Rubik’s Cube

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pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

In a system whose evolution is affected by chance (like in a statistical physics system), getting a series of consecutive moves right is not easy. Think of a Rubik’s cube. A Rubik’s cube illustrates the connection between available paths and entropy perfectly, since you will never be able to solve a Rubik’s cube by chance (even though in your desperation you might try). A Rubik cube has more than 43 quintillion possible states (that is, 43,252,003,274,489,856,000, or 4.3 × 1019), only one of which is perfectly ordered. Also, a Rubik’s cube is a system in which order is not that far away, since it is always possible to solve a Rubik’s cube in twenty moves or less.10 That sounds like a relatively small number, but finding the right twenty moves is not an easy feat.

.* Finally, I will connect the multiplicity-of-states definition of entropy with our ability to process information (that is, compute). As we saw in the Rubik’s cube example, information-rich states are hard to find, not only because they are rare but also because there are few paths leading to them. That’s why we equate the ability of someone to solve a Rubik’s cube with a form of intelligence, since those who know how to solve a Rubik’s cube get credit for finding these rare paths (or memorizing the rules to find them). But there are also examples simpler than a Rubik’s cube that we can use to illustrate the connection between the multiplicity of states of a system and computation.

Manfred Eigen, From Strange Simplicity to Complex Familiarity: A Treatise on Matter, Information, Life and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 310. 10. Tomas Rokicki et al., “The Diameter of the Rubik’s Cube Group Is Twenty,” SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics 27, no. 2 (2013): 1082–1105. 11. The first estimation of the number of moves needed to solve a Rubik’s cube was fifty-two, arrived at in July 1981. Then this number gradually decreased, from forty-two in 1990 to twenty-nine in 2000 and twenty-two in 2008, eventually reaching the final number of twenty. See “Mathematics of the Rubik’s Cube,” Ruwix, http://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/mathematics-of-the-rubiks-cube-permutation-group. 12.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

In the past, many others had built robots that could solve a Rubik’s Cube. Some devices could solve it in less than a second. But this was a new trick. This was a robotic hand that moved like a human hand, not specialized hardware built solely for solving Rubik’s Cubes. Typically, engineers programmed behavior into robots with painstaking precision, spending months defining elaborate rules for each tiny movement. But it would take decades, maybe even centuries, for engineers to individually define each piece of behavior a five-fingered hand would need to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Zaremba and his team had built a system that could learn this behavior on its own.

They eventually settled on two: a machine that could beat the world’s best players at a three-dimensional video game called Dota, and a five-fingered robotic hand that could solve the Rubik’s Cube. With their robotic hand, Wojciech Zaremba and his team used the same algorithmic technique as their counterparts at Google. But they moved the training into virtual reality, building a system that learned to solve the Rubik’s Cube through centuries of trial and error in the digital world. Training systems in the physical world, they believed, would be far too expensive and time-consuming as the tasks grew more complex. Like the lab’s effort to master Dota, the Rubik’s Cube project would require a massive technological leap. Both projects were also conspicuous stunts, a way for OpenAI to promote itself as it sought to attract the money and the talent needed to push its research forward.

Navy, 15–19 and machine learning, 48 single-layer network design, 36–37 Perceptrons (Minsky and Papert), 25, 33–34, 44, 194 pharmaceutical industry, deep learning’s ability to help the, 181–83, 271 photo manipulation, 209–11 photo-realistic faces, 210 Pichai, Sundar, 216–17, 241, 243, 263–65 Pinker, Steven, 266–67 Pomerleau, Dean, 43–44, 49, 137, 256–57 pornography, 231 Poulson, Jack, 249, 250 Principles of Neurodynamics (Rosenblatt), 22–23 privacy concerns GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), 248 medical data from the Royal Free NHS Trust shared with DeepMind, 188 Progressive GANs, 210 Project Mack Truck, 138–39 Project Marvin, 83 Project Maven building a system for identifying drone strike targets, 240 contract with Google, 243 Google employee petition against, 247–50 meeting with Google, 240–43 Puchwein, Peter, 284–85 QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationship), 182–83 Quake III (game), 295–97 Raji, Deborah, 230–32, 236–38 RankBrain, 139 Ranzato, Marc’Aurelio, 89, 124–27 Rashid, Rick, 130 Rebooting AI (Marcus), 270 Redmond, Michael, 174 reinforcement learning, 111–12, 113, 280, 309–10 research expense of recruiting and retaining the talent pool, 132 freely traded building blocks based on Linux, 131 immigration policies’ effect on foreign talent, 207–08 increased investments in, 136, 138–40 open research concept, 127–28, 129–32 Research in Motion (RIM), 75 robotics ABB robotics contest, 283–84 Amazon contest for warehouse picking, 278–79 the Arm Farm, 279–81 Google Brain robotics group, 279–81 learning human movement, 279–81 programming behavior and skills, 277 robots using dreaming to generate pictures and spoken words, 200 Rubik’s Cube demonstration, 276–78, 281, 297–98 use of Covariant’s automation technology in a Berlin warehouse, 284–85 Rosenblatt, Frank criticism of backpropagation, 38 death, 26–27 education and training, 17 Mark I machine development, 18 Perceptron machine demonstration, 15–19 research efforts, 25–26, 34, 36 rivalry with Marvin Minsky, 21–22, 24–25 Rubik’s Cube demonstration at OpenAI, 276–78, 281, 297–98 Rumelhart, David, 37–39, 97 Sabour, Sara, 208, 305 Salakhutdinov, Russ, 63 Schmidhuber, Jürgen, 59–60, 141–42 Schmidt, Eric, 173, 182, 216, 217, 220, 225, 242 Schroepfer, Mike (“Schrep”), 120, 123, 126, 167–69, 254–55, 257, 258–60 Science (journal), 105 Scott, Kevin, 85–86 security concerns adversarial attacks, 212–13 “air gap” systems, 246–47 medical data from the Royal Free NHS Trust shared with DeepMind, 188 Sedol, Lee, 171–72, 174–78, 216 Segal, Adam, 208 Segura, Marc, 284 Sejnowski, Terry, 29, 39–40, 49–50, 65 self-belief, 293–94 self-driving vehicles ALVINN project, 43–44, 53 Chauffeur project, 137–38, 142 China’s ability to develop, 226–27 exaggerated claims about, 271 Qi Lu’s proposal to Microsoft, 197–98 at Tesla, 155–56 using deep learning, 137–38 Sequence to Sequence paper on machine translation, 183 Shanahan, Patrick, 246 Silicon Valley scale, 293–94 self-belief and conviction, importance of, 293, 306–07 venture capital firms, 160–61 Silver, David AlphaGo project, 171, 173–74, 175, 198 artificial intelligence research, 104–05 as cofounder of Elixir, 103 and Demis Hassabis, 101–02, 103, 104–05 Simon, Herbert, 22, 288 Singhal, Amit, 83–84, 139 the Singularity Summit, 107–09, 325–26 SNARC machine, 21 speech recognition and Android smartphones, 77–79 deep learning and neural speech recognition, 67–68 Google Duplex technology, 265–66 Li Deng’s research on, 66–67, 218 speed of technological progress, 60 SRI (Stanford Research Institute), 20, 24 Stanford University, 57, 85 StarCraft (game), 296–97 statistical translation, 55–56 Suleyman, Mustafa (“Moose”), 107, 115–16, 157–58, 186–88, 244, 248, 294–95, 300–01 superintelligence, 105–06, 153, 156–60, 311 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Bostrom), 153 surveillance.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Author of the best-selling Gödel, Escher, Bach (1980), Hofstadter was a science writer with a gift for uniting science with art and the humanities. His article presented Rubik’s Cube as representing deep scientific principles. He described connections to quantum mechanics and the rules for combining the subatomic particles called quarks. Few people remember these details today, but they do remember that Rubik’s Cube is somehow impressive. Rubik’s Cube was bigger than the Laffer curve on ProQuest News & Newspapers, but smaller than the Laffer curve on Google Ngrams. Both show similar hump-shaped paths through time.

Make it a silly or impossible image. Example: “See” a gigantic key growing in a flowerpot.17 As neuroscience has shown us, long-term memory formation involves many regions of the brain, including visual-image processing regions.18 Rubik’s Cube, Corporate Raiders, and Other Parallel Epidemics Another fad appeared around the same time as the Laffer curve. Rubik’s Cube, invented in 1974 by Ernő Rubik, is a puzzle in the form of a cube-shaped stack of multicolored smaller cubes. As the narrative went, Rubik was a creative Hungarian sculptor and architect whose puzzle captivated the scientific and mathematics community worldwide because it fostered a narrative that it represented some interesting mathematical principles.

“Ten years from now, what difference does it make?” replies the clerk. “Well,” says the car-buyer, “the plumber’s coming in the morning.”25 Rubik’s Cube was just a toy, not support for an economic narrative. But Reagan’s lighthearted jokes made for economically powerful entrepreneurial narratives. These new narratives encouraged entrepreneurial spirit and risk taking, and they brought about profound changes in the legal structure of the world’s advanced economies. These examples, the Laffer curve and Rubik’s Cube, are just two of a vast universe of narratives. We need to understand their organizing force. The storage points for all these narratives is the human brain, with its prodigious memory capacity.


The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey Into the Dark Side of the Brain by James Fallon

Bernie Madoff, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gregor Mendel, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, personalized medicine, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, TED Talk, theory of mind

Most of us, however, fall somewhere in between these camps and organize the brain into a few hundred parts. I am a splitter, and I like having thousands of specific parts to study. But for the sake of simplicity, especially when teaching or writing a paper, I like to organize the brain into a 3×3×3 “Rubik’s Cube” pattern. This twenty-seven-part brain is as simple as I’m willing to go and still be able to sleep at night without violating Einstein’s first law of simplicity in science: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Everyone is familiar with the idea that we have a left brain and a right brain.

This medial piece between the left and right hemispheres is also called the limbic lobe, from the word limbus, which means “edge” in Latin, and here refers to a full circle of ancient cortex related to emotion, attention, memory, switching between cognitive and emotional states, and even helping you to see if someone has taken one of your french fries when you weren’t looking. FIGURE 3B: Brain hemispheres. The next slicing of the Rubik’s Cube brain is from front, or anterior, to back, or posterior. The most posterior region of the cortex is dedicated to the visual sensory system, as well as “association” cortices that have functions more complicated than simple seeing or touching or hearing, but rather cognitive tasks such as spatial processing.

One tends to adopt the song and rhythm of speech around the time one reaches puberty, but the range and capabilities of individuals vary widely. In the case of Henry Kissinger and his younger brother, Walter, who fled Nazi Germany in 1938, when Henry was sixteen and his brother was fourteen, the elder brother kept his pronounced Frankish accent while Walter sounded very American. In the Rubik’s Cube middle sector of the hemisphere, there are the somatic and motor areas that map the skin senses in the back half of this middle piece, and the map of the areas that control the muscles of the body. Just in front of this motor cortex is the premotor cortex, which is involved in the planning of motor movements and in learning the rules of how we swing a golf club and play the piano.


pages: 437 words: 132,041

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital rights, Edward Thorp, family office, forensic accounting, game design, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, Myron Scholes, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, random walk, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, SETI@home, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, two and twenty

There have been only four international puzzle crazes with a mathematical slant: the tangram, the Fifteen puzzle, the Rubik’s Cube and Sudoku. So far, the Cube has been the most lucrative. More than 300 million have been sold since Ernö Rubik came up with the idea in 1974. Apart from its commercial success, the gaudily coloured cube is a popular-culture evergreen. It is the nonpareil of puzzledom and, unsurprisingly, its presence was felt at the 2008 G4G. A talk on the Rubik’s Cube in four dimensions drew huge rounds of applause. The original Rubik’s Cube is a 3 × 3 × 3 array made up of 26 smaller cubes, or cubies. Each horizontal and vertical ‘slice’ can be rotated independently.

Not only was the idea of the cube a stroke of genius, but the way he made the blocks fit together was an outstandingly clever piece of engineering. When you dismantle a Rubik’s Cube there is no separate mechanical device holding it all together – each cubie contains a piece of a central, interlocking sphere. As an object, the cube itself is sexy. It is a Platonic solid, a shape that has had iconic, mystical status since at least the ancient Greeks. The brand name was also a dream: catchy, with delicious assonance and consonance. The Rubik’s Cube had an Eastern exoticism too, not from Asia this time but from Cold War Eastern Europe. It sounded a lot like Sputnik, the original showpiece of Soviet space technology.

He can also solve the Rubik’s Cube with his feet – his time of 51.36secs is fourth-best in the world. However, Akkersdijk really must improve his performance at solving the cube one-handed (33rd in the world) and blindfolded (43rd). The rules for blindfolded solving are as follows: the timer starts when the cube is shown to the competitor. He must then study it, and put on a blindfold. When he thinks it is solved he tells the judge to stop the stopwatch. The current record of 48.05secs was set by Ville Seppänen of Finland in 2008. Other speedcubing disciplines include solving the Rubik’s Cube on a rollercoaster, under water, with chopsticks, while idling on a unicycle, and during freefall.


pages: 192 words: 45,091

What in God's Name: A Novel by Simon Rich

Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, US Airways Flight 1549

Besides, he was grateful for the chance to finally see God’s office. It had fulfilled all of his expectations. God’s TV was enormous—at least sixty inches—and his remote control was nuts—a shiny, chrome slab that looked like it had been molded to fit his hand. The desk was solid maple and covered with cool executive toys. There was a Rubik’s Cube (which Craig could see was impressively far along) and a gleaming executive ball clicker, the kind that swings for minutes on end when given the slightest push. Craig located the boardroom and, with some difficulty, pulled open the heavy brass door. God strolled in and Craig tried to follow, but a strong hand clamped down on his shoulder.

“‘The End Is Near,’ ” he said finally. “‘Repent.’ ” Raoul nodded. “I’ll write it on my sign.” “Great!” God said. “That’s great, Raoul. Take care.” He turned off the television and glanced at his watch. It was more than two hours until his afternoon meeting, and he had absolutely nothing to do. He picked up his Rubik’s Cube and fooled around with it for a bit. He was almost finished with the yellow side, but he couldn’t make any progress without messing up the red side. And he didn’t want to do that—the red side was the only one he’d finished. After a few frustrating minutes, he twisted the cube back the way it had been and tossed it onto his desk.

It’s not like he had put the puddle there; puddles were just something that happened when it rained. Honestly, what was he supposed to do? He could say “No more rain,” but that would probably cause even more problems for the humans and make them even angrier. He turned off the computer. Earth was just as frustrating as a Rubik’s Cube. It was impossible to fix something without making another thing even worse. He reached for his beer mug and noticed with mild surprise that it was empty. He cracked open another can and took a giant swig, forgetting about the glass this time. God knew that criticism was part of the job. You couldn’t build something as successful as the world without hearing from some haters.


pages: 236 words: 50,763

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

Who would think playing Sudoku, Minesweeper, or Tetris well would show P = NP and solve one of the biggest challenges of our generation? Figure 4-9. Rubik’s Cubes. Photo by Tom van der Zanden How about Rubik’s Cube? Even the 3 × 3 × 3 cube takes a while to learn to solve; imagine how much harder solving larger cubes should be. Actually not. We have efficient algorithms to solve even large Rubik’s Cubes puzzles using a branch of mathematics known as group theory. These algorithms don’t find the absolutely shortest solution, but they always find reasonably short ways to solve the cube from any starting position that can lead to a solution. It’s surprising how easy Rubik’s Cube is to solve, while Tetris, Minesweeper, and Sudoku are hard.

, 33–34 one-time pad encryption, 129–30 On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals (al-Khwārizmī), 32 “On the Computational Complexity of Algorithms” (Hartmanis and Stearns), 76 “On the Impossibility of Constructing Minimal Disjunctive Normal Forms for Boolean Functions by Algorithms of a Certain Class” (Zhuravlev), 80 “On the Impossibility of Eliminating Perebor in Solving Some Problems of Circuit Theory” (Yablonsky), 80 OR, in logic, 52–53 OR gates, 79, 114, 114, 116, 116 P (polynomial): circuits size in, 116; efficiency in, 36; examples of, 46; meaning of, ix, 4 pad encryption, 129–30 parallel computing, 155, 156–58 partition into triangles problem, 59 partition puzzle, 4–5, 10 Pass the Rod, 37–38, 38, 39–40, 40, 45–46 “Paths, Trees, and Flowers” (Edmonds), 35–36, 76–77 perebor (Пepeбop), 71, 80 Perelman, Grigori, 7, 12 personalized recommendations, 23, 25 physics, NP problems in, 48, 48 Pippenger, Nicholas, 157 Pitts, Walter, 75 P = NC, 157–58 P = NP: big data and, 159; cryptography and, 129–30; imagined possibilities of, 12–19, 23–27; implications of, ix, 6, 9, 10, 46; importance of question, 46; likelihood of, 9, 28; meaning of, 4; NP-complete problems and, 59; proving, versus P ≠ NP, 120–21; random number generation and, 140; as satisfiability, 54–55; very cozy groups and, 104 P ≠ NP: attempts to prove, 118–21; implications of, ix–x, 46; meaning of, 4; mistakes in proving, 119–21; proving, 46, 57, 109–21, 161–62; very cozy groups and, 104 Poe, Edgar Allan, 124 Poincaré conjecture, 7 poker protocol, 137 polyalphabetic cipher, 124 polytope, 69–70, 70 prime numbers, 67–69, 129 privacy, and P = NP, 26–27 private-key cryptography, 26 probability theory, Kolmogorov and, 81–82, 167 products, in computations, 138 programs: contradictions in, 112; for hand control, 5–6 protein folding, 47–48 protein threading, 48 pseudorandomness, 140 public-key cryptography: factoring in, 140–41; P = NP and, 26, 127; randomness in, 136–37 public randomness, 136 P versus NP: circuit size in, 116; clique circuit computation and, 117; Eastern history of, 78–85; efficiency in, 36; future of, 155–62; Gödel’s description of, 85–86; hardest problems of, 55–57; history of, 6–7; as natural concept, 87; origin of problem, 54–55; paradox approach to, 112–13; parallel computing and, 157; resolving, 161–62; sources for technical formulation, 119; terminology used for, 58–59; Western history of, 72–78 quantum adiabatic systems, 147 quantum annealing, 147 quantum bits (qubits): copying, 148, 152; definition of, 144; dimensions of, 145; entanglement of, 145, 145, 147, 151, 151–52; transporting, 150, 150–53, 151, 152; values of, 145, 145 quantum computers: capabilities of, 9, 143, 146–47; future of, 153–54 quantum cryptography, 130, 148–49 quantum error-correction, 147 quantum states, observing, 146 quantum teleportation, 149–53, 150 randomness: creating, 139–40; public, 136 random sequences, 82–83 Razborov, Alexander, 85, 117–18 reduction, 54 relativity theory, 21 Rivest, Ronald, 127–28 robotic hand, 5–6 rock-paper-scissors, 139, 139 routes, finding shortest, 7–8 RSA cryptography, 127–28, 138 Rubik’s Cube, 64, 64 Rudich, Steven, 118 rule of thumb, 92 Salt, Veruca, 1–2, 157 satisfiability: cliques and, 54, 55; competition for, 96–97; as NP, 54–55 SAT Race, 96–97 Scherbius, Arthur, 124 Scientific American, 149–50 secret key cryptography, 126 security: of computer networks, 127; on Internet, 128–29 sensor data, 158 sentences, 75, 75–76 Seven Bridges of Königsberg puzzle, 38–39, 39 Shamir, Adi, 127–28 Shannon, Claude, 79 shared private keys, 129–30 shipping containers, 160–61 Shor, Peter, 146–47 simplex method, 69 simulations, data from, 158 Sipser, Michael, 117 Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, 31–32 six degrees of separation, 30–33 Skynet effect, 13 small world phenomenon, 30–33 smart cards, finding key to, 106–7 social networking, and Frenemy relationships, 29 Solomonoff, Ray, 83 Soviet Union: genetics research in, 81; probability theory in, 81, 167 speeches, automated creation of, 24 sports broadcasting, 17–18 Sports Scheduling Group, 16 Stalin, Josef, 81 Stanford University, 126, 139 Stearns, Richard, 76 Steklov Mathematical Institute, 117 Stephenson, Henry and Holly, 16 strategy, and equilibrium states, 49 Sudoku: large games, 60, 60–61, 61; zero-knowledge, 130–36, 131, 132, 133, 134 sums, in computations, 138 Sun Microsystems, 160 Switzerland, 94, 94–95, 95 Symposium on the Complexity of Computer Computations, 78 Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC), 52 Tait, Peter, 42 technological innovations, dealing with, 160–61 technology, failure of, 161 teleportation, quantum, 149–53, 150 television, 3-D renderings used by, 17–18 Terminator movies, 13 Tetris, 63, 63 theoretical cybernetics, 79–85 tracking, over Internet, 159–60 Trakhtenbrot, Boris, 83–84 transistors, in circuits, 113 translation, 18, 23 traveling salesman problem: approximation of, 99–100, 100, 101; description of, 2–4, 3; size of problem, 91, 91 Tsinghua University, 12 Turing, Alan, 73–74; in computer science, 112; in Ultra, 125–26; work on Entscheidungs-problem, 49 Turing Award: for Blum, 78; for computational complexity, 76; naming of, 74; for P versus NP, 57, 85; for RSA cryptography, 128 Turing machine, 73, 73–74, 86–87 Turing test, 74 Twitter, 161 Ultra project, 124–25 unique games problem, 104 universal search algorithm, 84 universal search problems, 84–85 University of Chicago, 121 University of Illinois, 12–14 University of Montreal, 148 University of Oxford, 19–20 University of Toronto, 51 University of Washington, 5–6 Unofficial Guide to Disney World (Sehlinger and Testa), 56–57 Urbana algorithm, 12–19, 23–27 U.S.


pages: 349 words: 109,304

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

As he sped up the freeway Gary decided he was done looking for the Dread Pirate Roberts, even if he had already found him. Chapter 54 JARED BECOMES CIRRUS When Jared Der-Yeghiayan was a freshman in high school, his math teacher would walk into class each day with a Rubik’s Cube in hand. Young Jared would watch as the teacher passed the colored square cube around the room, instructing every student to jumble it as much as possible. “If I can solve this Rubik’s Cube in under a minute, you all get homework,” the teacher said to the class each day. “If I can’t, you don’t get any homework.” Sure enough, every single class ended with students trudging home with a complicated math assignment.

