Tag: reading

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Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke says he almost died jumping on moon – Business Insider

The Apollo program is full of incredible anecdotes about the challenges and experiences of spaceflight. And like every other NASA program, it’s also had its fair share of shenanigans.

So it’s not surprising to read about Charlie Duke was horsing around on the towards the end of his time on the moon during Apollo 16. But when he landed hard on the lunar surface:

“I learned a lesson: Never do anything in space that you haven’t practiced. And we had not practiced the high jump.“

Charlie Duke

Source: Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke says he almost died jumping on moon – Business Insider

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neat stuff I come across

Head Starts are Overrated

Never decide you are too old or too late to the game to try something new. “The tidy specialization narrative cannot easily fit even [the] relatively kind domains that have most successfully marketed it,” Epstein concludes. “So, about that, one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind…research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated.”

–  Ephrat Livni, “To thrive in a “wicked” world, you need range“

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ideas

On the dark side of the “side hustle”

[T]he “side hustle” was originally an act of economic defiance. Now, the phrase has been bastardized into an advertisement for the gig economy, a way to make discounted, disposable labor seem hip.

Source: The Startup Industry’s Toxic “Side Hustle” Fixation

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ideas

Happy Little Data Points…

In total, Ross painted 381 works on the show, relying on a distinct set of elements, scenes and themes, and thereby providing thousands of data points. I decided to use that data to teach something myself: the important statistical concepts of conditional probability and clustering, as well as a lesson on the limitations of data.

So let’s perm out our hair and get ready to create some happy spreadsheets!

Source: A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross | FiveThirtyEight

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ideas

“…a sample size of one…”

Such thought experiments can be useful tools for exploring situations that can’t be studied in the laboratory. Occasionally, however, unfortunate accidents yield case studies: opportunities for researchers to study scenarios that can’t be experimentally induced for ethical reasons. Case studies have a sample size of one and no control group. But, as the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran has pointed out in Phantoms in the Brain (1998), it takes only one talking pig to prove that pigs can talk.

Source: Large Hadron Collider: What happened to the scientist who stuck his head inside a particle accelerator — Quartz

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ideas

“Collaborate and Be Patient.”

If you want to move fast, then go alone. If you want to move far, move together. If you want to transform, we must collaborate and be patient.

Source: Field Foundation of Illinois: 2015-2016 Biennial Impact Report