were notably absent.) Nor do these companies offer their own “bug bounty” rewards, meaning security researchers have neither the access nor incentive to find flaws.

Instagram is garbage

INSTAGRAM was leaving its trace on the physical world. People in search of ’grammable content were mobbing restaurants, public lands, and private neighborhoods in greater numbers, causing their stewards to think differently about design and crowd control. I read an article about rue Crémieux in Paris, where residents of pastel-painted houses were begging for a gate so tourists would stop taking photos in front of them. “It’s become hell. On weekends we get 200 people outside our windows. Our dinner table is right by the window and people are just outside taking pictures.”

Internet of beefs

The standard pattern of conflict on the IoB is depressingly predictable. A mook takes note of a casus belli in the news cycle (often created or co-opted by a knight, and referred to on the IoB as the outrage cycle), and heads over to their favorite multiplayer online battle arena (Twitter being the most important MOBA) to join known mook allies to fight stereotypically familiar but often unknown interchangeable mook foes.

Dusty Stars

Are we seeing 6 V838 Monocerotises orbiting our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole? It’s certainly possible. The number we see fits, the idea that they are stars embedded in dense dust clouds fits, the dynamics fit, and we have an example of just such a beast. There was a recent burst of star formation in the galactic center ~4–6 ga ago, which very well could have been when these binaries were born.

dust clouds with stars embedded in them.