ODO | There Is No Rewind

The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

If you’ve seen Apple’s launch video, it’s obvious that this is how simple computing should be!

I could have stood in line at the airport cabstand for fifteen minutes like every other mook in the world, freezing my balls off, but such is not the way of the twenty-dollar millionaire. I walked straight to the front of the line and offered a woman twenty bucks for her spot. She took it with a shrug.

The first of a series, on the art of spreading $20 bills:

Then I realized something else: Most people aren’t willing to lose their job for twenty bucks, but if they have something they already take for granted—a place in line, a seat, a ticket to a show they’ve already seen—they’ll jump on a twenty like a possum on a wet bag of groceries.

An additional list of 13 things adds on to the original 13 things that don’t make sense compiled by New Scientist, one of which covers the power of negative suggestion.

The Nocebo effect is the opposite of the Placebo effect (see the original list) and refers to cases where “putting someone in a negative frame of mind has an adverse effect on their health or well-being.”

Tell people a medical procedure will be extremely painful, for example, and they will experience more pain than if you had kept the bad news to yourself. Similarly, experiences of side effects within the placebo groups of drug trials have shown that a doctor’s warning about the possible side effects of a medicine makes it much more likely that the patient will report experiencing those effects.

Imagine that within your body is an ongoing battle between cops and criminals.  And, in general, the cops are winning.  They patrol randomly through your body, and when they happen to come across a criminal he is promptly removed.  The cops can always defeat a criminal they come across, unless the criminal has been allowed to sit in the same spot for a long time.  A criminal that remains in one place for long enough (say, one day) can build a “fortress” which is too strong to be assailed by the police.  If this happens, you die.

Lucky for you, the cops are plentiful, and on average they pass by every spot 14 times a day.  The likelihood of them missing a particular spot for an entire day is given (as you’ve learned by now) by the Poisson distribution: it is a mere .

But what happens if your internal police force starts to dwindle?  Suppose that as you age the police force suffers a slight reduction, so that they can only cover every spot 12 times a day.  Then the probability of them missing a criminal for an entire day decreases to .  The difference between 14 and 12 doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the result was that your chance of dying during a given day jumped by more than 10 times.  And if the strength of your police force drops linearly in time, your mortality rate will rise exponentially.

A perfect analogy.

Asia is home both to the cheapest city in the survey, Karachi, as well as the priciest, Tokyo…

Economist surveys living costs in February 2009.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Clay Shirky on the future of newspapers and journalism.