Am I Dyslexic?

So the other day I was trying to figure out why some HTML code I was working on wasn’t formatting correctly. I had spelled the code for the email link as “malito” instead of the apparently correct way which is “mailto.” The only thing is, ever since I’ve been on the Internet, I always thought the word was “malito.” what a shocker.

I’ve actually started reading a page a day upside down, just to shake things up a bit… slows my reading speed down by about a factor of four, I would say. I was wondering how many extra calories you burn by doing intense mental work as opposed to being idle – might be kind of hard to measure.

reminds me of Simon Singh talking about his new book Big Bang…. the cool part was
where he plays back ‘stairway to heaven’ in reverse, and shows us the demonic message hidden inside. how did anyone even figure that out?

Risk Homeostasis: Screwy, Mindbending, and Counter-Intuitive

First read about this theory in the book The Medici Effect. The premise is that you “compensate for higher risks in one area by taking lower risks in another” – best illustrated by a few examples:

* driving into a dark, narrow tunnel, you slow down… as soon as you get out, you speed up again.
* a famous study in Munich where anti-lock brakes were installed in half of the cars in the sample which were secretly monitored for 3 years; conventional wisdom would dictate that the new brakes would decrease the number of accidents, but in fact the number of accidents remained unchanged – from the theory’s perspective, due to the drivers compensating for the better brakes by driving more agressively.
* the introduction of zebra crossings – again, didn’t change the accident rate because pedestrians had a false sense of security.
* child-proof caps on medicines: actually increased the number of poisonings due to parents getting complacent and leaving them around the house.

the Importance of Healthcare

Why spend your money on healthcare as opposed to education or poverty alleviation? From a purely statistical point of view, it seems that healthcare has a greater impact on quality of life than the other two, although they all seem to be related. From an article in the New Yorker magazine a few months ago about why Bill Gates decided to focus his philanthropic efforts on healthcare (the 300+ page report they mention is available online here):

“

Gates didn’t get it: he was interested in population control and thought that improving the world’s health might even run counter to that goal. (“It was only when I dug into it a bit that I came to understand that better health leads to lower populations with more resources,” he said.)



Gates began to approach scientists for advice. One of them, William Foege, is a former director of the C.D.C. and one of the country’s most experienced public-health officials. I ran into Foege not long ago and asked him about his first encounters with Gates. He laughed and said, “The guy came to me and said he wanted to learn about public health and he wanted to help. Do you know how many times before I have heard those sorts of things? Rich people say that all the time. I gave him a list of eighty-two books. I saw him a couple of months after that and I asked, ‘How are you doing on those books?’ And he said, ‘Well, I have been so damn busy I have read only nineteen of them.’ I still didn’t know whether to believe him, so I asked, ‘Which was your favorite?’ He didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘That 1993 World Bank report was just super,’ he told me. ‘I read it twice.’” By then, Foege had signed on as an adviser to the foundation. He now splits his time between Seattle and Atlanta.



The 1993 World Bank Development Report helped change the way public-health officials calculate the relationship between disability and the value of life. In the report, for the first time, bank economists focussed on the concept of the “disability-adjusted life year” (DALY), which has come to serve as the standard measure of how to assess the burden of a disease. In the past, the impact of any illness–cancer, the common cold, and everything in between-was usually evaluated on the basis of how likely it was to kill you. But life without good health also carries enormous costs for individuals, families, and societies. The disability-adjusted life year combines years of potential life lost owing to premature death with years of productive life lost to disability. Blindness is an example of a health problem that, while not causing death, can dramatically reduce one’s quality of life or ability to function within society. Alzheimer’s disease is another.

”

Elon Musk talks about SpaceX and Paypal

Elon Musk dropped by campus for a talk on PayPal and SpaceX, two companies he’s co/founded.

or download the MP3 here.

Highlights:
Keeps a high signal (engineers) -to-noise (management) ratio
Venture Capitalists travel in packs
Dropped out of Stanford and lived in his office, showered at the YMCA

James Dyson talks about invention

This year’s entrepreneurship conference at Stanford’s GSB featured a talk by James Dyson of Dyson vacuum cleaner fame, though that would not be doing him honor for he’s so much more than that – constant perserverence (5,000+ prototypes for the first working bagless vacuum cleaner) and some cool ideas like calling up support and letting the vacuum cleaner “say” it’s serial #, status, and problems if you put up your cellphone’s mouthpiece to the speaker. And simple ideas, like a wheelbarrow with a spherical wheel (weight spread over a larger surface area) for going over muddy ground…

or download the MP3 here.