Sure enough, every single class ended with students trudging home with a complicated math assignment. After witnessing this spectacle several times, Jared was plagued by a desire to figure out how his teacher could always solve the riddle of the cube. He ran out and picked up his own Rubik’s Cube and spent weeks trying to solve the puzzle. With a lot of tenacity and a smidgen of help from the teacher, he was finally able to do the same thing. Over the years, Jared had collected dozens of different Rubik’s Cubes, now scattered all over his home and office. They hung from key chains and fell unexpectedly out of backpacks. To this day Jared had never met a cube he couldn’t solve in less than a minute.

Unsurprisingly, Jared’s training officer saw no urgency to a single pill, and it was a week before he even consented to accompany his younger colleague on the “knock-and-talk”—to knock on the door of the person who was supposed to receive the pill and, hopefully, talk with them. That day, as Jared’s government-issued Crown Victoria zigzagged through the North Side of Chicago, the small Rubik’s Cube that hung from his key chain swung back and forth in the opposite direction. His car radio was dialed into sports: the Cubs and White Sox had been eliminated from contention, but the Bears were preparing for an in-division contest against the Lions. Amid the crackle of the radio, he turned onto West Newport Avenue, a long row of two-story limestone buildings split into a dyad of top- and bottom-floor apartments.


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Greenberg et al. (2015), “Musical preferences are linked to cognitive styles,” PLoS ONE 10(7), e0131151. 31. On autism and the Rubik’s cube, see S. Baron-Cohen et al. (2009), “Talent in autism: Hyper-systemizing, hyper-attention to detail, and sensory hyper-sensitivity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, Philosophical Transactions: Series B 364, 1377–1383. On Max Park, see J. Rapson (2017), “They said autism meant he’d need life-long care—then he got a Rubik’s cube,” For Every Mum, July 29, foreverymom.com/family-parenting/autism-rubiks-cube-max-park/. On June 18, 2014, we hosted an event in Cambridge Union called “Autism and the Rubik’s Cube: Creating order from chaos,” with Professor Ernesto Rubik (architect and inventor of the cube); see “Event investigates ‘Autism and the Rubik’s Cube: Creating order from chaos,’” Cambridge Network, June 24, 2014, www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/event-investigates-autism-and-the-rubiks-cube. 32.

Each new note creates a pattern with the note that precedes it, and the sequence of notes in a riff is another pattern.30 An obvious place where we can see hyper-systemizing is in the world of games. Max Park is autistic, diagnosed at age two with a delay in social and fine motor development. At age ten, he was given his first Rubik’s Cube, and by age fifteen he had won the World Championship in both the 3x3 Rubik’s Cube and the one-handed events. His average solve time was 6.85 seconds with two hands, and 10.31 seconds with one hand. He had systemized the 3x3 cube. At best, solving the cube takes a minimum of twenty-two moves. You can see how rapidly if-and-then reasoning would help solve the cube: “if the red cube with the green side is positioned on the top layer on the right side, and I rotate the top layer anti-clockwise by ninety degrees, then this will complete the top layer as all one color.”

On June 18, 2014, we hosted an event in Cambridge Union called “Autism and the Rubik’s Cube: Creating order from chaos,” with Professor Ernesto Rubik (architect and inventor of the cube); see “Event investigates ‘Autism and the Rubik’s Cube: Creating order from chaos,’” Cambridge Network, June 24, 2014, www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/event-investigates-autism-and-the-rubiks-cube. 32. On Kobe Bryant, see A. Tsuji (2016), “Jamal Crawford adds to the list of legendary Kobe Bryant practice stories,” USA Today, January 28. 33. On whether Andy Warhol was autistic, see M. Fitzgerald (2014), “Andy Warhol and Konrad Lorenz: Two persons with Asperger’s syndrome,” professormichaelfitzgerald.eu/andy-warhol-and-konrad-lorenz-two-persons-with-aspergers-syndrome/.


pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

Sometimes they would let the suspect take the material out of a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is a type of building or room shielded against surveillance—and out into the public, where its very presence was a federal crime. I kept imagining a team of FBI agents lying in wait for me—there, out in the public light, just at the far end of the Tunnel. I’d usually try to banter with the guards, and this was where my Rubik’s Cube came in most handy. I was known to the guards and to everybody else at the Tunnel as the Rubik’s Cube guy, because I was always working the cube as I walked down the halls. I got so adept I could even solve it one-handed. It became my totem, my spirit toy, and a distraction device as much for myself as for my coworkers. Most of them thought it was an affectation, or a nerdy conversation starter.

I suppose the staff got the message, or didn’t: over the seven Constitution Days I spent in the IC, I don’t think I’d ever known anyone but myself to actually take a copy off the table. Because I love irony almost as much as I love freebies, I’d always take a few—one for myself, and the others to salt across my friends’ workstations. I kept my copy propped against the Rubik’s Cube on my desk, and for a time made a habit of reading it over lunch, trying not to drip grease on “We the People” from one of the cafeteria’s grim slices of elementary-school pizza. I liked reading the Constitution partially because its ideas are great, partially because its prose is good, but really because it freaked out my coworkers.

You’ll recognize SD cards if you’ve ever used a digital camera or video camera, or needed more storage on a tablet. They’re tiny little buggers, miracles of nonvolatile flash storage, and—at 20 x 21.5 mm for the mini, 15 x 11 mm for the micro, basically the size of your pinkie fingernail—eminently concealable. You can fit one inside the pried-off square of a Rubik’s Cube, then stick the square back on, and nobody will notice. In other attempts I carried a card in my sock, or, at my most paranoid, in my cheek, so I could swallow it if I had to. Eventually, as I gained confidence, and certainty in my methods of encryption, I’d just keep a card at the bottom of my pocket.


pages: 262 words: 65,959

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

For example, the world’s most famous puzzle, the Rubik’s Cube, crops up in “Homer Defined” (1991). The episode features a flashback to 1980, the year the cube was first exported from Hungary, when a younger Homer attends a nuclear safety training session. Instead of paying attention to the instructor’s advice on what to do in the event of a meltdown, he is focused on his brand-new cube and cycling through some of the 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations in order to find the solution. Rubik’s Cubes have also appeared in the episodes “Hurricane Neddy” (1996) and “HOMЯ” (2001), and the Rubik’s Cube was invoked as a threat by Moe Szyslak in “Donnie Fatso” (2010).

Instead, Marion Anthony D’Amico, head of Springfield’s notorious D’Amico crime family, is calling. Fat Tony, as he is known to his friends (and enemies), simply wants Moe to find out if his Russian friend Yuri Nator is in the bar. Assuming that this is another prank by Bart, Moe makes the mistake of threatening the caller: “I’m gonna chop you into little pieces and make you into a Rubik’s Cube which I will never solve!” A more ancient puzzle appears in “Gone Maggie Gone” (2009), an episode that is partly a parody of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. The storyline begins with a total solar eclipse, ends with the discovery of the jewel of St. Teresa of Avila, and revolves around the false belief that Maggie is the new messiah.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

One of the highest-profile demonstrations came from OpenAI, when in October 2019, it announced that it had created a system consisting of two integrated deep neural networks that enabled a robotic hand to solve a Rubik’s Cube.7 The system was trained using high-speed simulation and succeeded only after the equivalent of about 10,000 years of reinforcement learning. Solving a Rubik’s Cube with one hand is not at all easy even for humans. Despite the company’s claim that it had achieved something “close to human-level dexterity,” it turned out that it wasn’t easy for OpenAI’s system either: the robotic hand dropped the cube in eight out of ten attempts.8 Still, initiatives like this represent real progress, and as we will see, in many industrial and commercial environments, improving robotic dexterity will begin to have a significant impact within the next few years.

Mark Gurman and Brad Stone, “Amazon is said to be working on another big bet: Home robots,” Bloomberg, April 23, 2018, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/amazon-is-said-to-be-working-on-another-big-bet-home-robots. 6. Martin Ford, Interview with Rodney Brooks, in Architects of Intelligence: The Truth about AI from the People Building It, Packt Publishing, 2018, p. 432. 7. “Solving Rubik’s Cube with a robot hand,” OpenAI, October 15, 2019, openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/. (Includes videos.) 8. Will Knight, “Why solving a Rubik’s Cube does not signal robot supremacy,” Wired, October 16, 2019, www.wired.com/story/why-solving-rubiks-cube-not-signal-robot-supremacy/. 9. Noam Scheiber, “Inside an Amazon warehouse, robots’ ways rub off on humans,” New York Times, July 3, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/business/economy/amazon-warehouse-labor-robots.html. 10.


pages: 266 words: 80,018

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

She had been a matchmaker, the first to point Greenwald in the ghost’s direction. The two journalists were given meticulous instructions. They were to meet in a less-trafficked, but not entirely obscure, part of the hotel, next to a large plastic alligator. They would swap pre-agreed phrases. The source would carry a Rubik’s cube. Oh, and his name was Edward Snowden. It appeared the mystery interlocutor was an experienced spy. Perhaps one with a flair for the dramatic. Everything Greenwald knew about him pointed in one direction: that he was a grizzled veteran of the intelligence community. ‘I thought he must be a pretty senior bureaucrat,’ Greenwald says.

Greenwald and Poitras came back. They waited for a second time. And then they saw him – a pale, spindle-limbed, nervous, preposterously young man. In Greenwald’s shocked view, he was barely old enough to shave. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans. In his right hand he was carrying a scrambled Rubik’s cube. Had there been a mistake? ‘He looked like he was 23. I was completely discombobulated. None of it made sense,’ Greenwald says. The young man – if indeed he were the source – had sent encrypted instructions as to how the initial verification would proceed: GREENWALD: What time does the restaurant open?

His co-workers assumed the sweatshirt, sold by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was a joke. There were further hints of a non-conformist personality. Snowden kept a copy of the constitution on his desk. He flourished it when he wanted to argue against NSA activities he felt violated it. He wandered the halls carrying a Rubik’s cube. He also cared about his colleagues, leaving small gifts on their desks. He almost lost his job sticking up for one co-worker who was being disciplined. The RSOC where Snowden worked is just one of several military installations in the area. Displays of US power abound. A giant satellite dish peeks from a hillside.


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

If a message contained more realistic letter pairings than the previous guess, Coram stuck with it for the next go. If the message wasn’t as realistic, he would usually switch back. But occasionally he stuck with a less plausible cipher. It’s a bit like solving a Rubik’s Cube. Sometimes the quickest route to the solution involves a step that at first glance takes you in the wrong direction. And, like a Rubik’s Cube, it might be impossible to find the perfect arrangement by only taking steps that improve things. The idea of combining the power of the Monte Carlo method with Markov’s memory property originated at Los Alamos. When Nick Metropolis first joined the team in 1943, he’d worked on the problem that had also puzzled Poincaré and Borel: how to understand the interactions between individual molecules.

165–166, 167, 171, 190 limitations of, 190 memory and, 180–181 newsfeeds and, 122, 133–134 in poker, 135–136, 149–150, 151, 153, 154, 161, 163, 167–168, 172, 173, 175, 176–177, 182, 184, 185–189, 190, 192–196, 212, 217 rock-paper-scissors and, 178, 180–181 stock/financial markets and, 113, 115, 117–120, 122, 123–124, 129–130, 131–132 teaching themselves, 151, 176–177, 190 training, 155, 168, 174, 175, 176, 188 vulnerabilities in using, 118–119 rock-paper-scissors, 142–143, 178, 180–181 roll downs, 29–32, 33 rollovers, 29, 33–34, 204 roulette, 1, 197 bias in, 6, 7 control over events in, 199 evolution of successful strategies in, 21–22, 208 factors restricting scientific betting in, 22 fading of data availability limitations in, 73 gambling law and, 200 and lotteries, biased view of, 98 and luck, 202 and the Monte Carlo fallacy, 6, 200 randomness and predictions in, 2, 3–4, 5–8, 9, 10–11, 12–13, 14, 15–20, 21–22, 38, 124, 127, 162, 178–179, 202, 210–211, 212, 218 scientific idea inspired by, 217 spin stages, 16 university courses studying, 215 Roulston, Mark, 204 Rubik’s Cube, 63 Rubner, Oliver, 78 Rugby World Cup, 84 rule-based approaches, 149, 151, 153, 176 Rutter, Brad, 165–166 S&P 500, 121 sabermetrics, 209 Salganik, Matthew, 203 San Francisco Giants, 88 Sandholm, Tuomas, 167, 184, 189, 212 scandals, 90 Schaeffer, Jonathan, 154, 155, 156, 158, 160, 167, 168, 177, 190 Science (journal), 160, 188 scouting, 105 scratchcards, 26–28 screen scraping, 86 “Searching for Positive Returns at the Track” (Bolton and Chapman), 46 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 130 security casino, 2, 20, 21, 22, 40, 73, 197, 213 online, 195 Selbee, Gerald, 30, 33 “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” 9, 10 Shannon, Claude, 11–12, 12–13, 14, 15 sharps, 102, 107 Shaw, Robert, 14, 22 short stacking strategy, 193 shuffling cards.


pages: 909 words: 130,170

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

The problem is that there are vastly more ways for the rooms to be messy than there are for them to be tidy, so the chances are hugely in favour of their rooms being messy until a parent demands they do the work – and so expend the energy necessary – to restore their rooms to an acceptably low state of entropy. Even if there are many orders of magnitude simpler than a child’s bedroom, the now venerable Rubik’s cube gives us a sense of the mathematical scales involved. This puzzle, with its six different-coloured faces made up of nine squares and organised on a fixed central pivot that makes it possible to rotate any one of the faces independently of the others and so mix up the coloured squares, has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible unsolved states and only one solved state.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Metalibri, Lausanne, 2007 (1776), p. 12, https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf. 2Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, Wordsworth Library Collection, London, 2007, p. 1051. CHAPTER 1 1Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, Du calcul de l’effet des machines, Carilian-Goeury, Paris, 1829. 2Pierre Perrot, A to Z of Thermodynamics, Oxford University Press, 1998. 3‘The Mathematics of the Rubik’s Cube’, Introduction to Group Theory and Permutation Puzzles, 17 March 2009, http://web.mit.edu/sp.268/www/rubik.pdf. 4Peter Schuster, ‘Boltzmann and Evolution: Some Basic Questions of Biology seen with Atomistic Glasses’, in G. Gallavotti, W. L. Reiter and J. Yngvason (eds), Boltzmann’s Legacy (ESI Lectures in Mathematics and Physics), European Mathematical Society, Zurich, 2007, pp. 217–41. 5Erwin Schrödinger, What is life?

‘If you ask me about my innermost conviction whether our century will be called the century of iron or the century of steam or electricity,’ Boltzmann announced to his audience, ‘I answer without hesitation: it will be called the century of the mechanical view of nature, the century of Darwin.’ Even if there are many orders of magnitude simpler than a child’s bedroom, the now venerable Rubik’s cube gives us a sense of the mathematical scales involved. This puzzle, with its six different-coloured faces made up of nine squares and organised on a fixed central pivot that makes it possible to rotate any one of the faces independently of the others and so mix up the coloured squares, has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible unsolved states and only one solved state.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Eccles, Visiting Professor of Management Practice, Saïd Business School University of Oxford, Founding Chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and one of the founders of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) “Sustainable business legend John Elkington rightly declares that we have painted ourselves into ‘the mother of all corners.’ In Green Swans, his most important book yet, one can feel John’s clever mind and earnest soul wrestling with the ultimate Rubik’s Cube puzzle of all human history: How to transform capitalism to an economic system that is actually regenerative, like all other living systems on this planet. An essential guide for business leaders and a profound yet realistic dose of hope for the challenging ‘Exponential Twenties’ that lie ahead.”

He argues that the Anthropocene is already coming to an end after just 300 years.41 In the Novacene, which he concludes is already beginning, new beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems.42 They will think ten thousand times faster than we do and will regard humans as we regard plants, as desperately slow creatures. Already we hear that AI can solve Rubik’s Cube quicker than we can click our fingers, with no advance knowledge of how the puzzle works.43 And even that may seem like child’s play for future AI systems. Still, Lovelock believes, this need not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by many sci-fi writers and filmmakers.

See also: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/can-sustainable-companies-get-lower-cost-capital. 37.https://www.wbcsd.org/Overview/About-us/Vision2050 38.Julian Hill-Landolt, personal communication, June 17, 2019. 39.I had first read his writing in New Scientist in 1975 when I was also writing for the magazine. 40.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture_detector 41.Based on the sort of timings laid out in The Human Planet. 42.James Lovelock, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. London: Penguin Random House, 2019. See also: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313/313880/novacene/9780241399361.html. 43.Tom Knowles, “AI solves Rubik’s Cube Quicker Than You Can Click Your Fingers,” The Times, July 18, 2019. 44.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog 45.https://reviverestore.org 46.https://reviverestore.org/horseshoe-crab/ 47.Ryan Phelan, personal communication, July 31, 2019. 48.https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/synthetic-crab-blood-is-good-for-the-birds/ 49.https://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-mammoth/ 50.John Thornhill, “The Return of the Luddites,” Financial Times, July 13-14, 2019. 51.John Elkington, “Saving the Planet from Ecological Disaster Is a $12 Trillion Opportunity,” Harvard Business Review, May 4, 2017.


pages: 1,082 words: 87,792

Python for Algorithmic Trading: From Idea to Cloud Deployment by Yves Hilpisch

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brownian motion, cloud computing, coronavirus, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Guido van Rossum, implied volatility, information retrieval, margin call, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, paper trading, passive investing, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, systematic trading, transaction costs, value at risk

October 2016. 2 For details, see Hilpisch (2018, ch. 12). 3 For example, list objects are not only mutable, which means that they can be changed in size, but they can also contain almost any other kind of Python object, like int, float, tuple objects or list objects themselves. 4 See The Mathematics of the Rubik’s Cube or Algorithms for Solving Rubik’s Cube. 5 See Hilpisch (2015) for a detailed analysis of delta hedging strategies for European and American options using Python. 6 See the book by Lewis (2015) for a non-technical introduction to HFT. 7 Source: “66% of Fund Managers Can’t Match S&P Results.” USA Today, March 14, 2016. 8 Annualized performance (above the short-term interest rate) and risk measures for hedge fund categories comprising a total of 9,000 hedge funds over the period from June 1996 to December 2014. 9 See the book by Kissel (2013) for an overview of topics related to algorithmic trading, the book by Chan (2013) for an in-depth discussion of momentum and mean-reversion strategies, or the book by Narang (2013) for a coverage of quantitative and HFT trading in general.

