Archive for December 2016

Thursday 29 December 2016

interesting #4


1 Interactive: mapping the flow of international trade, visual capitalist
Who trades what with who? Beautiful map. For Belgium it's mostly US, China and neighbouring European countries.

 2. We know nothing about the future of sex robots, Engadget
Should a sex robot be able to withdraw consent if it thinks the act of sex would be harmful to its user? That's one of several instances Bendel outlined in which the needs of the robot and its user may conflict. If the user begins showing signs of physical distress or fatigue, is it wise to program conditions whereby the bot would turn itself off? We don't have an answer, but we'll need one -- and soon.

 3. Price tags: celebrities on social media, the Economist
Influencers can earn anywhere from $12,500 (100-500k followers) - $300,000 (over 7m followers) per youtube post. for instagram it's $5,000 (100-500k followers) - $150,000 (over 7m followers). Keep in mind that an instagram post is basically just a picture. That's a very expensive picture.

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book log: 2016

2016
nonfiction
elon musk bio, ashlee vance

if this is a man, primo levi 
the truce, primo levi

how to create a mind, kurzweil

outliers, gladwell
blink, gladwell
tipping point, gladwell
david and goliath, gladwell 


monkey business, rolfe and troobe
straight to hell, john lefevre

fiction
invisible monsters, chuck palahniuk 
haunted, palahniuk

we, zamyatin yevgeni
fahrenheit 451, bradbury
ready player one, ernest kline
the windup girl, paolo bacigalupi


I am no one you know, joyce carol oates
oscar et la dame rose, eric-emmanuel schmitt 
women, bukowski 

in process 
physics of the future, kaku

for 2017 (?)
do androids dream of electric sheep , p. k. dick
nothing is true and everything is possible, pomerantsev
the captive mind, milosz
the omnivores dilemma 
     
at the existentialist cafe
josefine mutzenbacher
ralph waldo emerson

to kill a mockingbird
the rebel, camus
moonwalking with einstein, 

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year in review: 2016





year of big changes: everything seems to move so slow until you look back and realize everything's different


  • started the year on 01/01 in shanghai, beijing two months and a half, visited xian, home in antwerp for six months, algarve in portugal for a week and ended the year again in shanghai (four months) where I also visited suzhou and beijing again
  • got my bachelor degree in social economics, economics and sociology (sociaal-economische wetenschappen) 
  • read a ton of books 
  • went from very very basic to great at basic conversation in french. estimate learned about 800 words (writing) in chinese. props to german for effort 
  • finished a marketing internship in beijing and a logistics internship in Antwerp 
  • got a full scholarship to go do my masters in shanghai, became financially independent from my parents
  • started attending Toastmasters to work on public speaking. gained confidence talking in front of people 
  • volunteered at a startup conference 



A lot changed. Met people, got a lot of opportunities. I'm lucky and I learned a lot, pushed myself, 
got out of my comfort zone. looking forward to more of that in 2017.



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Friday 23 December 2016

stats #1: terrorism


Terror in perspective, the Economist

– You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack

– You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack

Wikipedia notes that obesity is a a contributing factor in 100,000–400,000 deaths in the United States per year. That makes obesity 5,882 to times 23,528 more likely to kill you than a terrorist.

Terrorism statistics, Global Research

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interesting #3


1. Largest digital survey of the sky mapped billions of stars, EngadgetSee picture. Two petabytes of data. That's one thousand million million, or 10^15 bytes.2. Can you tell if you'll like someone based on their profile picture?, QuartzGuessing people would want to know more than ever with the holidays coming up. Superficiality of the digital era? Framing? Priming?Despite the wealth of new information available in the live interaction, perceivers’ judgments based on the photograph they had seen months earlier strongly predicted their judgments following the live interaction. If perceivers had formed a favorable impression of the woman based simply on her portrait, they continued to hold a favorable impression of her following the interaction. If perceivers had initially formed an unfavorable impression, then they continued to hold these unfavorable impressions, even after meeting her.3. In defence of hate speech, the trial of Geert Wilders, the EconomistRelevant in an age where echo chambers have gone mainstream.Proponents of hate-speech laws argue that they foster social harmony by forcing people to be more polite to each other. The opposite is more likely to be true. Criminalising something as subjective as the giving of offence encourages more people to say they are offended, so they can use the law to suppress views they dislike. This enrages those who are silenced; hardly a recipe for social tranquillity.4. Learn a new lingo while doing something else, Scientific AmericanAs someone who's trying to get their French and Chinese up to par, this is interesting. Basically passive language learning. For me, it's about integrating small things into my life and creating the right habit. French music through Stromae, improve listening skills through movies .... Time to start watching a series I like and pretend that I'm doing it to learn. You'll never have to work a day in your life if you love your job, right?

