links of the day

Warren Buffett: Women are Key To America’s Future Prosperity

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Warren Buffett joined Twitter today. To coincide with that move, he also penned a piece in CNN/Fortune, in which he explains how women are key to America’s prosperity:

Start with the fact that our country’s progress since 1776 has been mind-blowing, like nothing the world has ever seen. Our secret sauce has been a political and economic system that unleashes human potential to an extraordinary degree. As a result Americans today enjoy an abundance of goods and services that no one could have dreamed of just a few centuries ago.

But that’s not the half of it — or, rather, it’s just about the half of it. America has forged this success while utilizing, in large part, only half of the country’s talent. For most of our history, women — whatever their abilities — have been relegated to the sidelines. Only in recent years have we begun to correct that problem.

Despite the inspiring “all men are created equal” assertion in the Declaration of Independence, male supremacy quickly became enshrined in the Constitution. In Article II, dealing with the presidency, the 39 delegates who signed the document — all men, naturally — repeatedly used male pronouns. In poker, they call that a “tell.”

Finally, 133 years later, in 1920, the U.S. softened its discrimination against women via the 19th Amendment, which gave them the right to vote. But that law scarcely budged attitudes and behaviors. In its wake, 33 men rose to the Supreme Court before Sandra Day O’Connor made the grade — 61 years after the amendment was ratified. For those of you who like numbers, the odds against that procession of males occurring by chance are more than 8 billion to one.

I couldn’t agree more. Go Warren go!

Paul Miller Reflects on a Year Without the Internet

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On April 30 of 2012, Paul Miller took a hiatus. From the internet. For one year. 

How did his experiment go? He divulges in this excellent post on The Verge:

At 11:59PM on April 30th, 2012, I unplugged my Ethernet cable, shut off my Wi-Fi, and swapped my smartphone for a dumb one. It felt really good. I felt free.

A couple weeks later, I found myself among 60,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, pouring into New York’s Citi Field to learn from the world’s most respected rabbis about the dangers of the internet. Naturally. Outside the stadium, I was spotted by a man brandishing one of my own articles about leaving the internet. He was ecstatic to meet me. I had chosen to avoid the internet for many of the same reasons his religion expressed caution about the modern world.

This is a profound observation:

As my head uncluttered, my attention span expanded. In my first month or two, 10 pages of The Odyssey was a slog. Now I can read 100 pages in a sitting, or, if the prose is easy and I’m really enthralled, a few hundred.

I used to be able to read two hundred pages in one day. Now, I consider myself lucky if I can get fifty pages done in one sitting without itching to grab my phone or computer.

But reading on, we learned that Paul’s experience without the Internet markedly changed after the first months of freedom:

So the moral choices aren’t very different without the internet. The practical things like maps and offline shopping aren’t hard to get used to. People are still glad to point you in the right direction. But without the internet, it’s certainly harder to find people. It’s harder to make a phone call than to send an email. It’s easier to text, or SnapChat, or FaceTime, than drop by someone’s house. Not that these obstacles can’t be overcome. I did overcome them at first, but it didn’t last.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

…

My plan was to leave the internet and therefore find the “real” Paul and get in touch with the “real” world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked to the internet. Not to say that my life wasn’t different without the internet, just that it wasn’t real life.

I’ve linked to Paul Miller’s past posts. The archive is here.

The Single Most Valuable Document in the History of the World Wide Web

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Subject to debate, but according to this article in the BBC, the claim of the “most valuable document in the history of the World Wide Web” belongs to a legal document that made the web publicly available in such a way that no one could claim ownership of it and that would ensure it was a free and open standard for everyone to use.

A team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) has launched a project to re-create the first web page.

The aim is to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the web.

Interesting.

Why Developing Serious Relationships in Your 20s Matters

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I’m not an entrepreneur, but this post by Elizabeth Spiers resonated with me:

There was this girl. This guy.

Eh, fuck it. You’re busy. You have more important things to do. Changing the world is a full-time job and if you don’t do it now, when will you?

Here’s the thing: I know you. You’re probably one of the many people I’ve mentored or hired. On multiple occasions, you’ve explained to me (as if I were your batty old aunt, but I’m not taking it personally) that you have no time to get to know anyone because you’re busy doing your work.

This is a complete fallacy. Work and relationships are not incompatible…

Will Humans Ever Encounter Aliens?

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This is a thought-provoking analysis by Paul Tyma on why the human race will never encounter aliens:

So why else might they [aliens] want to come here? Maybe they want to trade with us. Well, yeah, right. If you’ve gotten this far it’s obvious we have no tech that would interest them. Maybe we’d be able to trade them some local arts and crafts or pottery or something – but other than that, they won’t be interested in our childish technology.

Well, maybe they want to study us? Well, maybe. It seems probable that if they were on a mission to study life forms, we would not be the first planet they would have visited. Chances are, they’ve seen other life forms already. Probably some at least similar to us. Statistically speaking, we might be interesting but not all that interesting.