Algorithmic Trading The term algorithmic trading is neither uniquely nor universally defined. On a rather basic level, it refers to the trading of financial instruments based on some formal algorithm. An algorithm is a set of operations (mathematical, technical) to be conducted in a certain sequence to achieve a certain goal. For example, there are mathematical algorithms to solve a Rubik’s Cube.4 Such an algorithm can solve the problem at hand via a step-by-step procedure, often perfectly. Another example is algorithms for finding the root(s) of an equation if it (they) exist(s) at all. In that sense, the objective of a mathematical algorithm is often well specified and an optimal solution is often expected.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

When a new job opens, they’ll refer their friends. When you need partnerships, they’ll open doors. The powerful connection of that initial group of hires shouldn’t be underestimated. If that initial cohort isn’t right—or if it isn’t diverse—it can be extraordinarily difficult to correct later. Cognitive diversity: Solving the Rubik’s Cube With all the dos and don’ts, and all the questions and techniques designed to ferret out just the right qualities in a potential hire, it may seem as if the goal is to identify the ideal employee and then replicate that process until you’ve assembled an army of identically ideal employees.

It’s about all dimensions of human experience and personality—age, height, language, sexual orientation, religion, background, education, personality type. You should think about extroverts and introverts; people who are open-ended versus people who are precise. “It’s also about, you’ve got X number of optimists—how many pessimists do you have?” Sallie says. “It’s almost like solving a Rubik’s Cube.” * * * — Caterina Fake, tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Yes VC, believes the work begins on day one. “If you have women in the founding team, if you have African Americans, if your team includes Latinos, it will continue to naturally evolve that way.” Diverse people will tend to bring in other diverse people, and the process will be more organic.

Think of early hires as your co-founders Your early hires will set the tone for your company. Early on, define the human qualities that are central to your culture (as well as the qualities you don’t want) and then use those as guides when interviewing people for cultural fit. Solve the Rubik’s Cube of cognitive diversity Without cognitive diversity, you will miss opportunities. You will perpetuate fallacies. And you will be lost in a monotonous haze. 5 Growing Fast, Growing Slow It was opening day for Tory Burch’s startup—her big opportunity to debut her new clothing line at her new store during New York Fashion Week.


pages: 378 words: 110,408

Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, deliberate practice, digital rights, iterative process, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, sensible shoes

On the Internet. To solve a Rubik’s Cube really fast? Internet. Of course, you have to be careful about the advice—the Internet offers just about everything except quality control—but you can get some good ideas and tips, try them out, and see what works best for you. But not everything is on the Internet, and the things that are may not fit exactly what you’re trying to do or may not be practical. Some of the most challenging skills to practice, for instance, are those that involve interacting with other people. It’s easy enough to sit in your room spinning a Rubik’s Cube faster and faster or to go to a driving range and practice hitting with your woods, but what if your skill requires a partner or an audience?

See brain adaptability plateaus, 161–65 play, 184–88, 215 Polgár, Judit, 182, 183, 187 Polgár, Klara, 180–83 Polgár, László, 180–83, 189 Polgár, Sofia, 182, 183 Polgár, Susan, 181–82, 183, 184, 185, 188 Poor Richard’s Almanack (Franklin), 156–57 positive feedback, motivation and, 22, 173–76 potential and adaptability, xix–xx, 47–49 practice ability and, 8, 9, 43 in blindfold chess, 51–54 vs. deliberate practice, 9, 132 digit memorization study, 2–5 effective techniques of, 9 fighter pilot school, 116–20 highly developed methods of, 85–89 as key to success, 230 music students, 77–79 solitary practice, 91, 92 vs. talent, in chess, 225–33 usual approach to, 11–14, 48–49, 121 See also purposeful practice; feedback praise, 186, 187, 189, 190, 239, 240 presbyopia study, 36–37 principles, of deliberate practice, 97–100 prodigies, xii–xiii, 211, 212, 214 See also expert performers; talent Professional Golfers’ Association, 146 Professor Moriarty, 226 prostate cancer study, 139–40 Psychology of Music (journal), xiv pull-ups, 34 purposeful practice adaptability, 41–47 brain response to (taxi studies), 30–32 characteristics of, 14–22 comfort zone, 17–22 defined, 98 vs. deliberate practice, 98 in digit study, 13–14 feedback, 16–17 focus, 15–16 goals, 15 highly developed methods of, 85–89 length of, 171 limits of, 22–25 musicians, 79–80 vs. naive practice, 14 recipe for, 22 vs. traditional approach, 11–14, 48–49 as work, 166–67 See also deliberate practice pushups, 33–34 Q quantitative vs. qualitative problems, 252 quarterbacks, pattern recognition, 64–65 quitting, 169–70, 173 R radiologists, 125–27, 141 Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, 88, 94 rat muscle study, 39 reading, mental representations and, 66–68 red flag, 121 Red Force pilots, 116–18 Renwick, James, 77–79 reproduction, of a master, 160–61, 214 retrieval structure comprehension and, 67 memory and, 24, 61 See also mental representations Richards, Nigel, 202–3, 205–6 ringmaster practice, 158–59 Road to Excellence, The (Ericsson), xxi rock climbing, pattern recognition, 65 Rubik’s Cube, 157–58 running age, 195 engagement in, 152, 153–54 Faloon, Steve and, 4, 15, 22 Hägg, Gunder, 172–73 mental representations, 82 pain of, 171 records in, 6, 107 Rush, Mark Alan, 201–2 Russell, JaMarcus, 236 S Sachs-Ericsson, Natalie, 95 Saikhanbayar, Tsogbadrakh, 84–85 Sakakibara, Ayako, xiv–xv Sanders, Lisa, 68–71 Sanker, David, 7 savants, 219–22 Schelew, Ellen, 243–47 Science (magazine), 42–43, 254 Scrabble, 202–3, 205–6 Scripps National Spelling Bee, 165–66 self-evaluation, of performance deliberate practice and, 99 fighter pilot school, 117 golf practice, 177–78 plateaus, 164–65 radiologists, 127 See also feedback; measurement, of performance self-fulfilling prophecy, of talent, 238–42 self-motivation, 191, 193 Servizio, Charles, 34 Sharma, Vikas, 8 Sherlock Holmes, 226 Shiffrin, Mikaela, 187 Shockley, William, 234 short-term memory digit study, 2–5 limit to, 2 role of, 61 siblings, of experts, 187–88 Simon, Herb, 55–56, 57, 257 simulator practice, 130, 143–44 simultaneous interpreters, 198 Sinatra, Frank, xiv Singh, Fauja, 195 singing, 151, 223–24 skill learning adaptability, see adaptability brain structure, 43–45 deliberate practice, 100 engagement, 150–54 individual instruction, 147–50, 165–66 vs. knowledge, 130–37 mental representations, 76–82 plateaus, 161–65 purposeful practice, see purposeful practice usual approach to, 11–14 skills-based training, 137–44 sleep, 92–93, 154, 170, 171 soccer, patterns in, 63–64 social motivation, 173–76 solitary practice, 91, 92, 109, 147–50, 165–66, 176–77, 230, 232 sommeliers, 104–5 Spectator, The (magazine), 155, 156, 159–60, 255 Spencer, David Richard, 7 sports.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

He tackled the weekly set of challenges, made it into the club, and ultimately became one of the highest-scoring members of a team that won the state programming championship. Hooked, Cheyer enrolled in a computer class in high school. When it came time to create his first original program—and not simply to complete the challenges from the club—he followed the author’s maxim of “Write what you know.” What he knew was the Rubik’s Cube. Cheyer had started a school club devoted to the colorful puzzle, which had earned him a mention in the October 1982 issue of Boys’ Life. He had won a regional contest for his speed at solving it—he averaged twenty-six seconds. So he wrote a program in the computer class that could automatically solve the cube.

Where Cheyer was a programmer, Kittlaus was an executive and a salesman, able to conceptualize a product and explain it with a compelling story. He was charming and handsome; a 2005 Chicago Sun-Times column described him as “a blond, baby-faced, Nordic Brad Pitt.” (Kittlaus’s mother is Norwegian, and he had lived in her homeland for seven years.) Favoring hobbies that were more adventurous than Cheyer’s Rubik’s Cube, Kittlaus liked to skydive, pursue tornadoes, and practice the Korean martial art of hapkido. Kittlaus, though, shared at least one thing with Cheyer: He was frustrated by the constraints of his job. Motorola wanted to create a new high-profit-margin phone, so Kittlaus was managing a project to create the first model by any company to feature Google’s new Android operating system.

See also Hello Barbie Robin (virtual assistant), 134–35 Robin Labs, 134–36 Robo-Radar, 22–23 robots children and, 190–93, 244 elderly and, 194–95, 239–40 first, 65 personality development, 137–38 in R.U.R. (play), 144 socialbot discussion of, 157 Robovie, 244 Roombas, 121–22 Rosenblatt, Frank, 87–89 Rubik’s Cube, 19 rules-based approaches Alexa Prize competition and, 144–45, 146–47, 149, 151, 159 Aristo, 162–63 Cyc, 161–62 Dadbot and, 256 machine learning vs., 85–86, 92, 136 natural-language generation and, 103–4 natural-language understanding and, 98–100 PullString and, 174 sequence-to-sequence approach combined with, 187 speech recognition and, 95–97 speech synthesis and, 110–13 Rumelhart, David, 90–91 R.U.R.


pages: 665 words: 159,350

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

If you choose four: I am here paraphrasing a recent theorem of Harald Helfgott, Ákos Seress, and Andrzej Zuk (“Random generators of the symmetric group: diameter, mixing time and spectral gap,” Journal of Algebra 421 [2015]: 349–68) and not exactly accurately, either, but the right idea is conveyed, I think. The Rubik’s cube: Clay Dillow, “God’s Number Revealed: 20 Moves Proven Enough to Solve Any Rubik’s Cube Position,” Popular Science, Aug. 10, 2010. a follow-up study in 1970: C. Korte and S. Milgram, “Acquaintance Networks Between Racial Groups: Application of the Small World Method,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 15, no. 2 (1970): 101–08.

Abstract geometries, like the geometry of the shuffled cards, are typically really fast to explore, much faster than geometries drawn from physical space. The number of places you can reach grows exponentially with the number of steps you take, following the terrifying law of geometric increase, which suggests that you can get almost anywhere in very short order. The Rubik’s cube has 43 quintillion positions, but you can get from any of them back to the original setting in just twenty moves. The hundreds of thousands of published mathematicians are all (with the exception of the applied Ukrainians and other isolates) only thirteen collaborations away from Paul Erdős. But math is a human activity, mathematicians are humans, and the network that captures our interest the most, if we’re to be honest, is the network of people and their interactions.

., 115 Roman Republic, 132–33, 349 Romney, Mitt, 347 Rosenberg, Seymour, 192 Rosenblatt, David, 228 Rosenblatt, Frank, 179–81, 181n Rosenbluth, Arianna, 315n Rosenbluth, Marshall, 315n Ross, Ronald academic conflicts, 208–9 and Bachelier’s work, 80–81 and Brownian motion, 84 and differential equations, 240–41, 263 and Hudson, 213 and Markov chains, 88, 90 mathematical background, 207–9 meets Poincaré at Sylvester medal award ceremony, 324 and models of disease spread, 207–8, 211, 214, 219–20, 233, 286, 288 and mosquito distribution problem, 64–67, 68, 70–71, 73, 74 and Pearson’s work, 77–79 and poetry, 322 and “reverse engineering” approach, 260–61, 263 on self-education, 210–11 St. Louis exposition lecture, 59–60, 64–67, 207–8 and theory of happenings, 211, 229, 266 rotation, 52, 53–54, 147–51, 202, 297 “rotten boroughs,” 350–51 Royal College of Physicians Laboratory, 233 Royal Society, 324 RSA, 135–36 Rubik’s cube, 333 Rucho v. Common Cause, 384–85, 402, 405, 406, 408 rumors, 233–34 Russian Orthodox Church, 85 Salisbury Cathedral, 350–51 sampling, 70–74 Sanskrit poetry, 236–37, 236n, 268, 322 Sargent, John Singer, 59 Sartorius von Waltershausen, Wolfgang, 46 satire, 411–13 Savilian Professor of Geometry, 323 scale changes, 202 Scarpetta, Sergio, 142 Schachtner, Patty, 381–82 Schaeffer, Jonathan, 98–99, 138, 139–42, 140n Schimel, Brad, 380–81 Schubfachprinzip (“chest-of-drawers principle”), 273–74 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 408 Science and Hypothesis (Poincaré), 83 science fiction, 183n Scientific American, 325n scoring functions, 164 scronch geometry, 55–56, 61–63 Second Congressional District of Wisconsin, 349–50 second law of motion, 238–39, 239n second law of thermodynamics, 331 selectivity, 37 self-driving cars, 177–78, 204–5 self-education, 210 self-evident truths, 13n Selfridge, Oliver, 204 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 220 seven-shuffle theorem, 331, 393, 399 Seventh Congressional District of Pennsylvania (Goofy Kicking Donald Duck), 366, 366–67 Shamir, Adi, 135 Shannon, Claude, 93, 96, 128 Shaw v.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

I would reduce each one to its basic elements—the prime numbers that made it up. 45 = 3 x 3 x 5. That’s called factoring, and it was my favorite investigative pastime. As a budding math nerd, I was especially intrigued by the primes. My love for math eventually became a passion. I went to math camp when I was fourteen and came home clutching a Rubik’s Cube to my chest. Math provided a neat refuge from the messiness of the real world. It marched forward, its field of knowledge expanding relentlessly, proof by proof. And I could add to it. I majored in math in college and went on to get my PhD. My thesis was on algebraic number theory, a field with roots in all that factoring I did as a child.

I was especially disappointed in the part that mathematics had played. I was forced to confront the ugly truth: people had deliberately wielded formulas to impress rather than clarify. It was the first time I had been directly confronted with this toxic concept, and it made me want to escape, to go back in time to the world of proofs and Rubik’s Cubes. And so I left the hedge fund in 2009 with the conviction that I would work to fix the financial WMDs. New regulations were forcing banks to hire independent experts to analyze their risk. I went to work for one of the companies providing that analysis, RiskMetrics Group, one block north of Wall Street.


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

They assured any practical-minded readers that their method might “have important applications in the cheese and sugarloaf industries.” This question loosely recalls another posed in interviews at some financial firms: How many cubes are in the center of a Rubik’s Cube? Since the standard cube is 3 × 3 × 3, the fake-out answer is “one.” Anyone who’s ever disassembled a Rubik’s Cube knows the real answer is “zero.” There’s a spherical joint in the middle, no cubelet. ? There are three boxes, and one contains a valuable prize; the other two are empty. You’re given your choice of a box, but you aren’t told whether it contains the prize.


pages: 267 words: 71,941

How to Predict the Unpredictable by William Poundstone

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, Brownian motion, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, centre right, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Thorp, Firefox, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, index fund, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, market bubble, money market fund, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, transaction costs

“We hope,” Shannon once wrote, “that research in the design of game-playing machines will lead to insights in the manner of operation of the human brain.” Shannon spent much of his time building outlandish machines. In 1950, he created one of the first chess-playing machines, and years later a pair of robot arms that could solve a Rubik’s cube. Shannon’s THROBAC was a desktop calculator that worked in Roman numerals (“THrifty ROman numeral BAckward-looking Computer”). His best-known contraption was Theseus, a mechanical mouse that could thread its way through an aluminum maze. Theseus became a media celebrity of sorts, and Shannon himself starred in a short film demonstrating it.

See crowd-sourced ratings Redfin estate agency, 203–204 Reichenbach, Hans, 43, 44 Rendell, Jonathan, 50 representativeness heuristic, 170–172 retail prices, 196–198 Rhine, Joseph Banks, 28–35, 39, 46 robots, 8, 14, 207, 258n rock/paper/scissors (RPS), 50–56, 79, 258n RockYou.com, 93 Romney, Mitt, 99, 140 Roskes, Marieke, 85 Rubik’s cube, 8 Russia, 141 S&P 500 Index, 148, 218, 220–225, 226–227, 229–235, 237–242, 244–246 Safari (Web browser), 194 Samuelson, Paul, 228 Scacco, Alexandra, 141 Schneier, Bruce, 93 Scholastic Assessment Tests (SAT’s), 65–67 Schroeder, Manfred, 10 screen tests (Warhol), 16 Sears, Sean, 53, 55 second-digit test, 127–128, 132, 134–136, 143 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 129 SEER (SEquence Extrapolating Robot), 14 seven, preference for number, 103–107 Shadow, The, 28 Shalvi, Shaul, 85 Shannon, Claude, 7–14, 16–17, 39, 55, 188 Shannon, Norma, 7 Sherdon, William A., 205 Shevchuk, Vladimir, 141 Shiller PE ratio.


pages: 253 words: 75,772

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

If Snowden failed to arrive within two minutes of the first time, we were to leave the room and come back later at the second time, when he would find us. “How will we know it’s him?” I asked Laura. We still knew virtually nothing about him, not his age, race, physical appearance, or anything else. “He’ll be carrying a Rubik’s Cubed,” she said. I laughed out loud: the situation seemed so bizarre, so extreme and improbable. This is a surreal international thriller set in Hong Kong, I thought. Our taxi dropped us at the entrance to the Mira Hotel, which, I noted, was also located in the Kowloon District, a highly commercial neighborhood filled with sleek high-rises and chic stores: as visible as it gets.

After two minutes, I heard someone come into the room. Rather than turn around to see who had entered, I continued to stare at the back wall mirror, which showed a man’s reflection walking toward us. Only when he was within a few feet of the couch did I turn around. The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik’s Cube, twirling in the man’s left hand. Edward Snowden said hello but did not extend his hand to shake, as the point of the arrangement was to make this encounter appear to be random. As they had planned, Laura asked him about the food in the hotel and he replied that it was bad. Of all the surprising turns in this entire story, the moment of our meeting proved to be the biggest surprise of all.


The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Atul Gawande, crowdsourcing, gentrification, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, land reform, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, subprime mortgage crisis

This ad copy transforms the alchemy of Morgellons into a magic trick: examined close-up, our most ordinary parts—even the surface and abrasions of our skin—become wild and terrifying. My name is automatically entered in the lottery, along with all the other conference attendees, and I end up winning a miniscope. I’m sheepish headed to the stage. What do I need a scope for? I’m here to write about how other people need scopes. I’m given a square box a bit smaller than a Rubik’s Cube. I imagine how the scene will play out later tonight: examining my skin in the stale privacy of my hotel room, coming face to face with that razor’s edge between skepticism and fear by way of the little widget in my palm. At the bottom of my sheet of jokes, the title—You might be a morgie if—is given one last completing clause: “you laughed out loud and ‘got’ these jokes.”

He finishes the cigarette and then tosses it into our cooking fire, where it smokes right into our breakfast. I am aware that Laz has already been turned into a myth, and that I will probably become another one of his mythmakers. Various tropes of masculinity are at play in Laz’s persona—bad-ass, teenager, father, demon, warden—and this Rubik’s cube of grit and edges seems to be what Barkley’s all about. I realize Laz and I will have many hours to spend in each other’s company. The runners are out on their loops anywhere from eight to thirty-two hours. Between loops, if they’re continuing, they stop at camp for a few moments of food and rest.


pages: 329 words: 93,655

Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, deliberate practice, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, lifelogging, mental accounting, Neil Armstrong, patient HM, pattern recognition, Rubik’s Cube, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

I learned that there was someone in New York City with an IQ of 228, and a chess player in Hungary who once played fifty-two simultaneous blindfolded games. There was an Indian woman who could calculate the twenty-third root of a two-hundred-digit number in her head in fifty seconds, and someone else who could solve a fourdimensional Rubik’s cube, whatever that is. And of course there were plenty of more obvious Stephen Hawking types of candidates. Brains are notoriously trickier to quantify than brawn. In the course of my Googling, though, I did discover one intriguing candidate who was, if not the smartest person in the world, at least some kind of freakish genius.

And then there were the extensive interviews conducted by another graduate student, Katy Nandagopal. Do you think you have a good natural memory? (Pretty good, but nothing special.) Did you ever play memory games growing up? (Not that I can think of.) Board games? (Only with my grandmother.) Do you enjoy riddles? (Who doesn’t?) Can you solve a Rubik’s cube? (No.) Do you sing? (Only in the shower.) Dance? (Ditto.) Do you work out? (Sore subject.) Do you use workout tapes? (You need to know that?) Do you have electrical wiring expertise? (Really?) For someone who wants to know what’s being done to him so that he might someday tell other people about it, being the subject of a scientific study can be exceedingly trying.


