#Insurance: Where Humans Still Rule Over Machines
https://www.WSJ.com/articles/insurance-a-place-where-humans-not-machines-rule-1495549740 Perhaps future rates will be determined by a man-machine hybrid
Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich Holing up in New Zealand & the survival condo; a bit validating for normal worriers
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“The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
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You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
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Every year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project, has gathered a group of Nobel laureates and other luminaries to update the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gauge of our risk of wrecking civilization. In 1991, as the Cold War was ending, the scientists set the clock to its safest point ever—seventeen minutes to “midnight.”
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The Man Who Kicked Off…#Biotech by @CarlZimmer
http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/the-man-who-kicked-off-the-biotech-revolution H Smith for discovering restriction enzymes + a history of the term
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“Trying to make sense of the failure, Wilcox suggested to Smith that the bacteria were destroying the viral DNA. He based his suggestion on a hypothesis proposed a few years earlier by Werner Arber, a microbiologist at the University of Geneva. Arber speculated that enzymes could restrict the growth of viruses by chopping up their DNA, and dubbed these hypothetical molecules “restriction enzymes.”” “}}
A Bigger Problem Than ISIS?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-problem-than-isis The #MosulDam is failing. A breach would cause a wave killing >1M. Infrastructure woes
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The second-generation Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm is your best option.
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https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/20/the-best-smart-smoke-alarm/
#Wearables Could Soon Know You’re Sick Before You Do
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/wearables-know-youre-sick/ Early indications of inflammation from @SnyderShot’s Fitbit
The…Pharma Startup…Silicon Valley Has Totally Missed
http://social.techcrunch.com/2017/01/06/this-millennial-wants-to-build-the-berkshire-hathaway-of-biopharmaceutical-companies-can-he-pull-it-off/ Run by QVT alum; focuses on better incentivizing scientists
We still don’t really know how #bicycles work
http://www.NewStatesman.com/science/2013/08/we-still-don%E2%80%99t-really-know-how-bicycles-work Still rides upright with special wheels cancelling gyroscopic effect
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“The most definitive analysis came exactly a century later. It involved an experimental bicycle that had all its gyroscopic effects cancelled out by a system of counter-rotating wheels. The effort of building such a strange contraption was worth it: the resulting paper was published the prestigious journal Science.
The publication plunged bicycle dynamics back into chaos. It turns out that taking into account the angles of the headset and the forks, the distribution of weight and the handlebar turn, the gyroscopic effects are not enough to keep a bike upright after all. What does? We simply don’t know. Forget mysterious dark matter and the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe; the bicycle represents a far more embarrassing hole in the accomplishments of physics.”
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