He was still doing weekends when I discovered Coast to Coast AM. As others have said, his ability to hold two opposing points of view in mind (i. this guy I'm talking to is crazy, ii. let's get weird) was wonderful. I enjoyed the way he played his interviews. On the west coast, it's a 10 pm show. To this day, I still like to put Coast to Coast AM on 1-hour sleep timer when I go to bed. Fun to hear all the crazy perspectives. Art Bell, you lived well.
A metric that may be useful: fragility index. How many positive results would need to be reversed to have the p-value exceed 0.05? Seems applicable for low-powered studies such as this one.
Oliver - as a fellow marathoner, I'll disagree on this. 26.2 is just a long run, with ever degrading legs. Even with the drafting behind the phalanx of runner, one's legs are being put through some rough work. I watched the Kipchoge doing this race. He was a beast, not a lab rat. Note that two other runners, with all the advantages, couldn't come close to what he did.
For me, this was confirmation that humans do indeed have room to push the current world record further down.
@bhc3 hey Hutch - you and I have run together in the past!
Surprised this thread has the legs it has - I was merely pointing out the sterile (and arguably Nike marketing oriented) attempt at a sub 2 hour 26.2 mile effort was, despite being a super human effort, not a 'marathon' per se. This has been beaten to death elsewhere online in running forums. Yes it is a little 'snobby' to say that, but formally a 'marathon' is a race and not a time trial...and more importantly a mass participation activity where finishing is considered a triumph for the average Joe or Jane.
I happen to think the Nike record attempt hijacks the everyday heroism of all those folks grinding out winter training after or before work right now, but I do agree the superhuman element of the athletes involved in the Nike event was incredible...
I guess it goes without saying that the headline is clickbait. The difference isn't "an illusion". Rather, the article describes an insightful way of looking at incomes based on cost-of-living for different geographies.
The yawning difference between Asians and whites mostly disappears after accounting for geography. But it's still quite large versus other segments (blacks, hispanics).
Based on the headline, I was expecting to see income convergence among the four groups. Not the case at all.
How do you mean? I think of Moments are formalizing something that Twitter does well: conversations/stories around topics of current interest. Sure, you'll engage your connections on these topics. But it's nice to see a broader view of them as well.
I'm convinced way down the road (ahem...pun) that autonomous vehicles are going to become our work spaces. We already see it with some people getting work done on their company buses. But those are limited in terms of letting you work fully.
In our future, you'll have your own personal space on a self-driving car. Room for proper placement of your laptop + keyboard. Ability to loudly participate in conference calls. Dual screens.
And this opens up home ownership possibilities. Bay Area home prices are going through the roof. If companies want to hire people, they need to account for housing prices. Well, why not hire people who live 2 hours away? For example, the job may be in San Francisco (median home price $1.063 million), but the employee lives in Roseville (media home price $372,200).
The work day starts with the 8 am commute. Our employee lets the vehicle drive and starts working. Emails, documents, conference calls, etc. He then shows up in the office at 10 am. Gets that key face time and benefits from those serendipitous moments that only occur in person. Exits the office at 4:30 pm to return home, working on the commute. Has dinner with the kids and helps them with the homework.
One can see real possibilities for positive change once we have autonomous vehicles.
I've flown to Germany from San Francisco several times. Nine time zones away. The flight leaves early afternoon in SF, and I'm in Germany by late morning. The travel included a 40 minute train ride from Frankfurt. I sleep very little on flights, and I'm exhausted on that train ride.
I used to try the "stay awake until night" method once I was in Germany. It wasn't very effective, I didn't adjust for several days. I then tried something different.
As soon as I get to my hotel (around lunchtime), I take a nap of 3 hours or so. I don't let myself sleep beyond that. I then get up and do some activities. I have dinner at the regular local time and then go to sleep at the usual time in the evening.
I've found that I rapidly adjust to the local time and have very little jet lag thereafter. It's that initial nap upon arrival that makes the difference.
There's now flights from SFO that leave to Frankfurt around 9pm local time - for me that already made a big difference. It allows me to at least sleep 2-3 hours instead of the usual 30 minutes in 5 minute chunks.
> As soon as I get to my hotel (around lunchtime), I take a nap of 3 hours or so. I don't let myself sleep beyond that. I then get up and do some activities. I have dinner at the regular local time and then go to sleep at the usual time in the evening.