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

The Internet abounds with LEGO gathering places such as LUGNET (aka the LEGO Users Group Network), a global forum for LEGO fans; MOCpages, where builders show off more than 350,000 LEGO “My Own Creations”; Brickshelf, a fan-created site that features close to two million images as well as a thriving market for LEGO kits and pieces; and Brickipedia, a LEGO wiki that encompasses nearly twenty-four thousand pages of reviews and forums. YouTube alone is stuffed with more than nine-hundred thousand clips showcasing over-the-top LEGO creations, with robots that solve Rubik’s Cube in mere seconds and a LEGO-based animation of English comedian Eddie Izzard’s hilarious send-up of Darth Vader, which has drawn more than nineteen million views. Along with Coca-Cola and Disney, LEGO has ranked at the top of a Young and Rubicam survey of the world’s most recognized brands. In 2007, the Reputation Institute declared LEGO the world’s most respected company.

The Mindstorms hierarchy—or, to be more accurate, the Mindstorms meritocracy—was always in flux. People ascended the pyramid based on their Mindstorms innovations and their contributions to the group, whether it be hacking new code or squashing a record number of bugs. As word of their eye-popping achievements—such as the CubeStormer, a Rubik’s Cube–solving robot that beat the human record for cracking the puzzle—spread across the far larger web of LEGO fans and even tech-heads who previously had been indifferent to LEGO, the buzz built upon itself and attracted thousands more converts to Mindstorms. By opening up the Mindstorms NXT development process, not only did LEGO build a better product, but it grew the Mindstorms brand by eliciting the goodwill of volunteer hobbyists who were more than willing to proselytize for a toy they had helped create.


pages: 351 words: 101,051

Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors by Caroline Elton

Alvin Roth, fear of failure, feminist movement, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, Rubik’s Cube, traumatic brain injury, women in the workforce

Admittedly this was a small-scale study, but the contrast with the endemic depression noted in studies from the UK and US is striking. Improving medical education often reminds me of solving a Rubik’s Cube. If you twist the cube one way to align the colors on the top surface, all sorts of untoward changes are probably happening on the five other sides that remain hidden from view. The controversy over junior doctors’ working hours is a classic example of this Rubik’s Cube principle. Undoubtedly overtired doctors are problematic, for their patients, colleagues, and also, of course, for themselves. But placing restrictions on junior doctors’ hours turns out not to be the perfect solution.


Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

Rubik’s Cube, telemarketer

I’m a mad man if you don’t pick me the hell up.” On Built-Up Expectations “Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn’t stand for shit. Just sat there. Big letdown.” On Canine Leisure Time “The dog is not bored. It’s not like he’s waiting for me to give him a fucking Rubik’s Cube. He’s a goddamned dog.” On Talking Heads “Do these announcers ever shut the fuck up? Don’t ever say stuff just because you think you should. That’s the definition of an asshole.” On Long-Winded Anecdotes “You’re like a tornado of bullshit right now. We’ll talk again when your bullshit dies out over someone else’s house.”


Trixie and Katya's Guide to Modern Womanhood by Trixie Mattel, Katya

Lyft, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, trickle-down economics, uber lyft

After performing dazzling feats of beauty, she would leave every client feeling like they just had lunch with a Playboy Bunny. Tara the not-so-scatterbrained stylist can teach us something! I learned that the girl who presents as “ditzy” might not want you to know how smart she is. Wielding intelligence welcomes expectation. It’s better to lie in wait as a drooling stooge. Then you can floor everyone by solving a Rubik’s Cube at a holiday party and be like, “What?” BEAUTY As long as I’ve been alive, I have known I was gorgeous. The longing glances from adult strangers, the catty remarks from peers, the sexual advances from Uber drivers. Using vocabulary from my Friday afternoon Lyft trip with Mohammad, I am what you would consider “five stars.”


pages: 390 words: 108,811

Geektastic: Stories From the Nerd Herd by Holly Black, Cecil Castellucci

citation needed, double helix, index card, Maui Hawaii, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup

I watch as the patterns of the stars take up residence inside her head. When she turns the last page, she pushes the book into my hands. “Thank you, Peter,” she says so earnestly I want to scoop her up and run around the field with her. So I do. In her eighth grade yearbook, Wendy Mass was bestowed the dubious honor of Most Likely to Solve Rubik’s Cube because she spent so much time fiddling with it instead of paying attention in class. Always fascinated by the night sky, she took Astronomy 101 in college. It was so complicated that she never got higher than 45 out of 100 on any exam. Fortunately, neither did anyone else and the professor graded on a curve.

Wendy is the author of eight novels for young readers, including A Mango-Shaped Space (about a girl with synesthesia), Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, Every Soul a Star, and Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall. She lives in northern New Jersey, where she can be found staring up at the sky with her telescope, or down at the ground with her metal detector, hoping to find gold. She can do Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes. Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Hope Larson. IT’S JUST A JUMP TO THE LEFT by libba bray “How did she get ahead of us?” Agnes whispered to Leta. “I can’t believe her. She came earlier than us on purpose,” Leta said. Five people up in the line, Jennifer Pomhultz, in a rabbit-fur jacket and side ponytail, executed a perfect step-ball-change while her older sister and a handful of others applauded.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

They believed what the software vendors told them: AI would lead them to the holy grail. 2. Use every conceivable esoteric AI technique, now. These were typically the brainstorms of people without a clue about finance. They were entirely capable of convincing themselves that a program that could solve Rubik’s Cube would be a great options trader. Unfortunately, they were often a little fuzzy on exactly what an option was. In designing MarketMind (and later QuantEx), the goal was not to use AI for its own sake, but rather to apply AI techniques where they could be used appropriately and within their limits to provide an advantage over conventional technologies.

They also include a number of less serious (but mathematically interesting) problems like how to arrange n queens on an n-by-n 168 Nerds on Wall Str eet square chessboard so no queen attacks another, many variations of the “missionaries and cannibals” and “monkeys and bananas” problems, and the aforementioned Rubik’s Cube. These clever programs used a very general symbolic pattern-matching technique, called Rete matching, which was a central element of the expert systems tools being promoted as “this year’s breakthrough of the century” in the mid-1980s. However, this sophisticated pattern matching is complex, requires an astonishing amount of computer power, and is only marginally relevant to the types of chart scanning real traders do.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

In training an algorithm to achieve superhuman performance at the computer game Dota 2, researchers at OpenAI used “thousands of GPUs over multiple months.” Because the computer could play games at an accelerated speed, the training was equivalent to a human playing for 45,000 years. In another project, an OpenAI team trained a robotic hand to manipulate a Rubik’s cube in 13,000 years of simulated computer time. The massive amounts of computing power used for machine learning research doesn’t come free. Leading AI research teams at organizations such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain are spending millions on compute pursuing the latest advances in AI. These exorbitant sums are only possible because the labs are backed by some of the world’s largest corporations with deep pockets.

., Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning (arXiv.org, December 13, 2019), 2, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06680.pdf. 26equivalent to a human playing for 45,000 years: OpenAI, “OpenAI Five Defeats Dota 2 World Champions,” OpenAI blog, April 15, 2019, https://openai.com/blog/openai-five-defeats-dota-2-world-champions/. 2613,000 years of simulated computer time: Ilge Akkaya et al., Solving Rubik’s Cube With a Robot Hand (arXiv.org, October 17, 2019), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07113.pdf. 26spending millions on compute: Ryan Carey, “Interpreting AI Compute Trends,” AI Impacts, n.d., https://aiimpacts.org/interpreting-ai-compute-trends/; Dan H., “How Much Did AlphaGo Zero Cost?” Dansplaining, updated June 2020, https://www.yuzeh.com/data/agz-cost.html; Saif M.

., 44, 193 Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, 44 PLA, See People’s Liberation Army Pluribus, 50, 51 poisonous animal recognition, 211 poker, 43–44, 46–48, 50, 266–67, 269–73, 335 Poland, 108 Police Audio Intelligent Service Platform, 95 Police Cloud, 89–90 policy analysis, automated, 206 Politiwatch, 124 pornography, 121, 130 Portman, Rob, 37 Poseidon, 289; See also Status-6 post-disaster assessment, 204 power metrics, 13 Prabhakar, Arati, 210 prediction systems, 287–88 predictive maintenance, 196–97, 201 Price, Colin “Farva,” 3 Primer (company), 224 Princeton University, 156, 157 Project Maven, 35–36, 52–53, 56–59, 194, 202, 205, 224; See also Google-Maven controversy Project Origin, 138 Project Voltron, 195–99 Putin, Vladimir, 9, 131, 304–5 Q*bert, 235 Quad summit, 76 Qualcomm Ventures, 157 Quantum Integrity, 132 quantum technology, 37 “rabbit hole” effect, 145 race to the bottom on safety, 286, 289, 304 radar, synthetic aperture, 210 Rahimi, Ali, 232 Raj, Devaki, 202, 207, 213, 224 Rambo (fictional character), 130 RAND Corporation, 252 ranking in government strategy, 40 Rao, Delip, 120, 123 Rather, Dan, 143 Raytheon, 211 reaction times, 272–73 real-time computer strategy games, 267–69 real-world battlefield environments, 264 situations, 230–36 Rebellion Defense, 224 Reddit, 140 reeducation, 81 Reface app, 130 reinforcement learning, 221, 232, 243, 250 repression, 81, 175–77 research and development funding, 35–39, 36f, 38f, 39f, 333–34 Research Center for AI Ethics and Safety, 172 Research Center for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, 172 research communities, 327 responsible AI guidelines, 252 Responsible Artificial Intelligence Strategy, 252 résumé-sorting model, 234 Reuters, 95, 139 Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The (Kennedy), 12 risk, 271, 290–93 robotic nuclear delivery systems, 289 robotic process automation tools, 206 robotic vehicles, 266 robots, 92–94, 265–66, 286 Rockwell Automation, 162 Rockwell Collins, 193 Romania, 108 Root, Phil, 231 Roper, Will, 55–56, 214, 224, 225, 257 Rubik’s cube, 26 rule-based AI systems, 230, 236 Rumsfeld, Donald, 61 Russia, 12, 40, 52, 108, 110 bots, 142 cyberattacks of, 246 disinformation, 122 invasion of Ukraine, 129, 196, 219, 288 nuclear capabilities, 50 submarines, 255 Rutgers University Big Data Laboratory, 156 RYaN (computer program), 287, 445; See also Operation RYaN; VRYAN safe city technology, 107–8 safety of AI, 286, 289, 304 Samsung, 27–29, 179, 181 Sandholm, Tuomas, 43–51 Sasse, Ben, 184 satellite imagery, 56 Saudi Arabia, 40, 107, 109, 141–42 Scale AI, 224 scaling of innovation, 224 Schatz, Brian, 37 schedule pressures, 254–55 Schmidt, Eric, 39, 40, 71–73, 150, 164–65 Schumer, Chuck, 39 Science (journal), 123 Seagate, 156, 390 security applications, 110–11, 315 security dilemma, 50–51, 289 Sedol, Lee, 23, 266, 274–75, 298 self-driving cars, 23, 65 semiconductor industry; See also semiconductors in China, 178–79 chokepoints, 180–81 export controls, 181–86 global chokepoints in, 178–87 globalization of, 27–29 international strategy, 186–87 in Japan, 179 supply chains, 26, 76, 300 in U.S., 179–80 Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), 178, 181, 184 semiconductor(s) fabrication of, 32 foundries, 27–28 improvements in, 325 manufacturing equipment, 179 market, 27 as strategic asset, 300 Seminar on Cyberspace Management, 108–9 SenseNets, 91, 156, 357 SenseTime, 37, 88–89, 91, 156, 160, 169, 353–54, 357, 388 SensingTech, 88 Sensity, 130–33 Sentinel, 132 Sequoia, 157 Serbia, 107, 110 Serelay, 138 servicemember deaths, 255 Seven Sons of National Defense, 161–62 “shallow fakes,” 129 Shanahan, Jack on automated nuclear launch, 289 on international information sharing, 258, 291–92 and JAIC, 66, 201, 203, 205–6, 214 and Project Maven, 57–58 on risks, 254, 256 Sharp Eyes, 88, 91 Shenzhen, China, 37 Shield AI, 66, 196, 222, 224 shortcuts, 254–56 Silk Road, 110 SIM cards, 80, 89 Singapore, 106, 107, 158 singularity in warfare, 279–80 Skyeye, 99 Skynet, 87–88, 90, 91 Slashdot, 120 Slate, 120 smartphones, 26, 80 SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), 178, 181, 184 Smith, Brad, 159, 163, 166, 167 social app dominance, 149–50 social credit system, 99–100 social governance, 97–104 social media, 126, 141–51 socio-technical problems, 65 soft power, 317 SOFWERX (Special Operations Forces Works), 214 SolarWinds, 246 South Africa, 107 South China Sea militarization, 71, 74 South Korea, 27, 40, 182, 185, 187 Soviet Union, 287, 289, 447 Spain, 40, 107 SparkCognition, 66, 224 Spavor, Michael, 177 Special Operations Command, 218 Special Operations Forces Works (SOFWERX), 214 speech recognition, 91 “Spider-Man neuron,” 295 Springer Nature, 158 Sputnik, 33, 71–72 Stability AI, 125, 295 stability, international, 286–93 Stable Diffusion, 125, 139, 295 Stallone, Sylvester, 130 Stanford Internet Observatory, 139 Stanford University, 31, 32, 57, 162 Starbucks, 92 StarCraft, 180, 298 StarCraft II, 267, 271, 441 Status-6, 289; See also Poseidon Steadman, Kenneth A., 192 STEM talent, 30–34 sterilization and abortion, 81 Strategic Capabilities Office, 56 strategic reasoning, 49 Strategy Robot, 44–45, 49, 51 Strike Hard Campaign, 79–80 Stuxnet, 283 subsidies, government, 179–80 Sullivan, Jake, 186 Sun Tzu, 45 superhuman attentiveness, 269–70 superhuman precision, 270 superhuman reaction time, 277 superhuman speed, 269, 271 supervised learning, 232 supply chain(s), 300 attacks, 246 global, 76, 179, 183 “Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution, The,” 235 surveillance, 79–90 cameras, 6, 86–87, 91 laws and policies for, 108–9 throughout China, 84–90 in Xinjiang, 79–83 Sutskever, Ilya, 210 Sutton, Rich, 299, 455 swarms and swarming, 277–79 autonomous systems, 50, 220 demonstrations, 257 Sweden, 108, 158, 187 Switch-C, 294 Synopsys, 162 synthetic aperture radar, 210 synthetic media, 127–34, 138–39 criminal use, 128–29 deepfake detectors, 132–33 deepfake videos, 130–32 geopolitical risks, 129–30 watermarks, digital, 138–39 Syria, 58 system integration, 91 tactics and strategies, 270 Taiwan, 27, 71, 76, 100, 175, 178, 185–86 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), 27–28, 179, 181, 184 Taiwan Strait, 71, 75–76 talent, 30–34, 304 Tang Kun, 393 tanks, 192 Tanzania, 109 targeting cycle, 263 target recognition, 210 Target Recognition and Adaptation in Contested Environments (TRACE), 210–12 Tay, chatbot, 247 TDP (thermal design power), 454 TechCrunch, 120 technical standards Chinese, 171–75 international, 169–71 techno-authoritarianism, 79–110, 169 China’s tech ecosystem, 91–96 global export of, 105–10, 106f social governance, 97–104 throughout China, 83–90 in Xinjiang, 79–83 technology ecosystem, Chinese, 91–96 platforms, 35 and power, 11 transfer, 33, 163–64 Tektronix, 162 Tencent, 37, 143, 160, 169, 172 Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), 180 Terregator, 193 Tesla, 65, 180 TEVV (test and evaluation, verification and validation), 251–52 Texas Instruments, 162 text generation, 117–21, 123 text-to-image models, 125, 295 Thailand, 107, 109 thermal design power (TDP), 454 Third Offset Strategy, 53, 61 “Thirteenth Five-Year Science and Technology Military-Civil Fusion Special Projects Plan,” 73 Thousand Talents Plan, 32, 164 “Three-Year Action Plan to Promote the Development of New-Generation AI Industry,” 73 Tiananmen Square massacre, 68, 97–98, 103, 148, 160, 341, 359 tic-tac-toe, 47, 336 TikTok, 146–49 Tortoise Market Research, Inc., 15, 40 TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), 180 TRACE (Target Recognition and Adaptation in Contested Environments), 210–12 Trade and Technology Council (TTC), 187 training costs, 296–97 training datasets, 19–23 attacks on, 238–40, 244–45 of drone footage, 203 “radioactive,” 139 real world environments, vs., 58, 64, 233, 264 size of, 294–96 transistor miniaturization, 28 transparency among nations, 258–59, 288 Treasury Department, 246 Trump, Donald, and administration; See also “Donald Trump neuron” budget cuts, 39–40 and COVID pandemic, 74 and Entity List, 166 GPT-2 fictitious texts of, 117–19 graduate student visa revocation, 164 and Huawei, 182–84 and JEDI contract, 215–16 national strategy for AI, 73 relations with China, 71 and TikTok, 147 Twitter account, 150 trust, 249–53 Trusted News Initiative, 138–39 “truth,” 130 Tsinghua University, 31, 93, 173, 291 TSMC, See Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) TTC (Trade and Technology Council), 187 Turkey, 107, 108, 110 Turkish language, 234 Twitter, 139–40, 142, 144, 149, 247 Uganda, 108, 109 Uighurs; See also Xinjiang, China facial recognition, 88–89, 158, 353–55 genocide, 79, 304 mass detention, 74, 79–81, 102, 175 speech recognition, 94 surveillance, 82, 155–56 Ukraine, 108, 129, 196, 219, 288 United Arab Emirates, 107, 109 United Kingdom, 12, 76, 108, 122, 158, 187, 191–92 United States AI policy, 187 AI research of, 30 Chinese graduate students in, 31 competitive AI strategy, 185 United States Presidential election, 2016, 122 United States Presidential election, 2020, 128, 131, 134, 150 University of Illinois, 157 University of Richmond, 123 Uniview, 89, 355 unsupervised learning, 232 Ürümqi, 80, 84 Ürümqi Cloud Computing Center, 156 U.S.


pages: 189 words: 40,632

That Sugar Book: This Book Will Change the Way You Think About 'Healthy' Food by Damon Gameau

Gary Taubes, Rubik’s Cube, Stephen Fry

New research suggests that the calories from sugar, and fructose in particular, behave very differently from other calories (see here for a more detailed explanation). UNDERSTANDING INSULIN Before we find out the details of what sugar did to my body, we need to talk about insulin. For a non-scientist, insulin is the Rubik’s Cube of hormones. I am not even going to pretend to understand all of its functions. I do know, however, that it controls what our body does with the food we eat, deciding whether to burn it for energy or to store it (this is known as ‘fuel partitioning’ in science speak). Insulin and glucose (the sugar that most foods break down to) have a very close relationship.


pages: 314 words: 46,664

The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982-1985 by Jordan Mechner

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, financial independence, game design, Libby Zion, megaproject, Rubik’s Cube, Ted Nelson

There’s no reason why not. This could be the time it doesn’t fizzle. The time I don’t sabotage myself. The time I finally gather my courage (for that’s what’s needed, when you strip away the excuses), burst across the line, break the tape, enter a bold new era. Or I could blow it… like I did with Asteroids, with Rubik’s Cube, with Deathbounce. Not a chance. Not. A. Chance. When I raise my glass on New Year’s eight weeks from now, I’ll look back on 1983 and say: This was the year I made the jump. November 7, 1983 Ten hours on Karateka today. My first ten-hour day since summer. It helps that I’m sick, and therefore room-bound.


pages: 434 words: 135,226

The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy

Ada Lovelace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dava Sobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eratosthenes, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, German hyperinflation, global village, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, P = NP, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam, Wolfskehl Prize, Y2K

In 1735, Euler wrote that ‘So much work has been done on the series that it seems hardly likely that anything new about them may still turn up … I, too, in spite of repeated effort, could achieve nothing more than approximate values for their sums.’ Nevertheless, Euler, emboldened by his previous discoveries, began to play around with this infinite sum. Twisting it this way and that like the sides of a Rubik’s cube, he suddenly found the series transformed. Like the colours on the cube, these numbers slowly came together to form a completely different pattern from the one he had started with. As he went on to describe, ‘Now, however, quite unexpectedly, I have found an elegant formula depending upon the quadrature of the circle’ – in modern parlance, a formula depending on the number π = 3.1415 … By some pretty reckless analysis, Euler had discovered that this infinite sum was homing in on the square of π divided by 6: The decimal expansion of , like that of π, is completely chaotic and unpredictable.

