This guy lives in a 178 square foot apartment
Two things strike me about this story.
First, how someone with serious style can make any space really cool. Second, the power of a society that lets a guy do something he loves, even if he wanted to be an actor in the first place. Serendipity.
On Neanderthals and Cloning. It’s not just for Asimov, anymore. Or Brendan Fraser.
Loads of wicked quotes in this one:
Six years ago if you wanted to sequence E. coli [a species of bacteria], which is about 4 million base-pairs in length, it would have taken one or maybe two million dollars, and it would have taken a year and 150 people,” says Jarvie. “Nowadays, one person can do it in two days and it would cost a few hundred dollars.”
and…
“Neanderthals are not just sort of funny Eskimos who lived 60,000 years ago,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at Max Planck. “They have a different way to give birth to babies, differences in life history, shape of inner ear, genetics, the speed of development of individuals, weaning, age of puberty.”
And the obligatory:
“I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties,”
h/t Tyler Cowen
It was always a pipe dream for 2010.
This quote says it all:
A reduction in the ratio of signed to authorized lines from 94 percent to 85 percent is a further sign that capacity is up and a more competitive market has emerged.
Reminds me of a quote I’ll attribute to John Charman: “If it’s oversubscribed, it’s too cheap”. Indeed.
It’s a remarkably universal sentiment and Google is apparently on the bandwagon:
Google has long been unhappy with the state of broadband in America, where speeds lag far behind those of other developed countries. It announced the plan for its high-speed network, which would be open to other companies wanting to offer Internet service
Google is, like Apple, one of those companies that seems to be able to do stuff everyone else does, but do it better. In this case, my narrative for phone/cable companies’ pricing is a combination of weird regulatory problems (listen Russ Roberts interview Thomas Hazlett) and phone subsidization.
Phone companies are ridiculously profitable, so maybe Google knows something that nobody else does…
Apparently Esquire Magazine has some bright spark telling us to invest in gold. Felix isn’t impressed:
But to appreciate the fuller expression of Kurson’s genius, it’s worth flicking through his archives. There’s the 2006 article where he says that everybody should invest in credit default swaps… Kurson also reckoned that the automakers were a screaming buy in 2005, saying that “GM is moving with stunning speed to address what ails its business, and that “the United States government will not allow Ford or General Motors to default on its debt”.
He also told us to short Apple at $65 bucks, apparently.
It’s all hilarious stuff, of course, but I’m reminded of something I read at TED:
And what is the market itself but a gigantic, multi-tentacled, complexly interlinked engine for the real-time calculation of conventional wisdom? Figuring out, anticipating, and shaping conventional wisdom is what investment bankers do. It is the ocean in which we swim.
This Kurson fellow has, in the past, done his little part in awarding a few fat cat bonuses to bankers and investors smart enough to figure out his advice before he gave it. He is, perhaps, doing it again.
Fifth genome ever decoded is of a 4000 year old Greenlander. My favourite bit:
The hair was excavated in 1986 and kept in a plastic bag in the National Museum of Denmark. It was found with other waste, and the scientists speculate that it was the result of a haircut.
There it moldered, unfrozen, until discovered by Dr. Willerslev, an expert on ancient DNA. Having spent two months digging for ancient human DNA in Greenland without finding any human remains, he concluded that ancient Greenlanders must have disposed of their dead by laying them on the sea ice. Only on complaining of his bad luck to a friend did he learn that the friend’s father had found the hair sample 20 years earlier.
The moral of today’s story? It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Not Unreasonable 