The whole ball of wax: March 12, 2017 Snippets
We could probably all stand to read more books than we currently do; the tech community especially. Our “Reading Club” Slack channel at Social Capital, while a good source of information and the occasional opinionated magazine article, isn’t quite a substitute for reading stories, books, novels, or biographies. It’s good to surround one’s self with reasonable arguments; nonetheless, it may not be sufficient. So this week, we yield the floor to American author Annie Dillard, who by painting us a picture, illustrates why better than we ever could:
“I am beginning to bore myself with the following joke about the fireplace. Since it’s doesn’t draw well, I open the door a crack, which circulates air through the room and up the chimney. This cools the room. I say I’m going to get another couple cords of wood this summer for air-conditioning. I have not noticed that the innocent islanders in the captive audience on the receiving end of this little pleasantry are rushing it into print, but I have just found it in Werner of-all-people Heisenberg, in ‘Physics and Beyond’. One cannot be too careful of one’s reading.
Heisenberg attributes the first remarking of this remark, quite correctly, to Niels Bohr (who loved paradoxical formulations’) — for, although this might have been another of those many instances of simultaneous discovery by independent researchers which confound lay thinkers, but at which casehardened science historians merely shrug, it is, alas, not. The intervening decades are too embarrassingly long. …
Werner Heisenberg’s “Physics and Beyond” disappoints me. He is merely filling in the inches. He knows the material in this book cold — too cold. It is far behind him, not only in years, but in his thinking and, one hopes, his sense of what writing is. But it is a book. People read books. If you have something to say, write a book. Thoreau’s Kathmandu principle, the Colette principle (‘Break of Day’ as diary), still holds: you can write anything, anything at all, if you’re honest, because we are each as bizarre and foreign to one another as the news from Kathmandu (as Colette’s life was to me).
On the other hand. Writing is too hard to waste on the weirdness of your daily life, or at least on mine. I love to sock the reader into some odd time and place and let him breathe there and love it, and love the world for having such a place — and then to call for fireworks there with only a ballpoint pen. Possible books abound; I’d rather write an impossible page.
Argument is penny-ante play, or talk with tea. It is the literacy that is ‘a work very difficult to do.’ Argument draws a line linking corridors through chaos with reason. Art, by contrast, is the whole ball of wax — a system, coherent, chopped out from chaos and held.”
New foundations:
Why Google’s answer to AWS Reserved Instances is a big deal | Tino Tereshko
Collateralized Debt Obligations — an unlearned lesson | Viable Opposition
Important posts from important novelists:
Margaret Atwood on what “The Handmaiden’s Tale” means in the Age of Trump | NYT Book Review
What writers really do when they write | George Saunders, The Guardian
Treasured items:
Conflict and collectibles among the Yurok | Unenumerated
Check cashing services are actually providing better value than banks, for some | Alex Morrell, BI
Familiar Finance: on the subject of lending money to family and friends | Put a Number On It
The other side of the coin:
“9 to 5” turns 35, and it’s still radical today | Tara Murtha, Rolling Stone
Restaurant Guide 1: Restaurants should not look like (most) restaurants | Don’t Worry About the Vase
Only the rich are poisoned: the preference of others | Nassim Taleb
Complexity and strategy | Terry Crowley
Other reading from around the Internet:
Financiers fight over the American Dream | Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New Yorker
Inside the Economist’s weekly editorial meeting | The Economist
PK Subban on how he’d fix the NHL’s schedule and economics | Bill Simmons, The Ringer
Automation eats into the financial profession by unbundling jobs | The Financial Times
Announcing the MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award / The nomination form | MIT Media Lab
A career retrospective — 10 years working in tech | Sailor Mercury
Elli Kaplan, Founder & CEO of Neurotrack, isn’t one to take her company’s mission statement lightly. In a recent post, Elli lets us in on her personal and family experience, the tremendous need that Neurotrack seeks to fill, and its implications for all of us and our families. As Elli writes, “In this day and age, so many of us worry constantly about how the aging process will impact our physical image. We obsess over wrinkles, spots and blemishes. Every year American consumers spend more than two billion dollars on anti-aging skincare. But most of us know that as we grow older our greatest asset isn’t wrinkle-free skin; it’s our minds and memories. Our minds are responsible for our personalities, our strengths and our foibles. Our memories are the very essence of who we are. And yet few people think about how to protect these precious gifts as they age.”
Diagnosing memory loss before symptoms appear | Elli Kaplan, Neurotrack
Neurotrack is a welcome addition to an inspiring group of people and institutions working on cognitive decline and memory loss. The foundation of their work, Stuart Zola’s research on hippocampal damage and impaired recognition, has since been replicated in humans and holds tremendous potential. Nonetheless, there remains a great amount of scientific and clinical research still to be done; in addition to their commercial goals, Neurotrack is committed to doing everything they can to advance this research and our collective understanding of the science.
For International Women’s Day this past Wednesday, Kaplan interviewed four of the research scientists playing key roles in memory loss research. She asked about their proudest moments in research, advice for women seeking careers in STEM, and more:
Celebrating the women scientists tackling memory loss | Elli Kaplan, Neurotrack
For anyone called to help out in a greater capacity, please check out Neurotrack’s careers page: they are currently hiring for senior software engineer, product manager, and growth marketing manager positions.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team at Social Capital