This sort of discovery is very different to the thunderbolt discovery of the Riemann Hypothesis or Gauss’s discovery of a connection between primes and logarithms. The Lucas—Lehmer test is not a pattern that will emerge through experiment or numerical observation. They discovered this by playing around with what it means for 2n − 1 to be prime, continually turning the statement like a Rubik’s cube until suddenly the colours come together in a new way. Each turn will be like a step in the proof. Unlike other theorems where the destination is clear from the outset, the Lucas—Lehmer test ultimately emerged by following the proof without quite knowing where it was going. Lucas had begun turning the cube but Lehmer successfully brought it into the simple form used today.


pages: 458 words: 137,960

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Albert Einstein, call centre, dematerialisation, disinformation, escalation ladder, fault tolerance, financial independence, game design, late fees, Neal Stephenson, Pepsi Challenge, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, side project, telemarketer, walking around money, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds. For the sake of zoning and navigation, the OASIS had been divided equally into twenty-seven cube-shaped “sectors,” each containing hundreds of different planets. (The three-dimensional map of all twenty-seven sectors distinctly resembled an ’80s puzzle toy called a Rubik’s Cube. Like most gunters, I knew this was no coincidence.) Each sector measured exactly ten light-hours across, or about 10.8 billion kilometers. So if you were traveling at the speed of light (the fastest speed attainable by any spacecraft inside the OASIS), you could get from one side of a sector to the other in exactly ten hours.

I opened the door and stepped out. It was like stepping out of a time machine. Several NPCs milled around, all dressed in mid-1980s attire. A woman with a giant ozone-depleting hairdo bobbed her head to an oversize Walkman. A kid in a gray Members Only jacket leaned against the wall, working on a Rubik’s Cube. A Mohawked punk rocker sat in a plastic chair, watching a Riptide rerun on a coin-operated television. I located the exit and headed for it, drawing my sword as I went. The entire surface of Middletown was a PvP zone, so I had to proceed with caution. Shortly after the Hunt began, this planet had turned into Grand Central Station, and all 256 copies of Halliday’s hometown had been scoured and ransacked by an endless parade of gunters, all searching for keys and clues.


pages: 151 words: 54,074

Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston

battle of ideas, index card, Rubik’s Cube

I hardly remember them but when they arrive I find that their boy, who is about my age, has become beautiful. I stand in front of him and think straight away that Tom is the best boy I have ever seen. My sister is a delicate thing who likes to play with dolls. And Tom’s brother has grey skin, and only wants to be fast at solving the Rubik’s cube, his wrists clicking, his fingers flicking at its coloured squares. So Tom and I go outside. And everything waits for us. The creek at the base of the yard, and trees as giant as all American things, and the forbidden vacant lot. Every summer’s day leading from that first one is for throwing ourselves against the world.


pages: 161 words: 51,919

What's Your Future Worth?: Using Present Value to Make Better Decisions by Peter Neuwirth

backtesting, big-box store, Black Swan, collective bargaining, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Long Term Capital Management, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, the scientific method

Without a doubt, he was the smartest guy I ever worked for, and unlike me, he did pass all ten of his exams on the first try, even doubling up (taking two of the three-to-six-hour exams in the same exam session) two or three times throughout the process. Even more impressive than his exam record was the fact that he was the only person I know who solved Rubik’s Cube from scratch—with no advice, no math, and not even a pencil and paper to assist. All he used were his hands, his eyes, and his brains. The first time he solved it, it took him a week of twelve-hour days. The next time it was three days, then one day, and then pretty soon he was able to put the cube back together within a matter of minutes.


pages: 176 words: 54,784

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

digital nomad, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, iterative process, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Rubik’s Cube

Yet she’s scared to death of pushing her children away, scared to the point of asking, “How do I ask them to move out?” These are VCR questions. From the outside, the answer is simple: just shut up and do it. But from the inside, from the perspective of each of these people, these questions feel impossibly complex and opaque—existential riddles wrapped in enigmas packed in a KFC bucket full of Rubik’s Cubes. VCR questions are funny because the answer appears difficult to anyone who has them and appears easy to anyone who does not. The problem here is pain. Filling out the appropriate paperwork to drop out of med school is a straightforward and obvious action; breaking your parents’ hearts is not.


pages: 194 words: 54,355

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

The phone in the kitchen always had one of those long, coiled wires that attached the receiver to the base, the better to cook by or pull into a nearby nook in an attempt at privacy. You could spend hours endeavoring to redirect the coils that exasperatingly curled in the wrong direction midway, furling and unfurling the plastic-coated wires like a Rubik’s Cube. Small children, undeterred by warnings of sure death by electrocution, gnawed on them, drawn by what was an almost irresistible chewy texture and a very pleasant give. The semihard plastic tasted like toy packaging—yes, I remember it well. It was a big deal when you were old enough to answer the phone yourself, and you were issued clear instructions: Always answer with a bright “Hello” and say, “May I tell her who’s calling?”


Ready to Run: Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally by Kelly Starrett

Google bus, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, tech worker

As daunting as such an overhaul might seem, I want to stress that it’s not only worth it, but also entirely doable. One tip for making these changes is to understand how a swimming coach like Terry Laughlin, the mastermind behind the Total Immersion program, likes to frame learning how to swim. First, he notes the complexity, saying, “Swimming is the Rubik’s Cube of movement skill—highly complex with many interdependent parts.” But then he goes on to explain that learning a highly complex activity like swimming is a gift that keeps on giving. If you attend one of Laughlin’s seminars, he is not going to have you jump in the pool, watch you swim, and then start trying to bend your working stroke into something else.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

In 1980, barcodes spread for the first time beyond the grocery trade, when they were introduced by WH Smith. For male university students, the most interesting innovation of 1980 was the noisy, bulky Space Invaders machines that turned up in every student bar. For teenage schoolchildren, the biggest intellectual challenge of 1980 was trying to solve Rubik’s Cube. This new craze was a three-dimensional puzzle, devised in the 1970s by a Hungarian sculptor and licensed by Ideal Toys in 1980, comprising six faces covered with nine stickers in six different colours, which could be turned independently, mixing the colours to one of 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations.

Ian ref1, ref2 Palestine Liberation Organization ref1 Parker Bowles, Camilla ref1, ref2 Parkinson, Cecil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Philip, Prince ref1 Planer, Nigel ref1, ref2 The Pogues ref1 The Police (band) ref1 see also Sting police and law enforcement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 Hillsborough disaster ref1, ref2, ref3 miners’ strike ref1, ref2, ref3 Northern Ireland and the IRA ref1, ref2, ref3 racism and race riots ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 see also Yorkshire Ripper case poll tax ref1, ref2, ref3 see also taxes pornography ref1, ref2 Portillo, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Powell, Enoch ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Prior, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Private Eye ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 privatization ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Proctor, Harvey ref1, ref2 property market ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Public Sector Borrowing Requirements (PSBR) ref1, ref2 Pym, Francis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 R racism and race riots ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 see also ethnic minorities; immigrants and immigration Reagan, Ronald ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Red Wedge ref1, ref2 Rhodes, Nick ref1 Richardson, Miranda ref1 Richardson, Peter ref1 Ridgeley, Andrew ref1 Ridley, Nicholas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Rimington, Stella ref1, ref2 Roberts, Alfred ref1 Roberts, Captain Hilarian ref1 Rodgers, Bill ref1, ref2, ref3 Rowbotham, Sheila ref1 Royal Nay ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 destroy General Belgrano ref1 HMS Coventry ref1 HMS Sheffield ref1, ref2 HMS Sir Galahad ref1 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) ref1 Rubik’s Cube ref1 Runcie, Robert ref1, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Rushdie, Salman ref1 S Sabra and Chatila massacres ref1 Sanderson, Tessa ref1 Sands, Bobby ref1, ref2 SAS (Special Air Service) ref1, ref2 The Satanic verses ref1 Saunders, Jennifer ref1, ref2 Saward, Jill ref1 Sayle, Alexei ref1, ref2 Scargill, Arthur ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 see also miners’ strike Scarman, Lord ref1 Schmidt, Helmut ref1, ref3 Scottish National Party ref1 The Secret Policeman’s Ball ref1 Shah, Selim ‘Eddie’ ref1, ref2 Shand Kydd, Frances ref1 Sharon, Ariel ref1 Short, Clare ref1 Sinclair, Clive ref1, ref2, ref3 Sinn Fein ref1, ref2, ref3 see also IRA Sky television ref1 Smith, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Smith, Mel ref1 The Smiths ref1 Soames, Christopher ref1 Social Democratic and Labour Party ref1, ref2, ref3 Social Democratic Party (SDP) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT) ref1, ref1 South Georgia ref1, ref2 see also Falklands war Southall riots ref1 Soviet Union ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Space Invaders ref1 Spandau Ballet ref1, ref2 Special Patrol Group (SPG) ref1, ref2 The Specials (Special AKA) ref1, ref3 Spencer, Diana see Diana, Princess Spencer, Earl ref1 spin doctoring ref1, ref2 Spitting Image ref1, ref2 sport ref1 cricket ref1 Olympics ref1 see also football St Paul’s riots ref1 Stalker inquiry ref1 Steel, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 steelworkers see British Steel Stephenson, Pamela ref1 Sting ref1, ref2, ref3 Stock Exchange see banking The Stone Roses ref1 Strange, Steve ref1 strikes see miners’ strike; newspaper industry; unions Sugar, Alan ref1, ref2 Sullivan, John ref1, ref2 Sun ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23 Falklands war ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Sunday Express ref1 Sunday Telegraph ref1, ref2 Sunday Times ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Sutcliffe, Peter see Yorkshire Ripper case Sutcliffe, Sonia ref1, ref2 T Tapsell, Sir Peter ref1 Tatchell, Peter ref1 Tatler ref1, ref2 taxes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Taylor, Andy ref1 Taylor, John ref1, ref2 Taylor, Lord (Hillsborough inquiry) ref1 Taylor, Roger ref1 Tebbit, Norman ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 television and film ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Channel 4 ref1 comedy ref1 TV-am ref1, ref2 see also BBC; programmes by name Terrence Higgins Trust ref1, ref2 Thatcher, Carol ref1, ref2, ref3 Thatcher, Denis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Thatcher, Margaret ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, and apartheid ref1 Broadcasting Act ref1 campaign for party leadership ref1 character and reputation ref1 Ethiopia ref1, ref2, ref3 Falklands war ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 family ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 football hooliganism ref1, ref2 Germany and reunification ref1, ref2, ref3 immigration and race riots ref1, ref2 leadership challenged ref1, ref2 and local authorities ref1, ref2, ref3 miners’ strike ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Moscow Olympics ref1, ref2 NHS and education ref1, ref2 Northern Ireland and IRA ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 nuclear arms ref1 poll tax ref1 Spitting Image puppet ref1, ref2 wins 1979 election ref1, ref2 Yorkshire Ripper case ref1 see also Conservative Party; economy; European Union; privatization; unions Thatcher, Mark ref1, ref2, ref3 Thompson, Daley ref1 Thompson, E.P. ref1 Thomson, Kenneth ref1 Thorneycroft , Lord ref1 The Times ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Today ref1, ref2 Tomlinson, Ricky ref1 Torvill and Dean ref1 Tottenham riots ref1 Toxteth riots ref1, ref2 Trade Union Congress (TUC) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 trade unions see unions Transport and General Workers Union ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Trotskyists see Militants TV-am ref1, ref2 U Uref1 ref2 UBref1 ref2 Ulster Unionist Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 unemployment ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM) ref1 unions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20 broadcasting unions ref1 National Union of Miners (NUM) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 newspaper industry ref1, ref2 see also miners’ strike; Scargill, Arthur; unions by name United States of America ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 banking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Mark Thatcher ref1 music ref1, ref2, ref3 Ure, Midge ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 V Vaz, Keith ref1, ref2, ref3 Venables, Terry ref1 Vestey family ref1 Video cassette recorders ref1 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ ref1 W wages ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 see also unions Walker, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Walters, Alan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Warsaw Pact ref1, ref2 Weller, Paul ref1, ref2 Weston, Simon ref1 Westwood, Vivienne ref1 Wham!


pages: 190 words: 58,981

Grand: A Memoir by Sara Schaefer

fake news, index card, Neil Armstrong, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, TED Talk

“Sometimes we’ll have a ton of space for everyone to spread out, and sometimes we will be crowded together on a tiny beach.” After arriving at Sticky Beach, our first camp, Tyler gave a quick lesson on how to set up our tents and cots. I was overwhelmed by the number of poles and strings and flaps. “See? Pretty easy,” Tyler said, with the tone of a ten-year-old who just solved a Rubik’s Cube in thirty seconds. I knew it would not be easy at all, and I also knew that setting up a tent would be the first test of Ross’s and my relationship. Would this be a trip where we bickered constantly, like we did as children? Or would this be a strengthening of our sisterly bonds? Everyone knows that assembling a tent with another human being is the single biggest threat to a relationship.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

That’s a pretty big idea, so here are the basics. Imagine that all of life’s complexity could be boiled down to a library of interoperating components. The basic fundamentals of life, all indexed, open to the public, and waiting to be reassembled into new creations in the same fashion as one might twist and scramble a Rubik’s cube. Call it the open-source library of life. Now picture an Olympic-size gymnasium full of lab students building new organisms and life forms. It’s not a science fiction movie; it’s for real. And every year since 2004, thousands of lab students from around the world gather at MIT for the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition.

The bottom line is that the opportunity to bring customers, suppliers, and other third parties into the enterprise as co-creators of value presents one of the most exciting, long-term engines of change and innovation that the world has seen. But innovation processes will need to be fundamentally reconfigured if businesses and other organizations are to seize the opportunity. Just as you can twist and scramble a Rubik’s cube, customers and other collaborators will reconfigure and build on your products and services for their own ends. And whether we’re talking about government, health care, education, or beyond, static, immovable, noneditable items will be anathema—ripe for the dustbins of twentieth-century history. 2.


Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost

Colossal Cave Adventure, Fairchild Semiconductor, functional programming, game design, Google Earth, higher-order functions, Ian Bogost, Ivan Sutherland, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software studies, Steve Wozniak

Crane saw Atari VCS development less as a refinement of the gameplay in known interaction models and more as a challenge to make the highly constrained VCS hardware do new and exciting things. In Crane’s words, “I got more enjoyment out of discovering a new trick than from the game design itself. More often than not, I used this technique to lead me in a new direction of game design, and some of the tricks were to me as much an accomplishment as solving the Rubik’s Cube the first time.”11 Freeway, which Crane developed in 1981, offered an improvement on the techniques of same-screen sprite register rewrites (which Larry Kaplan had first used in Air-Sea Battle) and multicolored sprites (first used in the 1978 Superman) accomplished by changing both the sprite color 6 Pitfall!


pages: 201 words: 64,545

Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air freight, business process, clean water, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, pushing on a string, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Rubik’s Cube, urban sprawl, work culture

We never developed the mechanisms to encourage them to work together in ways that kept the overall business objectives in sight. Shooting line at Lago Fagnano. Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Don’t try this with dentures! Doug Tompkins Several planning efforts had to be aborted; no one could solve the Rubik’s cube of matching market-specific product development with such a complex distribution mix. Organization charts looked like the Sunday crossword puzzle and were issued almost as frequently. The company was restructured five times in five years; no plan worked better than the last one. At one point we decided we needed another perspective, and Malinda and I, along with our CEO and CFO, sought the advice of a well-regarded consultant.


pages: 216 words: 70,483

Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes

Burning Man, Haight Ashbury, Maui Hawaii, Rubik’s Cube, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

I used to think Catholics prayed over and over as a punishment for shoplifting or going to second base, or that they prayed the same prayer more than once to make sure God would hear them. But now I understood it differently: you prayed the same prayer over and over not so God would hear you, but so you would hear God. As someone whose mind is plagued by endlessly looping pop songs, radio jingles, and the Chili’s baby back ribs song, the idea of giving my brain a Rubik’s cube to settle it down so I could sneak around it and experience some peace made a lot of sense. Ram Dass said that “the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” In church, we had a different word for it. We called it the devil. The devil—red and goateed, you’re picturing him correctly—was a liar and a thief, but now that rascally demon was starting to feel like another metaphor.


pages: 220 words: 66,323

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Airbnb, mass immigration, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, women in the workforce, yield curve

His tone conveyed his respect for his mother’s work. She died of cancer—liver, stomach, pancreas—probably from handling the chemicals women like her used to make their hair respectable. “Stephen Johnson. Gone now, but what a life.” “I guess it’s like having a green thumb. Or being good at doing the Rubik’s cube. Some people can make money, some people can’t.” She knew who she and Clay were. This was one of G. H.’s hobbyhorses. “That’s the conventional wisdom. You have to ask yourself why that is. Who wants you to believe that it’s not possible to get, if not rich, at least comfortable? It’s a skill.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Watters figured it would be cheaper to bring him to Virginia than keep sending thousands of dollars’ worth of Western Union payments to New Zealand. So Watters offered McManus a job and a room back at his Hacker Hut. McManus showed up a few weeks later with his computer, a Rubik’s cube, a backpack, and a black T-shirt that read SOMEONE SHOULD DO SOMETHING. As roommates, the gregarious cowboy with a penchant for Miller Lite and the quiet Kiwi with the Rubik’s cube were the ultimate odd couple. But they hit it off. And with their nights free, McManus began to teach Watters the art of the hack. Watters had spent his entire career working for money. Hackers, McManus explained, aren’t in it for money.


pages: 238 words: 75,994

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

Rather, Alizade works in the niche world of the design of safe rooms—more popularly known as panic rooms. Alizade greeted me at the front door in jeans and a half-zip black fleece sweater. He is built more like a linebacker than a businessman. He is stout, broad-shouldered, and has large hands; he gestured with them often as he spoke, twisting and turning them as if solving an invisible Rubik’s Cube in order to explain how his products were made. Despite his chosen field of security design and his physical resemblance to someone more likely to be leading tours through the Alaskan outback, he is jovial, prone to quick jokes and laughter. After graduating with an engineering degree from Auburn University, and following a stint in Vietnam, Alizade joined the New Jersey State police force.


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

The piloti – stilt-like struts cut in from the building’s outside edge at ground level – of the high towers are shared with Le Corbusier’s modernist étalon, the Marseille Unité d’Habitation (which is smaller), but the most striking feature of the blocks, to the non-architect, are the superfluous details that depart from Le Corbusier’s functional modernism: the flying cornices, concrete frames like giant handles that jut from the tower roofs, and the frog-green bosses studding the beige brick façades. The initial effect is of some vast, elegant set of combination locks, or duochrome Rubik’s cubes, poised at any moment to whirr and counterspin, floor by floor, to trigger the catch on some deeper, hidden secret. Yet familiarity humanises it. You become aware not only of how soaked in light it is but of the architects’ legacy to the people who live there. Close to Roman Road is a crescent of red brick bungalows for the elderly, grouped around a garden with a fountain and a bronze sculpture by Elizabeth Frink, The Blind Beggar and His Dog.


pages: 213 words: 73,492

The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Remain Twenty-Something for Ever by Isy Suttie

call centre, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube

I often like the challenge of “making the best of it.” But this was potentially keeping myself in a situation that I knew, and I suspect he knew, wasn’t completely right. I can’t begin to try to analyze the complexities of why it wasn’t quite right, and I also think I owe it to him not to try. We were like a Rubik’s Cube with one faulty panel—a turquoise one that shouldn’t be there—so that we could never be solved, and never be calm. Any relationship or friendship is open, of course—is, and should be, always ebbing and flowing—but ideally upon a steady foundation. We were on shaky ground. But how tempting to stay together!


