Cocktail napkin math uses brute force/ basic mathematics to better understand our world. This newsletter reviews interesting tidbits in Technology, Math, Cognitive Sciences, Business.
- I'm wondering if the decline of hats is related to an increase in car use. The time periods seem to correlate. Which also makes me wonder if a rise in urban living will increase hat sales/ use.
- Next time a Doctor gives you a percentage ask them what the sample size is and if you can see the anonymized data. 99% probability that they are making it up, much like this probability.
Aeon piece that fails to capture much of the nuance that comes with the information economy. I'm mainly posting it to repost an interesting response, a classic post, a concept adjacent to, and then eventually [my own response].
Do you think you know about corn? You don't. Welcome to Jack's American Agricultural solution.
Johns Hopkins performed an incredibly deep study to figure out that US healthcare is expensive because we charge more (AND we get zero extra value for that money). In a related article, Vox shows that Emergency rooms are basically stealing from people with the way that they charge people.
The world has gotten weird with Microsoft driving innovation. Minor blip on the Microsoft/ Github radar but seems like it could be another in a series of Microsoft victories. Github makes private repos free for small teams.
Great Data Journalism Piece about inferring "the education business model"
A little slow on getting this one up... It may not have been new but it was new to me... Apparently drones caused a major London Airport to completely shut down... in what could be one of the first "terrorist" (might be a slight exaggeration) use of drones.
Reddit discussion about power laws and how it relates to modern consumable reading material.
Data driven article without much depth (Sorry Rand). The Article shows that blogging is useful to people that its useful to... but with graphs. It is a nice macro view to help those of us that like writing whether or not we're wasting our time.
Cocktail Napkin Math LOVES this tweet. You should too.
Harley Davidson releases a crazy cool electric motorcycle. Remember when Elon open-sourced all of Tesla's patents... this is exactly what we were hoping for.