Started a new blog on Quora: "Deepest Turtle, Highest Eagle"

Just started experimenting with the blogging feature on Quora. Here is the blog I started yesterday: "Deepest Turtle, Highest Eagle". I guess, for the foreseeable future, I will be continuing my blogging activity over there.

"Whole Information"? (Think Whole Foods)

I would've probably suggested an analogy to Whole Foods / organic food / farmer's markets etc., but the new effort by Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter) mentioned in the following news article makes sense to me. Getting people to like whole / organic content might take a bit of time, but I believe that, just like Whole Foods and organic / "Unjunked" food in general, eventually at least a significant fraction of the population will want it.

Medium wants people to eat their "information vegetables"

news.cnet.com

The Obvious Corporation CEO and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams says his new project is about creating content that focuses on quality over speed. Read this article by Donna Tam on CNET News.

It is great to see someone like Evan Williams thinking along these lines. Helps me feel good about my own experimental effort in a related area (quality over speed, long form content, well-written and relevant stuff with an educational objective): SAT Reading Daily. Check it out!

Here is a little advert for it:

SAT Reading Daily - A Redmond Labs Experiment

English students and teachers all over the world use SAT Reading Daily as a great source of reading material for daily SAT / GRE / GMAT English reading practice. Our smart software continuously crawls scores of news sources on the web, looking for the most well written news stories and commentary based on our proprietary English writing quality ranking algorithm, and brings them to you.

Do your consumer / investor choices reflect your political choices?

Here is another interesting way to think about the presidential race. Given the influence of money in the race (leaving aside for the moment the topic of whether it is a good thing or not), it might make sense to look at which companies are donating to which campaigns. Motif Investing (https://www.motifinvesting.com/) has created indexes based on the stocks of companies who have donated more than 50% of their total donation to one or the the party. You can either think of this as "which companies' products do I prefer" or "which companies' stock would I buy" and then see if your consumer/investor choices agree with your vote (or, alternatively, do the reverse i.e. vote for the party where your money is going. Or adjust your consumer / investor choices accordingly.  Having this sort of disclosure, and user-friendly tools to help people make more meaningful choices based on that, are all good things.

Democratic: https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs/democratic-donors#/overview

Republican: https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs/republican-donors#/overview

The Magic Number of the Day: 47!

The number 47 is in the news today. But actually, it has been popular for a while for other reasons. (Not quite as popular as 42, though. That one will remain popular all the way until the end of the universe!) 

Any guesses for why 47 might have been popular before yesterday?

In case you need a hint:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=47&cmpt=q

What about Fathers Day?

My last post was about Mothers day. So, in the interest of equality (and personal benefit, since I am a father!), here is one about Fathers day.

Here is the link to the Google Trends chart for the term "fathers day" (search traffic plotted against time):
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=fathers+day

Looking at the search volume, a few things become clear:
- Easy to see that Fathers Day is in the middle of June (I wish Google Trends would allow us to zoom in a little to figure out exactly where the peak is)
- Just like Mothers Day, there is a second peak, which in this case occurs a little later in the year
- You can explore a bit by clicking on various countries (links are below the graph) and see if you can find out which part of the world celebrates Fathers Day a bit later in the year. (Hint: It is in the southern hemisphere.)

Another great example of how statistical / evidence-based information can lead you to interesting / more complex answers that may not be commonly known.

When is Mother's day?

In the old days, the only way to find the date was to check the calendar. Not anymore. Now you can do this completely statistically / based on real evidence / democratically. :-)

Also, note the small spike a little bit earlier in the year - that probably corresponds to the British version of Mother's day.

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=mothers+day&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

Google Trends: mothers day

www.google.com

ALM Chicago: Venkatesh Rao - YouTube

If you are an engineer or engineering manager, and like to step back once in a while to think about your work, you will love this talk. If you are not an engineering type, you may not particularly enjoy the talk, but the ideas mentioned here will end up affecting your life anyway. :-)

Venktesh Rao has this incredible ability to digest huge amount of information from many different sources and integrating them into a great narrative. (He saves you a tremendous amount of time you would have to spend reading all that stuff.) You will hear a synthesis of many ideas from:
- Alan Kay
- Neal Stephenson (Kryptonomicon)
- Joel Spolsky
- James Scott (Seeing like a State)
- Mark Andreessen (Software is eating the world)
- David Kirkpatrick (Every company is now a software company)