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Special Report: Growing up Fast (2018), p. 9. 25Turkmenistan.ru, ‘В Туркменистане открыт новый железнодорожный мост Туркменабат – Фараб’, 7 March 2017. 26AKIPress, ‘CTSO to help Tajikistan to reinforce its border with Afghanistan’, 11 June 2018; Novosti Radio Azattyk, ‘Состоялась первая встреча глав оборонных ведомств Кыргызстана и Узбекистана’,13 June 2018. 27Dana Omirgazy, ‘Shymkent hosts first Kazakh-Uzbek business forum’, Astana Times, 25 May 2018. 28Uzbekistan National News Agency, press release, ‘The Year of Uzbekistan in Kazakhstan and the Year of Kazakhstan in Uzbekistan will be held’, 16 September 2017. 29Uzbekistan National News Agency, Press release, ‘Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan: dynamic development of cooperation based on friendship and brotherhood’, 2 March 2018. 30AzerNews, ‘Trade turnover between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan doubles’, 22 June 2018. 31Tasnim News Agency, ‘Grounds Paved for Long-Lasting Cooperation between Iran, Azerbaijan: Official’, 4 June 2018. 32Pahjwok Afghan News, ‘Afghanistan, Tajikistan sign two co-operation accords’, 24 June 2018. 33Simon Parani, Let’s not exaggerate: Southern Gas Corridor prospects to 2030, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Paper NG 135 (July 2018). 34Fawad Yousafzai, ‘Work on CASA-1000 power project in full swing: Tajik diplomant’, The Nation, 19 July 2018. 35Dispatch News Desk, ‘Kyrgyzstan keen to improve bilateral trade with Pakistan: Envoy’, 10 May 2018. 36TASS, ‘ЕАЭС и Иран завершают подготовку соглашения о зоне свободной торговли’, 9 April 2018. 37Nicholas Trickett, ‘Reforming Customs, Uzbekistan Nods Towards the Eurasian Economic Union’, The Diplomat, 26 April 2018. 38United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘President of Uzbekistan calls to develop reliable mechanisms of co-operation in Central Asia at the international conference in Samarkand’, 10 November 2017. 39See, for example, Raikhan Tashtemkhanova, Zhanar Medeubayeva, Aizhan Serikbayeva and Madina Igimbayeva, ‘Territorial and Border Issues in Central Asia: Analysis of the Reasons, Current State and Perspectives’, The Anthropologist 22.3 (2015), pp. 518–25; International Crisis Group, ‘Central Asia: Border Disputes and Conflict Potential’, Asia Report 33 (2002). 40For the draft agreement, see Kommersant, ‘Море для своих Пять стран договорились о разделе Каспия’, 23 June 2018. 41Bruce Pannier, ‘A landmark Caspian agreement – and what It resolves’, Qishloq Ovozi, 9 August 2018. 42Interfax, ‘Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan agree to swap land on border’, 14 August 2018. 43Astana Times, ‘Kazakhstan resolves all Central Asian border issues, announces Kazakh President’, 20 April 2018. 44Virpi Stucki, Kai Wegerich, Muhammad Mizanur Rahaman and Olli Varis, Water and Security in Central Asia. Solving a Rubik’s Cube (New York, 2014); Suzanne Jensen, Z. Mazhitova and Rolf Zetterström, ‘Environmental pollution and child health in the Aral Sea region in Kazakhstan’, Science of the Total Environment 206.2–3 (1997), pp. 187–93. 45Fergana Informationnov agentstvo, ‘Соляная буря превысила допустимую концентрацию пыли на северо-западе Узбекистана в шесть раз’, 27 May 2018; RIA Novosti, ‘Белая пыль неизвестного происхождения накрыла столицу Туркмении’, 28 May 2018. 46Matt Warren, ‘Once Written Off for Dead, the Aral Sea Is Now Full of Life’, National Geographic, 16 March 2018. 47United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, ‘Drought grips large parts of Afghanistan’, 6 June 2018. 48Ben Farmer and Akhtat Makoli, ‘Afghanistan faces worst drought in decades, as UN warns 1.4 million people need help’, 22 July 2018. 49Igor Severskiy, ‘Water related problems of Central Asia: some results of the (GIWA) international water assessment program’, Ambio 33 (2004), pp. 52–62. 50Albek Zhupankhan, Kamshat Tussupova and Ronny.


pages: 255 words: 77,849

Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart

banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Donald Trump, ghettoisation, Live Aid, mail merge, period drama, Rubik’s Cube, wage slave

I don’t want to be thirty-eight and so obsessed with twittering at my followers (whom I have NEVER MET) and getting poked at that I lose the ability to really LIVE. Please remember that you were very happy before you got into all this techno-business. You may bang on about how I need to learn things from the future, but you’d do very well to learn a few things from the past. And if you really want some kind of technology, what’s wrong with the Rubik’s cube? That is HARD. *punches air, collapses exhausted to the floor* Phew! Gosh, that was a jolly good bit of public speaking, wasn’t it? I’m very talented. I am clearly wasted as an office manager and should defo-pants be prime minister. ‘You can learn from the past.’ I like that. I am pleased with that and I am glad I have made my point.


pages: 250 words: 77,544

Personal Investing: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore, Amy E. Buttell, Carol Fabbri

asset allocation, asset-backed security, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, fixed income, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, John Bogle, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Rubik’s Cube, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

You can search for funds by style or size by using the site’s Fund Screening tool (http://tinyurl.com/ yypeg7). Many of Morningstar’s features are free simply by registering with the site. Some of its advanced features are subscription based, but they offer a 14-day free trial. Morningstar’s style box is like one side of a Rubik’s cube. The columns show investment style, while the rows show company size. Each box in the style box is a combination of an investment style and company size. Here are the three investment styles Morningstar shows in its style box: • Growth, as the name implies, invests in growing companies, whose stock prices increase in value as the company sales and earnings increase.


pages: 220 words: 75,651

The Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman

airport security, low cost airline, Mercator projection, off-the-grid, out of africa, Rubik’s Cube

There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. No one read, and passengers barely spoke; on a bus your seat holds you prisoner. My seatmates were a string of Marias—people traveling unbelievably long rides for short visits with family or for work. Vendors swarmed on board at every stop, hawking grilled corn and hot sodas and Rubik’s Cubes. “Jugo! Cola! Esta bien!” A stream of salesmen got on, talked and talked, holding up bottles of little green pills or small pieces of candy. “My product is better!” they all said, walking down the aisle, now filled to standing room only, passing out samples, talking some more, then collecting a few coins or taking the samples back.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

Hollywood, it turns out, has ruined robotics for kids: they expect laser-armed humanoid machines that can transform into trucks. Meanwhile, after an hour of assembly and programming, the Mindstorms rover could only roll forward and bounce feebly off a wall. We looked online to see what others were doing with Mindstorms, and saw that hobbyists had already made everything from robotic Rubik’s Cube solvers to working photocopiers. We wanted to invent something new, but there was no way we could do that sort of thing, or anything even close to it. The kids lost interest after lunch. Okay, there was always the plane. On Sunday we took it to a park. I tossed it in the air and promptly flew it into a tree.


pages: 223 words: 77,566

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, blue-collar work, cognitive dissonance, late fees, medical malpractice, obamacare, off-the-grid, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, working poor

That’s the uneasy truce I’ve struck with myself, and it works for now. People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the problems of my community. I know what they’re looking for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist. A good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the plight of the working class, once told me, “The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things.


pages: 272 words: 78,876

Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar

blue-collar work, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, Easter island, Future Shock, Honoré de Balzac, John Snow's cholera map, mass immigration, medical residency, placebo effect, publish or perish, Rubik’s Cube, selection bias, stem cell, the scientific method

Our professor told us that if ever, as doctors, we had to insert a needle into a patient’s chest to drain fluid, the right ventricle is the first chamber we would hit. A few snips and we released the heart from its beige scaffolding. A lab mate placed it on the cadaver’s forearm. “This guy really wears his heart on his sleeve,” he said. Gripping the organ like a Rubik’s Cube, I poked my fingers into the thin-walled central veins. It was hard not to lapse into thinking that it was just a piece of meat, a rubberized toy. The left ventricle had thick walls, a sign of high blood pressure. The inside of the right ventricle was a dense morass of fibers. Maybe there were stories written in that mossy tangle, but I didn’t see any.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Even if real, she could face a huge backlash from the US government – if she published something false, those repercussions could be much worse. She opted to follow the story. Greenwald was sent to Hong Kong, where his as yet unknown source had made elaborate plans to meet: he would wait in a hotel foyer with a Rubik’s cube, and they would follow him without saying hello from there. But because Greenwald, while a hugely popular blogger and an experienced civil rights lawyer, had never worked as a news reporter, she insisted he be accompanied by the Guardian US’s veteran Washington DC editor Ewen MacAskill. Her newly hired security editor Spencer Ackerman would bolster the team working from New York.


pages: 229 words: 75,606

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

If there are big weaknesses in the thesis or business plan, it’s likely that they will be revealed through the discussion. And the deal team will be the first to admit it. They want maximum buy-in, not narrow approval. If the deal goes wrong down the line, it should be a shock to everyone. Eventually, there is consensus around the table. Terms are tweaked, tactics are refined, the permutations of the Rubik’s Cube are assessed, and the investment committee and finally the Founder himself give the green light to proceed. It’s a thrilling, exhausting, typical outcome. And the beginning of at least five years of work. The project demonstrates the power of the Firm’s franchise, and the Founder loves it.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Students who were stymied by a calculus problem the day it was presented are able to solve it more easily after a night’s sleep than an equivalent amount of waking time. New information and concepts appear to be quietly practiced while we’re asleep, sometimes showing up in dreams. A night of sleep more than doubles the likelihood that you’ll solve a problem requiring insight. Many people remember the first day they played with a Rubik’s Cube. That night they report that their dreams were disturbed by images of those brightly colored squares and of them rotating and clicking in their sleep. The next day, they are much better at the game—while asleep, their brains had extracted principles of where things were, relying on both their conscious perceptions of the previous day and myriad unconscious perceptions.

., 191–92 Randi, James, 253, 346 randomization, 349 random sequences, 226–27 rare events, 256, 385–96 RBC Royal Bank, 274 reCAPTCHAs, 118–19 recency effect, 55, 408n56 regret, 264–66 rehearsal, 68–69, 374–75, 408n56 Reithofer, Norbert, 284 reminders, 124–25, 213, 301 Rentfrow, Jason, 196, 305, 376 representativeness heuristic, 228–29 research ethics, 348–49 resource limitations, 11, 19–20 risk assessment, 216, 221–22, 238–48, 264–66 Ritalin, 168, 171 Robinson, Marilynne, 375–76 Roman culture, 288 Rosch, Eleanor, 32, 56–57 Ross, Lee, xxii, 146–48, 339–40, 347 Rothbart, Mick, 154, 429n153 Rubik’s Cube, 185 rule of the designated place, 83, 83–86 RxList.com, 342 Sacks, Oliver, 92 Sand, George (Amantine Dupin), 283 Sandberg, Sheryl, 68 Sanger, Lawrence, 331, 333, 472n335 satisficing, 4–5, 276, 312 scheduling, 195–96, 211–14 Shultz, George, 156 Searle, John, 137–39, 141 selective focus, 18, 52, 177 selective migration, 196 selective windowing, 345 self-confidence, 200, 201, 429n153, 444n198 self-discipline, 208 self-presentation advantage, 148 Seneca the Younger, 14 sensory limitations, 165 September 11 terrorist attacks, 52–53, 456n256 serendipity, 377–78 shadow work, 19, 103, 341 Shakespeare, William, 292 Shannon, Claude, 311, 313–14, 316–18 Shapiro, Robert, 122, 124, 299 Shepard, Roger, 22, 58, 294, 304–5 Shinohara, Katsuto, 351 side effects, 231, 234, 239–41, 245–47, 265, 385, 391, 395 Simon, Herbert, 4 Simon, Paul, 73 Simons, Daniel, 12 Simons, Jonathan, 241 situational categories, 62 situational explanations, 145–46 Skinner, B.


pages: 252 words: 85,441

A Book for Her by Bridget Christie

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, Costa Concordia, David Attenborough, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, obamacare, Rubik’s Cube, Russell Brand, sexual politics, TED Talk

She popularised the term ‘birth control’ and opened the first birth control clinic in America – didn’t she have any input? Was it all down to me? Crikey – I didn’t expect to ‘do’ feminism just with some puerile jokes about gendered pens! I was only trying to make people laugh. Not solve anything. I can’t even solve a Rubik’s cube. Perhaps someone could let Ban Ki-moon know. He’ll be so relieved. All this violence against women was really starting to get him down a bit. Then he said, ‘I see from your website you love waterproof jackets. Perhaps you could write a show about those next?’ as if gender politics, and all that that entails, couldn’t possibly generate enough material to sustain a second hour of comedy.


pages: 289 words: 85,315

Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, kremlinology, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Wolfskehl Prize

Strangely this autobiography was written in 1928, seventeen years after Loyd’s death. Loyd passed his cunning on to his son, also called Sam, who was the real author of the book, knowing full well that anybody buying it would mistakenly assume that it had been written by the more famous Sam Loyd Senior. Loyd’s most famous creation was the Victorian equivalent of the Rubik’s Cube, the ‘14–15’ puzzle, which is still found in toyshops today. Fifteen tiles numbered 1 to 15 are arranged in a 4 × 4 grid, and the aim is to slide the tiles and rearrange them into the correct order. Loyd’s offered a significant reward to whoever could complete the puzzle by swapping the ‘ 14’ and ‘15’ into their proper positions via any series of tile slides.


pages: 250 words: 87,722

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis

automated trading system, bash_history, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, drone strike, Dutch auction, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, Flash crash, High speed trading, information security, latency arbitrage, National best bid and offer, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the new new thing, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Speeding up his stock market order merely reduced the time it took for him to arrive in HFT’s various traps. “But how do you prove that a millisecond is irrelevant?” Brad asked. He threw the problem to the Puzzle Masters. The team had expanded to include Larry Yu, whom Brad thought of as the guy with the box of Rubik’s cubes under his desk. (The standard 3x3-inch cube he could solve in under thirty seconds, and so he kept it oiled with WD-40 to make it spin faster. His cube box held more challenging ones: a 4x4-incher, a 5x5-incher, a giant irregularly shaped one, and so on.) Yu generated two charts, which Brad projected onto the screen for the investors.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

Only the tastemakers could afford the reach that goes with mass. We got to choose one of the options available on the shelf. We got to choose one of the few shows on free-to-air television. The system didn’t support niche like it does now. The cultural phenomena that resulted from the system were powerful indeed. The Rubik’s cube, breakdancing, BMX bikes, cabbage patch dolls, sitcoms, teenage mutant ninja turtles, video cassette recorders, the walkman, aerobics, legwarmers, Coke vs Pepsi, Band Aid, hair metal, Beverly Hills Cop, Nintendo, PAC-MAN and glow worms were all picked by someone else, someone who decided we needed them to enhance our human existence.


pages: 254 words: 81,009

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

Some of those problems require information, practice and skill development. Ronald Heifetz, a leadership expert, calls these types of changes technical problems.9 These are not necessarily simple, or unimportant, but there are recognized ways to address them. Examples of technical problems might range from completing the Rubik’s Cube in under a minute to landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier. They might be tough, but with enough learning and practice, you could succeed. Adaptive problems are a different matter. A problem is considered adaptive if there isn’t a correct way to solve it or a proven solution; there isn’t an instruction manual.


pages: 274 words: 81,008

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

Funds are encouraged to invest in other funds’ deals. That means a team in Brazil can enlist New York colleagues specializing in consumer products on a specific deal and if everyone works together, some of the carry goes to New York, and the U.S. buyout fund has a chance to co-invest. “This is about taking the Rubik’s cube of industry expertise, product, and geography and turning it so its face best projects our strengths against an opportunity,” D’Aniello said. “Winning in this business is a game of inches. This collaborative approach empowers our firm’s business model, and our strong One Carlyle culture lubricates its successful execution.”


pages: 297 words: 83,528

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, driverless car, family office, glass ceiling, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, index card, lockdown, microdosing, nudge theory, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, the High Line, TikTok

The taxi swerves again and this time it’s me sliding over to his side. “I guess it didn’t occur to me. That’s shitty, I’m sorry.” By the time we roll up to the address, I’m in a foul mood. “I’m going to get a coffee,” I say, and disappear for an hour. When I get back, he’s in full Cyrus mode, talking Rubik’s cubes around the poor interviewer. The guy can’t get a word in edgewise, but instead of being offended, he is rapt, listening to Cyrus riffing on everything from climate change to online privacy. Lately, I’ve realized that because of the popularity of the platform, and because of what it is—a replacement for religion—people are looking to Cyrus for answers to the questions they ask themselves all the time.


pages: 247 words: 86,844

Perfect Sound Whatever by James. Acaster

4chan, Airbnb, butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Rubik’s Cube, side project

I would not have given this album the time of day a year earlier but now it’s one of my favourite records of all time. After months of listening to new music every single day I needed something unlike anything I’d listened to before and I needed to hear melodies delivered in an unfamiliar fashion. It was like someone had taken what I knew an album to be and jumbled it like a Rubik’s Cube so it still made sense without anything being in its usual place. The opening to What Now? is a 9-minute-and-52-second-long track entitled ‘Guided Meditation’, which is literally 9 minutes 52 of guided meditation, presumably so we can clear our minds completely before listening to the rest of the record.


Crushing It! EPB by Gary Vaynerchuk

augmented reality, driverless car, fear of failure, follow your passion, imposter syndrome, Mark Zuckerberg, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk

I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you can make money from brands that would wanna put their stuff on there?’ That was new to me.” It was summer 2015, and Dan scored his first brand deal by making a pitch on a website called FameBit, a marketing site where brands post offers to pay creatives to promote their products. He got paid around $250 to cut open a Rubik’s Cube, and then $1,000 to cut open a mattress. “I thought we had it made. A thousand dollars, and we’re just cutting open a mattress!” A few months later, he met Shaun “Shonduras” McBride (see Chapter 9), who told him that with their channel’s reach—they now had almost one million subscribers—they should be pitching the advertising agencies that run big influencer marketing campaigns.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

FOLDING BEIJING: SCIENCE-FICTION VISIONS AND AI ECONOMICS When the clock strikes 6 a.m., the city devours itself. Densely packed buildings of concrete and steel bend at the hip and twist at their spines. External balconies and awnings are turned inward, creating smooth and tightly sealed exteriors. Skyscrapers break down into component parts, shuffling and consolidating into Rubik’s Cubes of industrial proportions. Inside those blocks are the residents of Beijing’s Third Space, the economic underclass that toils during the night hours and sleeps during the day. As the cityscape folds in on itself, a patchwork of squares on the earth’s surface begin their 180-degree rotation, flipping over to tuck these consolidated structures underground.


pages: 312 words: 92,131

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning by Tom Vanderbilt

AlphaGo, crowdsourcing, DeepMind, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake it until you make it, functional fixedness, future of work, G4S, global supply chain, IKEA effect, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

Howard, “Searching the Real World for Signs of Rising Population Intelligence,” Personality and Individual Differences 30, no. 6 (2001): 1039–58. “Pretty close to anything”: KSNV, “Fake Doctor, Rick Van Thiel, Says He Learned Surgical Procedures on YouTube,” News 3 Las Vegas, Oct. 7, 2015, news3lv.com. transmission of techniques: Maxwell Strachan, “Rubik’s Cube Champion on Whether Puzzles and Intelligence Are Linked,” HuffPost, July 23, 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com. Time-use data show: See, for instance, Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan, Where Does It All Go? What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Center for Time Use Research (London: Pelican, 2019).


pages: 312 words: 93,836

Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking Scandal in History by Alexis Stenfors

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, game design, Gordon Gekko, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, mental accounting, millennium bug, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Rubik’s Cube, Snapchat, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, work culture , Y2K

After a year of discussing morality with a lawyer, two years with a psychotherapist, and several more years talking about it with people I have met since, I am not sure whether I have come any closer to a definitive answer to the question ‘Why did you do it?’ Perhaps getting an answer was always less important than seeking an answer. CHAPTER 3 SUPERHEROES AND BEAUTY PAGEANTS For a derivatives trader such as myself, being able to accurately predict future LIBORs was as difficult as trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube for the first time. There were so many things that had to be taken into account when working out what the next move by the central bankers was going to be, and how many of these potential decisions had already been anticipated by the market (and by how much). Central bankers were mostly concerned about ensuring that the inflation rate reached a certain target.


pages: 304 words: 95,306

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

Nurses parachuting into the no-man’s land of intensive care, terrified in unfamiliar territory, and yet there they were, sleeves rolled up, ready to help. So what have we learnt? One, with the right mindset, we are capable of incredible things. We swept away bureaucracy and administrative chaff and were led by pure clinical need – hospitals moved internally like a Rubik’s Cube at high speed, building units, throwing up resuscitation areas and going above and beyond, and just kept going and going. It’ll be that much harder for good ideas to be shouted down as impossible when we’ve all witnessed this. Two, we know a lot more about coronavirus now than we did going in.


pages: 292 words: 97,911

Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies by Nick Frost

Alexander Shulgin, call centre, David Attenborough, hive mind, impulse control, job-hopping, Norman Mailer, Rubik’s Cube, tech billionaire