What do you think?

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(Via Tim O’Reilly)

Getting Lost Inside Your Home: Developmental Topographical Disorientation

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If you think you have a bad sense of direction, you may be relieved that there are people like Sharon Roseman, who suffers from Developmental Topographical Disorientation (D.T.D.), a rare neurological disorder that renders people unable to orient themselves in any environment.

Click here to watch The New York Times video describing this debilitating condition:

Before she was given the D.T.D. diagnosis, doctors told her she might have epilepsy or a brain tumor. She kept her condition a secret from her husband, worked close to home and was terrified of not being able to take care of her children in the event of an emergency. After the diagnosis, she says she felt validated for the first time in her life: “I can now talk freely about D.T.D. and teach others what it is, so that someday a young child can be diagnosed and not have to grow up being afraid.”

Michael Santos and the Power of the Internet

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Michael Santos spent 25 years in jail. When he got out in 2012, he experienced the wonder of the Internet. Writing in Salon:

As a prisoner, I could not access the Web directly. Staff members oversaw policies that placed enormous barriers between the people inside boundaries and society. In the prisons where I served my sentence, prisoners were even prohibited from accessing electronic typewriters. They had their reasons, I suppose, but blocking people inside from using technology did not go far in preparing them for success upon release.  By the late 1990s, I became so hungry to experience this new tool for myself, I created indirect ways to access the Internet. Connecting with society and making efforts to prepare for a law-abiding life upon release was a priority for me, and I had to figure out ways that I could overcome the obstacles imposed by prison rules that blocked prisoners from computers.

After reading numerous magazine articles about how people were launching websites, I wrote out a web design. It wasn’t much. I simply wanted a place to publish essays, articles, and profiles I wrote about other prisoners. I was still a citizen of our democracy, and as such, I felt that I had a duty to share my observations with taxpayers. I sent my web design to people from my support network and they coordinated the development of my first website. It was simple, but it served the purpose of allowing me to use it as a tool to document my journey through prison and to write about the experiences of others. Throughout the final decade of my imprisonment, I published thousands of articles on my website to help others understand prisons, the people they hold, and strategies for growing through confinement.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of his story is that he was publishing important, material work while in prison (linked above) and once he got out of jail, the Internet propagated his discovery.

The San Francisco Chronicle profile of Santos, published last year, is excellent.

A Fortune for No One

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The New York Times profiles the story of Roman Blum, a Holocaust survivor who died last year but left no will. He had a fortune of more than $40 million, the largest unclaimed estate in the history of New York state:

Much about Mr. Blum’s life was shrouded in mystery: He always claimed he was from Warsaw, although many who knew him said he actually came from Chelm, in southeast Poland. Several people close to Mr. Blum said that before World War II, in Poland, he had a wife and child who perished in the Holocaust, though Mr. Blum seems never to have talked of them, and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has no record of them in its database. Even his birth date is in question. Records here give it as Sept. 16, 1914; identity cards from a German displaced persons camp have it as Sept. 15.

But perhaps the greatest mystery surrounding Mr. Blum is why a successful developer, who built hundreds of houses around Staten Island and left behind an estate valued at almost $40 million, would die without a will.

Read the rest.

Decoding the Graffiti Symbols of Utility Workers

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This is a great post at The Smithsonian Magazine on decoding what those symbols pasted as graffiti by utility workers mean:

These “safety colors” –expanded to include red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, grey, white, and black– have been formalized by the American Standards Institute (ANSI) as Safety Color Code Z535, which provides Munsell notation and Pantone color-matching information to help ensure consistency across mediums.

While the color system warns workers about certain types of hazard, there is a complementary language used to approximately mark the underground location of a conduit, cable, or pipe. According to the Guidelines for Operator Facility Field Delineation established by the Common Ground Alliance, spray-painted lines (in the appropriate color, of course) space between four-feet and fifty-feet apart should be used to mark the center of a single facility or, if multiple conduits are running in a single trench, over their outside edges with arrows pointing in the the direction the services are running with a perpendicular line connecting the edge marks to form an H (as seen in the photo at the top of this post). A diamond is used instead of the perpendicular line to indicate a duct system.

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(hat tip: @pbump)

The Milk Smugglers in Hong Kong

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Bloomberg reports on the milk smugglers in Hong Kong:

Since the former British colony on March 1 restricted outbound travelers to two 2-pound cans each, a syndicate has been cracked and more people have been arrested for smuggling milk powder than were detained all of last year for carrying heroin.

The reason? Mainland Chinese demand for the formula, fueled by distrust of locally made food after product- safety scandals that included the deaths of at least six babies due to tainted milk. The U.K. and New Zealand are among countries that restricted milk sales as bulk purchases of brands such as Danone’s Aptamil and Mead Johnson Nutrition Co. (MJN)’s Enfamil caused local shortages.

Who knew?