Yea, I found that to be much better as well. It additionaly seems to help tremendously to do an hour or two of sport after that nap. I feel being physically exhausted helps to get adjusted much quicker, because I sleep much deeper the following night. It's awfully hard to convince yourself to start tho.
"I believe that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian."
Considering this was 1890, and that she was experiencing all these prejudices, a remarkable prediction on her part. We're still a ways away, but in 2010, 15% of new marriages in the U.S. were interracial. [1]
Technology and time removed frontiers, people used to be tribes, then burgs, then kingdoms, nations, USofX. Soon the notion of native, race and country may be very very blurry.
I'm expecting somewhere way down the road, scientists will unlock the secrets to prolonging our lives for nearly forever. They'll stop the telomeres from degrading, come up with ways to address cancer quickly and effectively, etc.
At the same time, space travel technology will also have been advanced, allowing for self-sustaining spacecraft that offer protection against the harsh environment of outer space.
At that point, you can imagine that a hearty band of explorers will undertake a mission of leaving our solar system and exploring way beyond our world. Who knows how far they could get.
These are the sorts of advances I can imagine becoming real many generations from now. I wouldn't underestimate our capacity to make it happen.
If you want to speculate, how about the possibility of uploading people's mind to a robot? Let's say that we are able to send outer space a bunch of self replicating robots (they can travel to various planets and build a copy of themselves using the raw materials they can find there). After some time, we have lots of robots at many points in space, then you make a copy of your mind and send it at the speed of light to those robots. Because of the self replicating nature of the thing, we can have lots of robots so anybody who wants to can upload his/her mind to one of them. That way we have a non risky an relatively cheap way to explore the galaxy - it would just take couple of thousands of years to have everything set up.
Still a relatively slow way to get around. We have some co-factor here for "median time between alien contacts" which might be thousands of years. In which case they came, they saw, and the people who saw them remembered it as folk tales.
"Speed" could be seen in terms of perceived time for distance covered. No reason with a robot-uploaded consciousness that you couldn't slow its perception of time such that travel between the stars becomes something comprehensible by a human-like mind. A bit like video game time acceleration, but real.
That doesn't address what happens to the visitees, but if that kind of slow-scale exploration becomes the default, then any civilizations on a similar level to the robot explorers would have technology and societal structures in place to support meaningful contact of that nature.
Both our bodies and minds need to hardened to endure deep space.
10,000 years between stars is a long time to be playing solitaire. The voyagers may need to sleep, hibernate, slow down their metabolism, alter their perception of time, or something, to make the journey bearable.
10,000 years between stars is a long time to be playing solitaire.
That's assuming our space ships resemble a Saturn V or the Space Shuttle. Why limit ourselves to that? How about a colony ship the size of New York City, built in orbit, housing millions of people? At that point we don't even need to live thousands of years; we'd have a generational ship.
I don't know this market well. But I can suggest three tests that you should apply to any potential niche you're considering.
"Jobs-to-be-done" (JTBD) is useful analytical tool here. A "job" is a thing that someone is trying to accomplish. Harvard's Theodore Levitt expressed it well in this quote:
"People don't want to buy a 1/4 inch drill. They want a 1/4 inch hole."
It reframes the discussion away from features to customer objectives.
As you look at your platform, think about different market niches and the things they're trying to get done. Here are three tests to apply as you consider a given niche.
1. Is it an actual JTBD for a large enough target niche?
This is the most basic test. Do people actually have the need that your product/service addresses? Not only that, but can you characterize the the number of potential customers with the JTBD?
2. Does your product/service/idea meaningfully improve on the incumbent solution(s)?
This is a tougher test. How does your idea outperform the current way customers address the JTBD? You need to have a clear view on this. And the improvement needs to be significant, not just a little. Customers will overvalue their incumbent solution's benefits, and undervalue the new product's benefits.
3. Is the total incremental cost to the customer of your idea less than the total incremental value to the customer?
This test is the toughest. You need to consider monetary costs of course. But there can be many other switching costs as well. Loss of existing data, new time required to learn, new formats that have upstream and downstream impacts.
My take is that successful products can get to clear yes's on these three tests. But it takes some work, experimenting and seeing where your idea falls short if it's not getting yes's on the three tests.