. *** Back home, high and cocky from my brush with the law, I poke my head around the door to the lounge and Mum and Dad are sat in silence, telly off. How long had they been there? How long were they planning on being there? In the middle of the room, in the middle of our mint-green carpet, was a giant lump, my giant lump of hash. It looks exactly like a brown Rubik’s cube but obviously a lot easier to solve. Trouble now breaks out. Not a row, just a kind of Category C rumble with a drug pro and con to-and-fro-type parent deal. To be fair they make a compelling argument but I’m high, the guys are waiting, and I’d like to be higher. My counter comes in the shape of a rat out.


pages: 337 words: 103,522

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think by Marcus Du Sautoy

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Automated Insights, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, John Conway, Kickstarter, Loebner Prize, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, move 37, music of the spheres, Mustafa Suleyman, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons

And so although I make some apology for my Western-focused viewpoint, I think it will provide a suitable benchmark for the creativity of our digital rivals. Of course, human creativity extends beyond the arts: the molecular gastronomy of the Michelin-star chef Heston Blumenthal; the football trickery of the Dutch striker Johan Cruyff; the curvaceous buildings of Zaha Hadid; the invention of the Rubik’s cube by the Hungarian Ernö Rubik. Even the creation of code to make a game like Minecraft should be regarded as part of some of the great acts of human creativity. More unexpectedly creativity is an important part of my own world of mathematics. One of the things that drives me to spend hours at my desk conjuring up equations and penning proofs is the allure of creating something new.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The G-MAFIA studied the Chinese cities where smart city initiatives were piloted—such as Rongcheng, Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai—and identified best practices to pilot in the United States. We now have a few American smart cities—Baltimore, Detroit, Boulder, and Indianapolis—that are testing out a wide range of AI systems and services. Networks of cubesats overhead—tiny satellites the size of a Rubik’s Cube—feed real-time data into AI systems that can recognize objects, unique light patterns, and heat signatures. This, in turn, allows city managers to predict power outages, monitor and reroute traffic, manage water reserves, and clear ice and snow off the roads. AI also helps them manage budgets and personnel throughout the year, surfacing entirely new ways to shave off fractions of expenditures at scale.


pages: 308 words: 98,022

Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson

cotton gin, impulse control, Mason jar, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer, Y2K

We put heavy rocks all around the edges of the tarp and the vultures looked pissed, but I was so grateful I cried. Then I went inside and took a very, very long shower. When I came back out I realized that vultures are surprisingly strong, and that the blue plastic tarp had become a kind of vulture Rubik’s Cube, each of the birds trying a corner to get it all solved. I was having a nervous breakdown, but at least I was bringing the vulture community together. My friend Laura (yes, the same one who’d dragged me to wine country) noticed that my Twitter stream was filled with updates about vultures, and machetes, and dead dogs, and how glad I am that Cartoon Network exists, and so she called.


pages: 307 words: 102,734

The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River by Dan Morrison

airport security, colonial rule, company town, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, off-the-grid, Potemkin village, Rubik’s Cube, satellite internet, Silicon Valley

While rainfall causes things to be green, it’s also true that green—trees and grasses—sustains rain through the humidity it creates, and with fewer trees there’s less rain. And fewer clouds mean there’s more sunshine, more evaporation. It’s the same phenomenon that turned the Sahara from a savanna to desert.” “One hell of a Rubik’s Cube,” Schon said, distracted by the relentless flow of boda-bodas, mutatu minivan taxis and lorries. “Thanks, Perfesser.” Omar Wadda greeted us at his plain office and had us sign his guestbook. He was a little stocky, with eyeglasses and a head of receding white hair, and he exuded the easy competence of a career civil servant.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Unfortunately, the Volna rocket that was launched from a Russian submarine in June 2005 failed, and Cosmos 1 went to the bottom of the Barents Sea.17 Solar-sail development has continued, but the ambitions and the size of the sails have been scaled back. A team from NASA built NanoSail-D, based on the CubeSat specifications. CubeSat is a miniaturized satellite designed to spur space research by using standard components and off-the-shelf electronics. A CubeSat is a bit bigger than a Rubik’s Cube—10 centimeters on a side and weighing less than 1.3 kilograms. Most CubeSat launches have come from academia, but companies such as Boeing have built CubeSats, and amateur satellite builders have gotten their projects off the ground using crowdfunding campaigns on websites such as Kickstarter.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Hour after hour, I watched colleagues slave away three or four times a day to send out the Urgent News that Fred Thompson or Mike Huckabee or whoever had just given the same speech he’d given fifty times in a row. To pass the time I’d often read (in Iowa, I was hissed at by a campaign staffer for turning the pages of a Sports Illustrated too loudly) or else I’d do even dumber things (a Rubik’s cube earned me a rebuke in Houston). I finally learned that the only safe activity during filing hours was to do nothing. So I sat there, hour after hour, primary after primary, just thinking about what we were doing. By 2012 I had a theory of the presidential campaign as a complex commercial process.


pages: 456 words: 101,959

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

When it comes to special interests, Autistic brains are total sponges, absorbing facts and figures at a rate that seems kind of inhuman to neurotypical people. We can develop a special interest in nearly anything. Some of us learn to speak fluent Klingon; others memorize algorithms for solving Rubik’s cubes. My sister’s brain is a compendium of movie trivia and dialogue. My own special interests have included everything from bat biology to the history of the Tudor dynasty, to personal finance, to subreddits run by so-called men’s rights activists. Though the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that Autism is defined by having a “restricted” range of interests, some Autistic folks cycle through new special interests every couple of months and become polymaths in a variety of subjects.


pages: 405 words: 109,114

Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

More generally, Professor Robert Shiller of Yale, one of the few prominent economists who recognized that the US housing market was in a massive bubble before the crisis, has been one of several financial economists to suggest that financial market bubbles can be modeled as social waves in which ideas catch fire and become self-reinforcing before eventually deflating.7 Such social eruptions can be modeled using similar tools to those used to examine epidemics, involving the probability of passing on an infection from one person to the other and a rate at which people stop being infectious, which define the height and longevity of the craze. Examples of crazes include hit records, Rubik’s Cubes, and smart phone apps. This approach provides a way of thinking about asset price bubbles and the madness of crowds in a structured manner. The increasing interest in behavioral economics provides another platform for considering how individuals deviate from pure rationality.8 Behavioral economics, which examines how individuals actually behave in various economic situations rather than how they are supposed to behave, provides many insights but remains a specialized field.


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

By 2016 fuel economy would surpass 35 mpg, and the 2025 standards would eventually be ratcheted up to 54.5 mpg. It was a big deal. In a White House Press release, EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson congratulated the president on solving a “supposedly ‘unsolvable’ problem.” Congressman Ed Markey said the president had conquered “the energy and economic policy equivalent of a Rubik’s Cube.” Perhaps. But he had done so by taking a toy that had already been smashed to bits, and reassembling it—not through any particular mathematical genius or cunning. The energy team of the Obama administration had all the leverage in the world and they would have been fools not to use it. They had the chance, so they put the screws to Detroit.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

His task was simple: identify ways in which the information environment might be enhanced for Marines on the ground in isolated parts of Afghanistan, so that the Marines kill more Taliban fighters and the Taliban fighters kill fewer Marines. The captain and his colleagues got behind a technology from Palantir, a Palo Alto–based company named after the Palantiri all-seeing stones in Lord of the Rings. The company is run by Alex Karp, an eccentric Stanford social theory PhD whose hobbies include solving Rubik’s Cubes and qi gong meditation. Karp was a student under Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher and sociologist famous for his notion of the public sphere and its importance as a free discussion forum where public opinion is formed. From 2005 to 2008 the CIA was Palantir’s sole customer. Since 2010, Palantir has also designed software systems for the NSA, the FBI, and the US military.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

From 1958 through 1974, he published only nine articles. In the following decade, before Alzheimer’s disease ended his career all too decisively, the total published output of Claude Shannon consisted of a single article. It was on juggling. Shannon also worked on an article, never published, on Rubik’s cube. The open secret at MIT was that one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century had all but stopped doing research—to play with toys. “Some wondered whether he was depressed,” said Paul Samuelson. Others saw it as part of an almost pathologically self-effacing personality. “One unfamiliar with the man might easily assume that anyone who had made such an enormous impact must have been a promoter with a supersalesman-like personality,” said mathematician Elwyn Berlekamp.


pages: 462 words: 172,671

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin

business logic, continuous integration, database schema, disinformation, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, finite state, G4S, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, iterative process, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, web application

private boolean setArgument(char argChar) throws ArgsException { ArgumentMarshaler m = marshalers.get(argChar); if (m == null) return false; try { if (m instanceof BooleanArgumentMarshaler) setBooleanArg(m, currentArgument); else if (m instanceof StringArgumentMarshaler) setStringArg(m); else if (m instanceof IntegerArgumentMarshaler) setIntArg(m); } catch (ArgsException e) { valid = false; errorArgumentId = argChar; throw e; } return true; } --- private void setBooleanArg(ArgumentMarshaler m, Iterator<String> currentArgument) throws ArgsException { try { m.set(”true”); catch (ArgsException e) { } } Didn’t we just put that exception processing in? Putting things in so you can take them out again is pretty common in refactoring. The smallness of the steps and the need to keep the tests running means that you move things around a lot. Refactoring is a lot like solving a Rubik’s cube. There are lots of little steps required to achieve a large goal. Each step enables the next. Why did we pass that iterator when setBooleanArg certainly doesn’t need it? Because setIntArg and setStringArg will! And because I want to deploy all three of these functions through an abstract method in ArgumentMarshaller, I need to pass it to setBooleanArg.


pages: 325 words: 110,330

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

Albert Einstein, business climate, buy low sell high, complexity theory, fail fast, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Menlo Park, reality distortion field, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

(Since John and I took over at Disney Animation, that studio has adopted this tradition of candor as well.) Somehow, and perhaps especially because they have less invested, a director who’s struggling with his own dilemmas can see another director’s struggles more clearly than his own. “It’s like I can put my crossword puzzle away and help you with your Rubik’s Cube a little bit,” is how he puts it. Bob Peterson, a member of the Braintrust who has helped write (and provide voices for) eleven Pixar films, uses another analogy to describe the Braintrust. He calls it “the grand eye of Sauron”—a reference to the lidless, all-seeing character in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—because when it focuses on you, there’s no avoiding its gaze.


pages: 315 words: 106,402

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Kickstarter, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube

He was beginning to wonder why the NCAA needed to know all this stuff. “Um,” said Michael, finally. “Two, I think.” “And that’s here in Memphis?” asked the lady. Michael nodded. “I’m saying,” said Sean. “It’s a book.” Not a good one. Michael’s answers were as nourishing as a bag of stale potato chips, and as vexing as a Rubik’s Cube. The lady was now officially frustrated. She’d come all the way from Indianapolis to interrogate Michael Oher, but she was getting no answers from Michael Oher, and too many from this rich white Ole Miss booster whose roof, for some reason, Michael Oher lived under. She stared intently at Michael and said, “Michael, you have to talk to me.”


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Perhaps we are now experiencing the long hangover after the ebullient high of web 2.0, the birth of social media, and the rise of a global, commercial, advertising-supported Internet culture—the bursting of a cultural bubble, if not a financial one.8 It’s possible that we’ve simply asked too much, or expected too much, from social media. As Virginia Heffernan quipped, about Twitter, “I think we’ve asked way, way too much of a little microblogging platform that was meant to talk about where to get a beer in Austin, Texas, and now is moving mountains, and is a centerpiece of geopolitics. It’s like asking nodes of Rubik’s Cubes to manage world history.”9 Or perhaps these are growing pains. In a 2013 interview, Ken Auletta took the mounting criticism of social media as evidence that “Silicon Valley is in the equivalent of its adolescence. And, in adolescence, is suddenly a time when you become aware of things beyond yourself, become aware the world. . . .


pages: 395 words: 103,437

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

Kim’s calibration of provocations and diplomacy, as well as his adroit use of ambiguity and flattery, also underscore how we must be clear-eyed about his goals, while also maintaining analytic agility in our assessment of his intentions and identifying risks and opportunities in a given scenario. THE EVOLVING PUZZLE If figuring out Kim’s intentions is like completing a jigsaw puzzle, crafting a solution to the North Korea problem should be likened to solving the Rubik’s Cube. This 3-D puzzle befuddles players with seemingly endless permutations, only to frustrate them further when they see that even though they’ve solved one side, the other five are a jumble of colors. Denuclearization is a primary goal of any solution; another high priority is choking off North Korea’s ability to generate revenue for the regime and its nuclear weapons program, which has grown by leaps and bounds since he came to power—it is more diverse, more mobile, and more dangerous—and poses unacceptable threats to global security.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Even if they did, Fredrickson and Losada adapted and tweaked the models in arbitrary ways to generate numerical predictions that came somewhat close to those Losada had reportedly observed in his study of executives. Fredrickson and Losada then presented the model’s output as if it were a universal law of human nature.16 Brown and colleagues describe the Fredrickson and Losada approach as analogous to “a video of a Rubik’s Cube being miraculously solved in five seconds, only for it to be revealed at the end that what was filmed was an ordered cube being scrambled, with the whole sequence then being played back in reverse.” In response to this critique, Fredrickson admitted that she had relied on Losada’s modeling and “has since come to question it.”


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Some aspects of the game only become available if you have enough relationships with other characters, at which point you need to start worrying about their needs, too—yet more plates on poles. I played The Sims so much I began hallucinating it. This isn’t unusual—people have reported similar experiences with chess, jigsaw puzzles, Rubik’s Cube, Spacewar!, but most notably Tetris, such that the phenomenon is popularly known as the Tetris Effect, or according to Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, Game Transfer Phenomena.89 After playing Diner Dash constantly, I couldn’t sit in a restaurant without imagining how I’d bus the tables as rapidly as possible.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

Having humans serve as backup for algorithmic diagnosis and recommendations for treatment represents conditional automation, and over time this Level 3 autonomy for some people with certain conditions will be achievable. If these big four AI areas (games, images, speech, cars) summarized here weren’t enough, there’s a long list of miscellaneous tasks that AI has recently been reported to do, some of which are noted in Table 4.3. Beat CAPTCHA Create new musical instruments Determine art history Solve Rubik’s cube Manage stock portfolios Write Wikipedia articles Lip read Design websites Tailor clothes Write songs Find energy materials Brain “shazam” (fMRI music) Write text Original paintings Define accents Write poetry Do the census Text to speech w/ accent Recommend fashion Distinguish fake vs. real art Autonomous stores Sort LEGO pieces Make fake videos, photos Predict purchase 1 week before person buys it Convert text to art Artificial comedy Create slow mode video by imputing frames Draw Check NDAs Pick ripe fruit Count and identify wild animals Put together IKEA furniture Create movie trailers Sense human posture through walls Debate Predict earthquake aftershocks TABLE 4.3: Miscellaneous tasks that AI has been reported to achieve in recent years.


pages: 561 words: 114,843

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

(Google must have thought so too: they recently acquired his company Quickoffice.) To open this section, I have asked him to talk about the nexus of resources and strategy. The job of a startup CEO is generally tougher than that of running a more established company. Startup CEOs face a veritable Rubik’s Cube of challenges, trying to run companies with constrained resources while operating in developing markets. This fundamental challenge is the essence of what this section attempts to define. Simply stated, how can startup CEOs align their constrained cash and human resources alongside business strategies that will inevitably change as their targeted markets evolve?


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

It’s these kids, who have free time and no preconceptions, who will likely be the ones to domesticate 3-D printing, just as they were the first to domesticate computers, printers, Photoshop, and video-editing software. Over at sites like Shapeways or Ponoko or Thingiverse, creators post designs for everything from iPad racks to Rubik’s Cube–like puzzles. Many are “open,” which means anyone can download them, customize them, and print a copy themselves—learning gradually by remixing existing works, much as we learn to write by copying or imitating others. What literacy will 3-D printing offer? How will it help us think in new ways?


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

It was a royal populist appeal, made through music, movies, and pro wrestling. In 2016, MBS created the General Entertainment Authority to foster the new sector. Around the time I went to the opera, the GEA invited me to a flashy event to lay out its plans for 2018. It opened with a light show and a performance by an illusionist with a Rubik’s Cube, followed by a talk by the authority’s chairman. The GEA was going to double the number of events it oversaw to more than 4,000, he said, and was launching a new website and app to host its schedule. “It is wrong that we who love happiness go to look for it in neighboring countries,” he said.


pages: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

These Googlers came from every kind of educational background, including many of the best schools on the planet; had invented seminal products and technologies like JavaScript, BigTable, and MapReduce; had been part of some of the most revolutionary companies; and included Olympic athletes, Turing Award and Academy Award winners, Cirque du Soleil performers, cup stackers, Rubik’s Cube champions, magicians, triathletes, volunteers, veterans, and people who had accomplished just about any cool thing you could think of. Invariably, the candidate would ask if Jonathan had cherry-picked the resumes. And he would honestly tell them that it was a random sample of the people who build Google’s products.


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

The first brand belonged to Walter Faria, the second to the Schincariol brothers—some of the first hidden billionaires I uncovered. It wasn’t long before billionaires started showing up in my dreams. Eventually I looked beyond consumer brands. In a downtown subway station, a plaque announced the contractor who had laid the subway line: Camargo Corrêa. In Rio I’d seen a building that resembles grayscale Rubik’s cubes arranged in Jenga stacks midplay. It’s the headquarters of Petrobras, the state oil company, but it was built by a private company known as Odebrecht. Camargo and Odebrecht both were family-owned—and huge, raking in many billions of dollars in revenues each year. I realized I was looking at two of Brazil’s richest families.


pages: 460 words: 122,556

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, break the buck, Brownian motion, Carmen Reinhart, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, geopolitical risk, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Y2K

ak The Wall Street Journal sharply opined, “The Treasury Secretary has set a terrible precedent, leaving subordinate debt holders at other large financial institutions to calculate that they too will receive a government bailout if they stumble.” al A graphic depiction of AIG’s corporate structure resembled a financial Rubik’s Cube, with names of subsidiaries stretching thirteen columns across and extending twenty-five rows down. am Dimon, like Thain, had been involved in LTCM, but they were not yet CEOs. an Diamond likened this to a “reverse Spinco.” Instead of spinning off Lehman’s bad assets, as the Lehman bankers had proposed, Barclays would acquire the good assets, leaving a rump collection of toxic loans for the banks.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Finally, as technology accelerates growth in key urban centers, these regions need to manage the challenges this growth is creating, not just for individual institutions, but for the entire community. In each of these areas, tech companies are dependent on support from a community and often even a nation. And in each area, tech companies have an opportunity and a responsibility to do more themselves. It’s a formidable challenge, much like a Rubik’s Cube puzzle that can only be solved by moving many pieces at the same time. How can we best advance the people side of technology? For us, a good learning opportunity arose when we dropped by the company’s annual science fair for software developers in 2018. The Microsoft Conference Center had been transformed into our annual TechFest, put on by Microsoft Research, or MSR, as everyone calls it.


Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World by Michael Schuman

Admiral Zheng, British Empire, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, land bank, moveable type in China, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

If Heaven granted the Mandate to rule based on de, or virtue, and the Chinese possessed superior de, then how exactly could the Mongol conquest of China be explained? It was a thorny question that many writers of the Yuan and early Ming period left unanswered. The official history of the Yuan just recorded the dynasty’s events, without the usual commentary. The Mongol period simply didn’t compute. The Ming solution to this ideological Rubik’s Cube was to pick up where the Song Dynasty left off. The Yuan may have been a real dynasty, but it was a deviation from the long-standing norm, and the Ming were setting the course of the Chinese history of the world back on track. “Since ancient times the emperors had been ruling all-under-Heaven with the Middle Kingdom in the inner realm to control the barbarians and the barbarians in the outer world to serve the Middle Kingdom,” Zhu broadcast to the people of north China during his rebellion against the Yuan in a 1367 proclamation.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

The reaction was nationwide, with the recent product called ‘‘furniture polish’’ and ‘‘sewer water.’’ Within weeks ‘‘Coke Classic’’ returned to the market, and the company stock jumped 36 percent. Only in America could a marketing disaster turn into company profit. For entertainment, Americans fooled with Rubik’s Cube, a plastic square with its surface subdivided so that each face consisted of nine squares. Rotation of each face allowed the smaller cubes to be arranged in different ways. The challenge, undertaken by millions of addicts, was to return the cube from any given state to its original array with each face consisting of nine squares of the same color.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

In my own experience this principle has never failed: In any game, increase your options. There are two kinds of games in the universe: finite games and infinite games. A finite game is played to win. Card games, poker rounds, games of chance, bets, sports such as football, board games such as Monopoly, races, marathons, puzzles, Tetris, Rubik’s Cube, Scrabble, sudoku, online games such as World of Warcraft, and Halo—all are finite games. The game ends when someone wins. An infinite game, on the other hand, is played to keep the game going. It does not terminate because there is no winner. Finite games require rules that remain constant.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Reliance had laid hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cables across India, one told me, as well as erecting ninety thousand new mobile phone towers. I was shown a desk in an open-plan area at which Ambani himself was said to sit, although it showed no sign of having actually been used. His elder son, Akash, had one nearby with a more lived-in feel: a Rubik’s cube sat discarded next to a framed photo of the Ambani family, while a pink poster of Andy Warhol was tacked to the desk’s backboard. The poster’s slogan read “The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting,” which I took to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to Jio itself, given its launch had been delayed for the best part of five years.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

In the James Bond movies—beyond the women and the fight scenes—one of the highlights of nearly every film is Bond’s visit to the labs of Agent Q, who shows off the latest technological inventions that (lo and behold) come in perfectly handy later on. And of course, Quincy got all this forensic frenzy started back in the 1970s. And, to be fair, to whatever degree modern generations of kids have grown up on Barbies and fire trucks, they have also grown up on chemistry sets, Operation, Slinkys, and Rubik’s Cube. But without a doubt, in the past fifteen years, science has gotten a big boost. Educators from Carl Sagan to Bill Nye the Science Guy to even Al Gore have done significant work to bring complex science to America in terms and pictures that everyone can understand. And in movies like 1997’s Good Will Hunting and 2001’s A Beautiful Mind, we learned to find math and science geniuses wildly compelling.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

YouTube sent payments and 1099 forms, but left YouTubers to sort out the taxes on their own. In 2010, Johnson met one of YouTube’s earliest dedicated moneymen, David Sievers, a twenty-two-year-old Nebraskan training to be an accountant. Sievers handled taxes for a friend in Nebraska, Dan Brown, who had achieved sudden YouTube fame filming his skills solving Rubik’s Cubes. YouTube fame was a small world, and Sievers quickly added more marquee YouTuber clients, including the mad scientist Johnson. Later that year Johnson and his new taxman traveled together to Los Angeles to pitch a web series. Sievers, who had grown up thumping a Bible, had never been to the city; Johnson bought him his first margarita there.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I knew that he competed at the national level in mathematical and computing olympiads, which sufficed to attract my attention for a closer look; but I didn’t know yet if he could learn to think about AI. I had asked Marcello to say how he thought an AI might discover how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Not in a preprogrammed way, which is trivial, but rather how the AI itself might figure out the laws of the Rubik universe and reason out how to exploit them. How would an AI invent for itself the concept of an “operator,” or “macro,” which is the key to solving the Rubik’s Cube? At some point in this discussion, Marcello said: “Well, I think the AI needs complexity to do X, and complexity to do Y—” And I said, “Don’t say ‘complexity.’”

Outside their own professions, people often commit the misstep of trying to broaden a word as widely as possible, to cover as much territory as possible. Is it not more glorious, more wise, more impressive, to talk about all the apples in the world? How much loftier it must be to explain human thought in general, without being distracted by smaller questions, such as how humans invent techniques for solving a Rubik’s Cube. Indeed, it scarcely seems necessary to consider specific questions at all; isn’t a general theory a worthy enough accomplishment on its own? It is the way of the curious to lift up one pebble from among a million pebbles on the shore, and see something new about it, something interesting, something different.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

When I visited, two dozen students sat at workbenches hunched over circuit boards or silently tapping away at computers. Behind them on the edges of the workshop lay discarded pieces of robots, like archeological relics of students’ projects from semesters prior. On a shelf sat “Roby Feliks,” the Rubik’s Cube solving robot. Nearby, a Raspberry Pi processor sat atop a plastic musical recorder, wires running from the circuit board to the instrument like some musical cyborg. Somewhat randomly in the center of the floor sat a half-disassembled robot, the remnants of TJ’s admission to the FIRST competition that year.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Cohen was one of the coder-iest coders I’d ever met. He wore his hair in a shoulder-length mop, sported a half shave, and loped about the house in a gray shirt with a dragon design. His work area was a room on the first floor, and behind his desk was an enormous plastic bin filled with dozens of Rubik’s Cube–style “twisty puzzles”; he twiddled them with twitchy intensity, solving them and rescrambling as he pondered how to make BitTorrent run incrementally faster. Cohen was, I discovered, obsessive about puzzles and games. He was designing his own twisting 3-D puzzles, one of which was going to be produced soon for sale.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Other defensive counterintelligence measures aren’t so visible. In his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, James Bamford recounts some of the counterintelligence measures built into National Security Agency headquarters. It sounds fictional but it’s all real: Modern and boxy, it has a shiny black-glass exterior that makes it look like a giant Rubik’s Cube. But hidden beneath the dark reflective finish is the real building, a skinlike cocoon of thick, orange-colored copper shielding to keep all signals—or any other type of electromagnetic radiation—from ever getting out. Known by the code name Tempest, this protective technique … was designed to prevent electronic spies from capturing any escaping emissions.… [The windows of the director’s office] contained hair-thin copper wires to seal in even the faintest electronic whisper.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

She had rapidly mastered trigonometry and integral and differential calculus, and he told her mother privately that if he had encountered “such power” in a Cambridge student he would have anticipated “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first rate eminence.”♦ She was fearless about drilling down to first principles. Where she felt difficulties, real difficulties lay. One winter she grew obsessed with a fashionable puzzle known as Solitaire, the Rubik’s Cube of its day. Thirty-two pegs were arranged on a board with thirty-three holes, and the rules were simple: Any peg may jump over another immediately adjacent, and the peg jumped over is removed, until no more jumps are possible. The object is to finish with only one peg remaining. “People may try thousands of times, and not succeed in this,” she wrote Babbage excitedly.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The 1962 World’s Fair, centered on the new Space Needle, contained various wonders like cars (both emissionless and flying) and featured three fairgrounds for science and industry, against just one each for art and entertainment, a proportion inverted and then abolished by the Boomers. Futurama II in 1964 was the last of the science Fairs. By 1982, the best on offer was Knoxville’s Suntower (339 feet shorter than the Space Needle) and a mechanized Rubik’s cube (itself a Hungarian, not American, invention). The Space Shuttle made a desultory appearance at the 1984 Fair, but enthusiasm for this sort of display can be inferred from the fact that there has not been an American Fair since.* In an age of endless sequels, Futurama II alone begat no grandchildren.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

In 2006, he donated over 30,000 of the puzzles to the Lilly Library at Indiana University to create the Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection. In addition to the staggering number of puzzles, Slocum also donated thousands of books about puzzles. Among the pieces on display (only a few hundred out of the thousands in the collection) are an archaic Rubik’s Cube with differing sizes of nails on each side, called a “texture cube”; a trick cup that seems normal until its drinker fills it too full and it drains away into the base; and more whimsical amusements like a Coke bottle with a wooden arrow through it. There are also countless intricate wooden geometrical curiosities that must be twisted and shifted together and apart.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

But Ivester’s experience showed that Google could accommodate exceptions to its standards. Just as in the case of elite institutions, the stray C or a non-Mensa SAT score could be trumped by an accomplishment that indicated that one was special. “It’s like they did some crazy skiing thing or could do the Rubik’s cube better than anybody,” says early employee Megan Smith. Stacy Sullivan could recall having trouble hiring someone in international sales—until she noted that his résumé cited a foosball championship in Italy. “That’s pretty good,” said Sergey. “We can hire him.” If the guy worked that hard at something, the logic went, he’d probably be pretty good at selling ads.


pages: 728 words: 182,850

Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter

3D printing, A Pattern Language, air gap, carbon footprint, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, Donald Knuth, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fear of failure, food miles, functional fixedness, hacker house, haute cuisine, helicopter parent, Internet Archive, iterative process, Kickstarter, lolcat, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, slashdot, stochastic process, TED Talk, the scientific method

So when you get stuck on one of these problems even though you’re working in a wider circle, how do you go about getting unstuck? That’s an interesting question. Let me deviate from that slightly and then I’ll come back. Most people are familiar with the scientific method, which is holding everything exactly the same and changing this one thing. This reminds me of people trying to do one side of the Rubik’s Cube. Most of the good methods don’t involve getting any side. That’s the last thing you do. So people get stuck because they don’t want to toss in the towel on the progress they think they’ve made so far. So if you want to make it past one level, you may have to scrap your whole methodology and just start over.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The price tag is staggering and the benefits modest—the biggest dig in American history will increase capacity by only 20 percent. While that’s enough to retake the title and reduce delays, the cost-effectiveness of the endeavor seems a bit skewed. Much of the time, energy, and money will be spent on the contortions necessary to solve the airport’s layout like a Rubik’s Cube. The taxpayers won’t foot the bill—not the local ones, anyway. Daley vowed to pay for it all with a mixture of bonds, fees, federal funds, and checks from the airlines, which were crying poverty even before $150 oil and the recession. With the first $3 billion in hand, work began on the runways in summer 2007, nearly a year behind schedule and already a billion dollars over budget.


Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

Our species’ capacity for culture, based on teaching and learning, is a key part of the social suite even if the specific components of culture—so variable, as we saw in chapter 1—are not. Sustaining complex cultural knowledge requires a large and interconnected set of thinkers and innovators. Our blueprint is the foundation of cultural evolution. Human society is like a Rubik’s Cube that is bound together and obeys a few particular principles but that is nevertheless configurable into 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 combinations. Genes and Culture Coevolve Having established that humans are, genetically speaking, uncommonly capable of culture compared with other animals and that culture itself can vary across time and place, in part due to processes akin to evolution, let’s now consider how genetic and cultural inheritance might interact.


pages: 272 words: 19,172

Hedge Fund Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Edward Thorp, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Flash crash, global macro, hindsight bias, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jones Act, legacy carrier, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, oil shock, pattern recognition, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, systematic trading, technology bubble, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

When discussing trading strategies, Platt speaks at a speed that is somewhere between a rushed New Yorker and the fast-talking executive in the famous Fed Ex commercial. When the topic of conversation is a four-legged fixed income trade, keeping up with Platt can be a challenge. How did you get interested in markets? I have always liked puzzles. When I was 10 years old, my dad gave me a Rubik’s cube, and 36 hours later, I could do it from any position in under one minute. I always regarded financial markets as the ultimate puzzle because everyone is trying to solve it, and infinite wealth lies at the end of solving it. When you are solving any puzzle, you have to start off from the perspective “What do I know for sure?”


pages: 616 words: 189,609

The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey by Richard Whittle

Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, digital map, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, helicopter parent, military-industrial complex, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, The Soul of a New Machine, VTOL

They were churning through a navigator’s nightmare of darkness and dust above Islamic revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. They were also flying under radio silence, and at gut-wrenchingly low altitudes to avoid radar detection. The Sea Stallions were a crucial element in Operation Eagle Claw, an audacious secret mission of Rubik’s Cube complexity. The mission’s goal was to rescue fifty-three Americans held hostage in Iran over the previous five and a half months, since Islamic radicals had seized the 27-acre U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran on November 4, 1979. Without helicopters, Eagle Claw’s planners had decided, there was no good way to get the 118 Delta Force commandos and other troops chosen for the mission close enough to the Iranian capital to infiltrate the city of five million, rush the embassy, overpower the estimated 200 guards, and free the hostages.


pages: 713 words: 203,688

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Gordon Gekko, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble

“Jerry was older, and he never wanted to work as hard,” Roberts recalled. “The reason Jerry was so negative was that he wasn’t reading and understanding what was going on.” As the firm grew—by 1983, it had eight deal makers, by 1988, fifteen—tensions rose. Factions developed. Junk bonds produced an ever more complicated stream of Rubik’s Cube financial structures. Kravis and Roberts were so busy Kohlberg could no longer keep abreast of every deal. Outside parties began shouldering more and more of the daily work, and Kravis and Roberts soon were orchestrating small armies of investment bankers and lawyers. “Jerry began to pull back,” says his longtime friend George Peck, a Kohlberg Kravis consultant.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

“I need help.” He was in bad shape. “Bill stayed depressed for weeks,” Allen recalled.35 They brought cots to campus and, like old times, spent many nights in the computer room that summer of 1972, communing with a PDP-10. With his rigorous mind, Gates was able to take the problem posed by the Rubik’s Cube of class-scheduling variables and break it into a series of small component problems that could be solved sequentially. He was also able to put himself into a history class with all the right girls and only one other boy (“a real wimp”) and make sure that he and his senior class friends had Tuesday afternoons free.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

The musketeers’ first mission, which was both audacious and somewhat awkward because they were still in their twenties, was to forman analysis unit that would assess the code-writing skills, productivity, and even the attitudes of more than two thousand Twitter engineers and decide which of them, if any, should survive. Code graders James and Andrew sat with their laptops at a small round table in the open space near the second-floor conference room that Musk had commandeered as his battlefield camp. X was nearby on the floor playing with four large Rubik’s cubes. (No, he could not actually solve the puzzle yet. He was only two and a half.) It was Thursday, October 27, the day Musk was rushing toward the surprise flash-close of his takeover, but he found an hour to break away from his meetings to discuss with his cousins how to cull Twitter’s engineering ranks.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

The image that pops into my head is a squeaky yellow bathtub duck, like the chubby rubber ducky that Ernie sings about on Sesame Street. Somehow I must combine these six rectangular Lego blocks into something that resembles a rubber ducky. The head part is obvious. But what about the others? The two red pieces are flat slabs with six knobs. Does one sit on top of the duck’s head, like a hat? I hate things like this—Rubik’s Cubes, Sudoku puzzles. I hate them because I suck at them, and I never know the trick to solving the puzzle, so I just sit there flailing away. Or I just surrender and sit there staring at the cube, with the same look on my face that my cat has when he looks at the TV, wondering how those little birds got inside the box.


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

The Eightfold Way was a new periodic table—the previous century’s triumph in classifying and thus exposing the hidden regularities in a similar number of disparate “elements.” But it was also a more dynamic object. The operations of group theory were like special shuffles of a deck of cards or the twists of a Rubik’s cube. Much of SU(3)’s power came from the way it embodied a concept increasingly central to the high-energy theorist’s way of working: the concept of inexact symmetry, almost symmetry, near symmetry, or—the term that won out—broken symmetry. The particle world was full of near misses in its symmetries, a dangerous problem, since it seemed to permit an ad hoc escape route whenever an expected relationship failed to match.


The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin L. Abbott, Michael T. Fisher

always be closing, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, business climate, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, database schema, discounted cash flows, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, friendly fire, functional programming, hiring and firing, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, machine readable, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, the scientific method, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, web application, Y2K

The cube on its own serves as a way to think about the whys of scale and helps create a bridge to the hows. The cube also serves to facilitate a common language for discussing different strategies, just as physics and math serve as the underlying languages for engineering discussions. Introducing the AKF Scale Cube Imagine first, if you will, a Rubik’s cube or classic colored children’s building block. Hold this imaginary block directly in from of you, or stare down directly at it so that you can only see a single face of the six faces. At this point, the cube is nothing more than a two-dimensional square, similar to the square seen in Figure 22.1.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

We can add that nothing in culture makes sense except in the light of psychology. Evolution created psychology, and that is how it explains culture. The most important relic of early humans is the modern mind. 4 THE MIND’S EYE To gaze is to think. —SALVADOR DALI Past decades had hula hoops, black-light posters, CB radios, and Rubik’s cube. The craze of the 1990s is the autostereogram, also called Magic Eye, Deep Vision, and Superstereogram. These are the computer-generated squiggles that when viewed with crossed eyes or a distant gaze spring into a vivid illusion of three-dimensional, razor-edged objects majestically suspended in space.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

It will take you through the Rheinschlucht (Rhine Gorge), somewhat optimistically dubbed Switzerland’s Grand Canyon, but impressive enough for all that. Swissraft ( 081 911 52 50; www.swissraft.ch) offers half-/full-day rafting for Sfr109/160. Sleeping & Eating Sleep? Dream on. Riders Palace HOTEL $ $ ( 081 927 97 00; www.riderspalace.ch; Laax Murschetg; dm Sfr30-60, d Sfr180-280) It may resemble an oversized Rubik’s cube, but Riders Palace is a curious slice of designer cool with bare concrete walls and fluorescent lighting. Choose between basic five-bed dorms, slick rooms with Philippe Starck tubs or hi-tech suites complete with PlayStation and Dolby surround. Find it 200m from the Laax lifts. La Vacca SWISS $$$ ( 081 927 99 62; Plaun Station, Laax-Murschetg lifts; mains Sfr40-70; late Dec–mid-Apr) Experience the raw funk of La Vacca, a tipi where cowhide-draped chairs surround a roaring open fire.


pages: 1,234 words: 356,472

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

Apollo 11, carbon-based life, clean water, corporate governance, disinformation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, operational security, plutocrats, random walk, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, the scientific method, trade route, urban sprawl

The system was standard across the Commonwealth, giving everyone who could afford an OCtattoo direct connection to the planetary cybersphere. He guessed that most of the businesspeople having breakfast around him were quietly interfacing with their office arrays. They had that daydreaming look about them. He pulled the appropriate key out of its store in his wrist array, represented by a Rubik’s Cube icon, which he had to twist until he’d arranged the surface squares into the correct pattern. The cube opened up, and he dropped the message icon inside. A single line of black text slid across his virtual vision: PAULA MYO IS ON VELAINES. Adam just managed to hold on to his coffee cup. “Shit!”


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

Richardson, executive director of the General Contractors Association. “The engineers were telling us we would be below ground for two to three years and that the public perception would be negative,” Coscia recalled when we spoke; “people would not know that we’re working and spending hundreds of millions of dollars. The site was a Rubik’s cube for years.” Several insiders tried to persuade Governor Pataki to let the agency shut down the No. 1 subway, but the governor was adamant about keeping it running, despite the cost of underpinning the subway to make continuous service possible. Temporarily taking the line out of service would have “cut an important transit link and angered commuters from Staten Island, a Republican stronghold, who use the No. 1 line after getting off the ferry,” David W.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Buses can get crowded. As more and more people get on, children move onto their parents’ laps, kids share seats, people squeeze together and everyone generally accepts the cramped conditions with good humor. Whenever someone gets off the back of a crowded minivan, it takes on the element of a human Rubik’s Cube, with seats folding up and everyone shuffling; on some buses there’s actually a conductor to direct the seating. For specific details on buses by island, see the chapter Getting Around sections. Car & Motorcycle Driving in the Caribbean islands can rock your world, rattle your brains and fray your nerves.


Lonely Planet Mexico by John Noble, Kate Armstrong, Greg Benchwick, Nate Cavalieri, Gregor Clark, John Hecht, Beth Kohn, Emily Matchar, Freda Moon, Ellee Thalheimer

AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, Burning Man, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, language acquisition, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines, urban sprawl, wage slave

Crowds throng here on weekends to party at this open-air space dappled by disco balls. Clásico ( 602-61-14; Blvd Las Fuentes; 10:30pm-3am Thu-Sat) With a nod to the genteel decór of an English country house, this dance club has upholstered walls and tiers of smart banquettes that rise around a dance floor that pulses like a two dimensional Rubik’s Cube on acid. The ‘classic’ music shuffle includes techno, disco and tunes from the ’80s and ’90s. It’s next door to the Borakay bar and the Hotel Camino Real, though not reachable via the hotel. Go by car or taxi. Shopping Instituto Marca Chiapas ( 602-65-65; Blvd Belisario Domínguez 2035; 9am-8pm Mon-Sat, 10am-2pm Sun) The Chiapas state crafts shop, 2km west of Plaza Cívica, sells a great range of the state’s artesanías (handicrafts), from Amatenango ‘tigers’ and funky Cintalapa ceramic suns to colorful highland textiles.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

Shanghai Science & Technology MuseumMUSEUM (Shanghai Kejiguan GOOGLE MAP ; %6862 2000; www.sstm.org.cn; 2000 Century Ave; adult/student/child under 1.3m ¥60/45/free; h9am-5.15pm Tue-Sun, last tickets 4.30pm; mScience & Technology Museum) You need to do a huge amount of walking to get about this seriously spaced-out museum but there are some fascinating exhibits, from relentless Rubik’s-cube-solving robots to mechanical archers. There's even the chance to take penalty kicks against a computerised goalkeeper. Riverside PromenadeWATERFRONT (Binjiang Dadao MAP GOOGLE MAP ; h6.30am-11pm; mLujiazui) Hands down the best stroll in Pudong. The sections of promenade alongside Riverside Ave on the eastern bank of the Huangpu River offer splendid views to the Bund across the way.