links of the day

Medalball

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What if you could apply the tactics of Moneyball to the Olympic Games? Nate Silver performs a neat thought experiment to do just that. As he writes, “I’ve identified three measures that, when weighted equally, suggest the sports in which the Kyrgyzstans of the world could direct their energy and resources to maximize their medal count.” The formula can be broken down to three parts:

Find a cheap sport:

The average medal winner comes from a country with per capita G.D.P. of $27,000 in today’s dollars, which is well above the worldwide average of around $11,000. But wealthy nations haven’t claimed every sport. Indonesia has won many medals in badminton; Belarus and Ukraine are powers in rhythmic gymnastics. 

Pick a sport with most medals awarded per participant:

Team sports like soccer require a lot of players for a single medal; that’s expensive and illogical for a medalball country. So I ranked the number of medals awarded in the 2008 Olympics, per event, for every 10 athletes participating. The higher the number, the better the chance of a medal.

The final tip is to pick a sport where the diversity of country winners (outside of the top three) is large. Putting these together, Nate Silver concludes the following sports are best for producing a medalball country (scores out of 10 points; 5 is average):

1. Wrestling 8.78
Thirty-five countries, including Kyrgyzstan, have medaled in wrestling since 1996.

2. Tae Kwon Do 8.76
Though an Olympic sport only since 2000, it already has among the most diverse lists of medal-winning countries, including Afghanistan and Venezuela.

3. Weight Lifting 8.69
Its eight male (and seven female) weight classes give athletes of all sizes a chance. The poorer nations of Southeast Asia have done well in the lighter classes.

A great thought experiment!

Aerographite: The New Lightest Material in the World

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A team of German scientists from the Technical University of Hamburg and University of Kiel has developed a new carbon-nanotube-based material called Aerographite that’s the lightest material in the world. It’s density is only 0.2mg per cubic centimeter. To put that into perspective: styrofoam is 75 times denser.

Aerographite is made of mostly air–99.99 percent, to be exact–along with carbon nanotubes. The scientists created the material by growing an interlinking chain of carbon nanotubes onto a zinc oxide template:

To create the material, researchers started with a zinc oxide in powder form and heated it up to 900 degrees Celsius, which transformed it into a crystalline form. From this material the scientists made a kind of pill. In it, the zinc-oxide formed micro and nano structues, called tetrapods. These interweave and construct a stable entity of particles that form the porous pill. The tetrapods produced the network that is the basis for Aerographite. In a next step, the pill is positioned into the reactor for chemical vapour deposition at TUHH and heated up to 760 degrees Celsius. 

The lightest material I’ve ever held is aerogel, which I described in this post. By comparison, aerographite is at least ten times less dense than aerogel.

News at End of the Day: Evening Edition

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The team behind Mule Design has unveiled a new project: Evening Edition. It’s your first (or last) stop at the end of the day to catch up on unmissable news:

Now, we’re all constantly awash in a torrent of news-like “updates”, in between fake celebrity death tweets, divorce notices on Facebook and new-puppy tumblrs. How is anyone supposed to sift through all of that to get to the important stuff?

To help answer that, we built Evening Edition. It’s a summary of the day’s news, written by an actual journalist, with links to the best reporting in the world, published once a day. It’s optimized for your phone or iPad so you can read it on the train home or on the couch. It can be the starting point for a deep-dive or just enough so you sound erudite at your next cocktail party. What it’s not, and what it will never be, is another chirp of noise constantly guilting you into checking it. It’s breaking news for the slow web.

Bonus: it looks great on your phone or tablet.

On Lying and Eye Movement

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Can you tell a liar from the way his eyes move when he tells a lie? A new study suggests otherwise:

When right-handed people move their eyes up and to the left in response to a question, they are picturing a real memory. When their eyes go up and to the right, the theory goes, they are accessing the creative centers of the brain and visualizing an imagined event — therefore concocting a lie. The theory, dating back to the 1970s, is widely repeated and frequently taught in neuro-linguistic training courses. But it has never been thoroughly substantiated, and new research suggests it is little more than pseudoscience.

In a controlled study published in the journal PLoS One, British researchers monitored the eye movements of 32 right-handed people as they told lies and truths about recent events to an interviewer. The scientists found that there was no pattern of eye movement that predicted lying. In a second experiment, 50 people were asked to look for signs of lying among interviewees. Although half were taught to look for eye movements, they fared no better at lie detection than an untrained control group.

Myth busted, it seems.

Walter Kirn: Confessions of an Ex-Mormon

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Walter Kirn, the National Correspondent at The New Republic, writes a poignant story of becoming a Mormon and then renouncing the religion. The fresh American start promised by the Church of Latter Day Saints “didn’t turn out like that”:

My stated excuse for sneaking away from Mormonism was skepticism about its doctrines, but I’d learned that most Mormons don’t grasp all the teachings of Joseph Smith—nor do they credit all the ones they do grasp. After the bus trip to Eden, holy Missouri never came up again in conversation. As for the future temple in Independence, I found out that the spot where Smith said it would rise belonged to a Mormon splinter sect with a U.S. membership of about 1,000. The “sacred underwear”? It was underwear. Everyone wears it, so why not make it sacred? Why not make everything sacred? It is, in some ways. And most sacred of all are people, not wondrous stories, whose job is to help people feel their sacredness. Sometimes the stories don’t work, or they stop working. Forget about them; find others. Revise. Refocus. A church is the people in it, and their errors. The errors they make while striving to get things right.

But I didn’t have the patience, or the humility. I wasn’t a son of stubborn pioneers. I was the son of the lawyer on the plane who’d suffered the breakdown I thought I could avoid. I left the Church as abruptly as I’d entered it. No formalities, no apologies, no goodbyes.

