- “What’s distinctive about modern cosmopolitanism is its celebration of the contribution of every nation to the chorus of humanity. It is about sharing. And you cannot share if you have nothing to bring to the table. Cosmopolitans worthy of the label have rhizomes, spreading horizontally, as well as taproots, delving deep; they are anything but rootless.”
An excellent essay in defense of the idea of globalization and being cosmopolitan. Worth reading for many different reasons – understanding why Brexit may not make sense, understanding the etymology of ‘cosmopolitan’, and how affinity to those closest to you isn’t necessarily hatred for those a little bit farther away. - “It might be difficult to believe that farms and physicians could use the same core compounds and never realize it—but pharmaceutical chemistry and agricultural chemistry are separate professional fields that attend different conferences, publish in different journals, and have no reason to talk to each other. Without medicine ever recognizing it, azoles came to account for one-fourth of all fungicides worldwide. They are used on cereals and seeds, tree fruits and soft fruits, vegetables and flowers, hops and beans. Because they kill fungi so effectively, their use has bled out of agriculture into a vast array of consumer goods, from paints to lumber to glue.”
A rather alarming article about the rampant use of anibiotics – which is a theme common enough these days – across domains. You can’t help but be slightly alarmed when you read it, but all the same, it is heavily recommended reading – perhaps for that very reason. Sent to me by Aadisht Khanna, a never ending source of interesting information. - “Asking a computer to ‘tell me about this picture’ poses other problems, though. We do not have HAL 9000, nor any path to it, and we cannot recognise any arbitrary object, but we can make a guess, of varying quality, in quite a lot of categories. So how should the user know what would work, and how does the system know what kind of guess to make? Should this all happen in one app with a general promise, or many apps with specific promises? Should you have a poster mode, a ‘solve this equation’ mode, a date mode, a books mode and a product search mode? Or should you just have mode for ‘wave the phone’s camera at things and something good will probably happen’? ”
Benedict Evans, someone whose blog is worth following in any case, unpacks modern camera systems, and how they’re likely to change over the coming years – for the better is a matter of opinion. - “A new circular from NSE changes the financing game for people who’ve been using the options market for financing deals. The NSE will require cash to be posted (instead of stocks or other instruments) as margin against call options shorted by participants in the longer term options markets.”
This might not make sense to you if you don’t understand options, but if you do – please do read it. Fascinating – and also helps you understand why understanding anything by reading only a textbook never makes sense. - “The American paddlefish is a beast. It weighs up to 160 pounds and can run seven feet long including its needle-nose snout. String one up and it looks like the Chrysler Building. The Roomba of the Ozarks, they patrol the waters with mouths open, filtering plankton through their gill rakers.But paddlefish have another quality — their eggs happen to taste quite a bit like Russian sevruga caviar. And that curious evolutionary fact explains why, in the mid-2000s, Russian émigrés began descending on tiny Warsaw, Missouri (pop. 2,177).”
The story has more than its fair share of twists – and is worth reading for that reason alone. Plus, what better way to learn about markets?