Issue #18 · July 5th, 2016 · View in your browser

A worrying amount of bomb detectors in the Middle East are fake. Last Sunday, a bomb killed more than 200 people in Baghdad. It represents the deadliest single attack in Iraq since 2007 and ISIS' deadliest attack. You know what may have been able to prevent it? Fucking functional bomb detectors. A couple of con men profited from the rather dire security situation in the Middle East to sell $80M worth of fake bomb detectors to the Iraqi government. These toys are named ADE 651. They are widely used in Lebanon as well. Such problematic low-hanging fruits could be solved within weeks, why is no one doing anything? [Vanity Fair]

Talent achieves what others cannot achieve but genius achieves what others cannot imagine. Well, at least this is how Schopenhauer makes the distinction between talent and genius. Contemplation allows a person to break free from the ego and enter the much more interesting world of ideas. Schopenhauer warns, though, that imagination cannot be the entirety of genius, just an essential accompaniment. This somewhat echoes what Aaron Swartz once said (bless his soul): “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity”. [Brain Pickings]

What is surveillance capitalism? Maciej Cegłowski is a man the bookmarking geeks of the Internet love because he is the creator and sole maintainer of Pinboard, a beautiful bookmarking service. But we're not there for that are we? Right, so he recently gave an interesting talk in Berkeley: “Just like industrialized manufacturing changed the relationship between labor and capital, surveillance capitalism is changing the relationship between private citizens and the entities doing the tracking. Our old ideas about individual privacy and consent no longer hold in a world where personal data is harvested on an industrial scale.” Interesting! [Idle Words]

The “power lunch” was a concept invented by the Four Seasons hotel in NYC, in the late 1970s. Today, people eat at their desks and the food is delivered by some twenty something student in an eco-friendly bag. Back then, people used to rush out of their offices to grab a sandwich. The rich, however, could indulge in hour-long, boozy lunches. How much time you spent on Lunch, in America, became a metaphor for status. So one Four Seasons manager thought he could transform the lunch break for the wealthy into effective business opportunities. They set the tables apart for more privacy and wine became available by the glass. Executives from my generation, however, seem to prefer Starbucks because of WiFi. [Marketplace]

An AI recently downed an experienced fighter pilot. We're talking about a simulation here. However, this AI was developed by a doctoral graduate at the University of Cincinnati. It beat retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene “Geno” Lee. We thus learn that PhD students are able to write software that defeats people who have had decades of experience in one of the most specialised military discipline of them all, i.e piloting fighter jets. AI pilots will influence the future design of airplanes, they will be lighter, cheaper, smaller Ah, also, this piece of code was running on a $35 Raspberry Pi. (Here's a 12,000 word introduction to programming with the Raspberry Pi, btw). Well, time to regulate AI! [Marginal Revolution]

What to do when you are in the sea but your stuff is on the beach? There are some problems that need to be solved. How do you make sure your keys, phone, etc. aren't stolen? Here are some suggestions from the NYT readership: “Wrap your valuables in a shirt and leave a bag sitting out in the open, so a potential thief would grab the wrong thing” or “ask someone to watch it for you, like your computer at the library,” Meredith Pickett said. “If you ask, people are surprisingly trustworthy.” [New York Times]

Caribbean sperm whales have their own culture and language. Different cultures are represented through different approaches to hunting, baby-sitting or the structure of the family (some whales spend more time with their friends than with their family, which is unusual for animals, apparently). Each group of Caribbean whales has its own dialect as well. “In the Caribbean, for example, there's one distinct coda that Gero and his colleagues have heard repeatedly over the past 30 years. Called the 1-1-3 coda, it's a series of two clicks followed by three clicks in a rather catchy rhythm. Each family teaches new calves the coda, precisely duplicating the pattern used by every family in the clan.” Maybe it's time to stop jailing such wonderful animals for our ice-cream eating kids to nonchalantly peek at? [Ars Technica]

And a heap of assorted links:  

+ The Financial Times : Brexit and Henri VIII [the FT's Izabella Kaminska, an awesome blogger]

• The Washington Post : The opposite of Brexit: African Union launches an all-Africa passport [wait and see but interesting]

• McClatchy : Donor promised to make Clinton ‘look good’ if appointed to board [by board they mean a sensitive intelligence board]

• Buffer Blog : 55% of readers read your article for 15 seconds or less: why we should focus on attention and not clicks [there's more to it than writing good headlines]

• Smashing Magazine : Client Experience Design [as freelance designers, our first customers are the stakeholders]

• Nasdaq : Nassim Taleb on simplicity and skin in the game [read it, it's short!]

• Farnam Street : The four tools of discipline [delay gratification!]

• Kottke : Boston Dynamics' new house trained robot [it can put fragile tableware in the dishwasher for you and it's creepy af]

And finally, did you know the Russian cursive writing looked like this? How can they read it? I'd really like to know so do tell, please!

*Thanks and have a nice week, 

Ulysse*