Highly recommend reading in its entirety. If you’re wondering what else Walter Kirn is also known for: writing the book Up in the Air, which inspired a film of the same name starring George Clooney. It’s an excellent film.

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(via @Longreads)

Georgia Tech Joins Coursera

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My alma mater, Georgia Tech, is one of twelve new universities that has joined the Coursera team. Coursera is a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. In their own words: “We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.”

Take a look at the course offerings from Georgia Tech. The Computational Photography course taught by Professor Irfan Essa looks intriguing:

This course is aimed at teaching you the basics of how computation has impacted the entire workflow of photography, from how images are captured, manipulated and collaborated on and shared.  At the core of it photography means, drawing with light and how light can be captured to form images/videos. In this class you will learn about how the optics, and the sensor within a camera are generalized, as well as the lighting and other aspects of the environment are generalized to capture novel images. We will also cover post and pre processing techniques to manipulate and improve images. Finally, we will consider the power of the web and the Internet for both analyzing and sharing images, as well as the impact of mobile smart phone cameras. This class builds on concepts from well known disciplines like computer vision, computer graphics, and image processing. Look forward to participate in this class.

Sign me up!

The Weird and the Misfits

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This message of embracing your weirdness, of being a misfit, is reverberating with a stronger frequency in my life these days. Here is Alex McCaw:

By definition, the system isn’t set up to cater for misfits. While I am by no means comparable to those famous alumni on my school wall, I am also a misfit. Misfits don’t blend into the artificial world of enforced hierarchies, such as those in high school, and are often happier forging their own paths. By the time I was seventeen, I had already dropped out of two schools and decided enough was enough. The system wasn’t for me. I packed up my bags and moved to London. I knew what I was passionate about, and I wasn’t afraid to admit it. I wanted to spend the rest of my life programming.

Chris Sacca recently gave the commencement speech to a crowd of newly graduated students. He talked about being a misfit, about standing out and embracing what you really are. As he says, your GPA only matters to people who can’t find any other reason to find you interesting.

The most important piece of advice I can give you on the path to happiness, is not just be yourself, but be your weird self. It takes too much energy to be other than your weird self. We spend so much of our lives living up to the expectations of others.

It’s our collection of screw ups, stories and idiosyncrasies, that make us weird and interesting. Weirdness is why we adore our friends. Weirdness is what binds us to our colleges. Weirdness is what sets us apart and gets us hired. Be your unapologetic weird selves.

Where else have I heard this message? At World Domination Summit this year, Chris Brogan said: “You will succeed the weirder you get.”

On Making Friends After College

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This piece in The New York Times on making friends after college resonated with me deeply. Personally, I have found that I have lost connections with some of the people I bonded in college. More importnatly, I’ve found it exceedingly challenging to make friends after college (and graduate school).

Our story is not unusual. In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.

As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.

No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now.

The three conditions on why making friends becomes difficult as one enters their 30s:

As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.

Good read in its entirety.

What are some things you’ve done to make friends after college? I am really curious.

Italo Calvino on Classics

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What is a classic? In his collection of essays on classical literature titled Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino produces the following 14 definitions of a “classic”:

  1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’
  2. The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
  3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.
  4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
  5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.
  6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
  7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
  8. A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
  9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
  10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
  11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
  12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.
  13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
  14. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

To this day, one of my favorite books by Calvino remains Invisible Cities. If you’ve never read it, well… it’s a classic.

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(via Reddit Books)

An Interview with Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad

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For all you Breaking Bad fans out there, this is a must-read interview with Aarol Paul (the man who plays Jesse Pinkman) in GQ.

A few highlights, including this gem where we find out that Pinkman was supposed to only last one season on the show:

GQ: With Breaking Bad, I’ve heard again and again that Vince’s original intention was for you to be finished after one season. Then something happened—you were good!—and so the plan shifted. 

Aaron Paul: Well, I never knew that the original idea was to kill off Jesse. I had no idea. So my first meeting was—I mean, it was probably the sixth or seventh pilot that I read that season. First one that I went out for. But when I read it, I was like, AMC? They’re doing original programming? I thought they only played old Westerns.But it was hands-down the best pilot that I’ve ever read. In all honesty, I didn’t think it would see the light of day, because you don’t see stuff like that on TV.

This is the only way to watch the show I think: marathon…

GQ: It seemed like everyone I know sort of binged to catch up on Breaking Bad over the last year or two, and watched the whole series in one go. Do you hear from fans that they’re watching the show that way? 

Aaron Paul: All the time. People have come up to me saying, “I’ve watched all four seasons in four days.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s impossible.” But people assure me they really do it.

On working with Bryan Cranston:

GQ: You and Bryan, in interviews I’ve seen you guys do—even after the Emmys, for example [Bryan has won three for his role on BB, and Aaron has won one]—it seems that you have just an incredibly strong friendship.

Aaron Paul: We do. And I’ll be honest: I was a decent actor before. I’m not going to beat myself up, but I—you can always learn. But after working on Breaking Bad, it’s like going to an extreme acting workshop every day. Working with Bryan, he’s just—he’s on such a different level than me.

Aaron Paul is getting married. He met the girl at Coachella. His words on “knowing” when you meet the right person for you:

But you know when people say, “When you know, you know”? It was crazy. The moment that happened—even leading up to the kiss on the Ferris wheel, I couldn’t imagine myself being without her. Because just the idea of doing this all the time was such a fantasy of mine—I was like, “Wait, can this actually exist?” I don’t know—maybe this is just one those crazy, whirlwind Coachella romances that you always hear about.

Season 5 premiere is tomorrow night!