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Monday 19 December 2016

book log #2

finished
the Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi 
Farang, laowai, gaijin, foreigner, ... this book reminded me that we're all foreigners on this planet. Fans of westworld, the future, ... subtle AI, hints of transhumanism, evolution and mankind meet the end of the world through manmade catastrophies and global warming, great read. Unexpectedly dramatic and realistic.

 “We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.”
Oscar et la Dame Rose, Eric Emmanuel Schmitt  
Broke my heart a little bit. Beautiful book, consists of a collection of letters of a young boy writing to God as he's dying. Read it in French as a step to improve said language. Not too difficult, reminded me of le Petit Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery).

 "There's no solution for life except for living it."
"I think we make the same mistake in life. We forget that it's fragile and ephemeral. We make everything seem like we're immortal."
"Life, it's deadly."

“Il n'y a pas de solution à la vie sinon vivre.” 
in process
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“Je crois qu'on fait la même erreur pour la vie. Nous oublions que la vie est fragile,friable, éphémère. Nous faisons tous semblant d'être immortels.” 
"La vie, c'est fatale"
How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil
Physics, biology and neuroscience for beginners. Great thought experiments on how the brain works. Given the difficulty of the subjects that are touched on, it's remarkable that Kurzweil can still manage to make it all understandable.

 Women, Charles Bukowski
To balance out Kurzweil

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Wednesday 14 December 2016

interesting #2

But Singapore’s paternalism has not gone away. Earlier this month the government announced that only ethnic Malays will be permitted to run for president next year. The constitution will be amended to mandate that presidential elections be reserved for members of a certain ethnic group if nobody from that group has served as president for the past five terms.

Living in China, this article was very enlightening.
China today is extraordinarily homogenous. It sustains that by remaining almost entirely closed to new entrants except by birth. Unless someone is the child of a Chinese national, no matter how long they live there, how much money they make or tax they pay, it is virtually impossible to become a citizen. Someone who marries a Chinese person can theoretically gain citizenship; in practice few do. As a result, the most populous nation on Earth has only 1,448 naturalised Chinese in total, according to the 2010 census. Even Japan, better known for hostility to immigration, naturalises around 10,000 new citizens each year; in America the figure is some 700,000 (see chart).

Bumped into this while trying to untangle myself the knot of the conflicts going on in Syria. Complicated but this video gives it a very good shot.

Humans deem themselves superior to animals. What about AI and robots?  


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Monday 12 December 2016

Hollywood


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Sunday 11 December 2016

interesting #1



see picture

"I was already puzzled by the evolution of large brains in cephalopods, and this discovery made the questions more acute. What is the point of building a complex brain like that if your life is over in a year or two? Why invest in a process of learning about the world if there is no time to put that information to use? An octopus’s or cuttlefish’s life is rich in experience, but it is incredibly compressed.

The particular puzzle of octopus life span opens up a more general one. Why do animals age? And why do they age so differently? A scruffy-looking fish that inhabits the same patch of sea as my cephalopods has relatives who live to 200 years of age. This seems extraordinarily unfair: A dull-looking fish lives for centuries while the cuttlefish, in their chromatic splendor, and the octopuses, in their inquisitive intelligence, are dead before they are 2? There are monkeys the size of a mouse that can live for 15 years, and hummingbirds that can live for over 10. Nautiluses (who are also cephalopods) can live for 20 years. A recent Nature paper reported that despite continuing medical advances, humans appear to have reached a rough plateau at around 115 years, though a few people will edge beyond it. The life spans of animals seem to lack all rhyme or reason.

We tend to think about aging as a matter of bodies wearing out, as automobiles do. But the analogy is not a good one. An automobile’s original parts will indeed wear out, but an adult human is not operating with his or her original parts. Like all animals, we are made of cells that are continually taking in nutrients and dividing, replacing old parts with new ones. If you keep replacing the parts of an automobile with new ones, there is no reason it should ever stop running."


"In no other country that participated in the PISA survey is the difference in test results between immigrant students and non-immigrant students so flagrant as in Flanders, Belgium." 

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Book log #1: December 2016




finished

sociological insights and observations on the nature of humanity by an Auschwitz survivor albeit not a tale of survival. A horror of the kind that makes you want to cry while you read it, partly because it's so beautifully written. Some chapters still haunt me.

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”
incredibly inspiring and shows an array of different perspectives on the man
collection of short stories. The Girl with the Blackened Eye is one of them, about a girl who reflects on when she got abducted by a man when she was fifteen years old.



in process 
set in 23rd-century Thailand, global warming has ruined the planet and big corporations are essentially using bioterrorism to gain control of the world.  I'm about halfway through, great so far. Side note: I'm going to Thailand soon and I like the small observations some of the protagonists make into Thai culture.
"sequel" to If This is a Man, written 20 years after the events set in the first book
up next 
At the Existentialist Cafe
The Omnivores Dilemma
Women by Charles Bukowski
Moonwalking with Einstein
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