Find a half-remembered link or follow a subject through years of Sunday notes.
7,487 posts
In news that’s stranger than fiction, the Pakistani Prime Minister and his daughter are in the middle of a scandal called #fontgate because a document she released is dated 2006, but the font wasn’t commercially available until 2007. | learn more
“I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of…
Sometimes it’s easy to get myopic, forgetting that there are many great retailers outside of the US market. This Bloomberg article highlights A.S. Watson Group, which plans to open 1,400 stores this year – a third of them in China. Their profit margins in China are 22%. | learn more
Buy Online Deliver From Store (BODFS). The acronym sucks, but the service is a big deal. Now the retailer has digitized everything about it to make it even more efficient. |learn more
Check out these interesting slides presented by the CEO of Nextfood at the Nordic Next 2017 conference. He shows some interesting data about the market for food, future trends and more. |learn more
Strategist Ben Thompson makes his case for why Amazon really bought the organic foods retailer. Think about how both the Fufillment and AWS businesses were built around Amazon.com’s retail business as the cornerstone customer. Will WF be the cornerstone customer for their grocery infrastructure? | learn more
The three scientists who developed the theory posit that almost every gene is relevant for almost every outcome. Not every gene is a star player, but many small roles add up too. | learn more
Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky discusses the deeply-rooted phenomenon of dividing the world between us and them. He also analyses how we categorize thems, and proposes some strategies to overcome this mentality. | learn more
The creation (“gecko gripper”) applies something called Van der Waals forces, which create a weak electric field to temporarily allow stickiness. | learn more
Prime minister Justin Trudeau is legalizing recreational marijuana. This isn’t necessarily easy, because there’s not enough legal pot to go around. His current challenge: getting through a supply crunch to beat down the black market. | learn more
The new French president released his official portrait recently. It’s full of interesting symbolism and backstory. Everything from the time on his clock to his two carefully stacked iPhones conveys a message. | learn more
There’s an interesting story behind the rolling green hills that graced every PC’s desktop for many years. | learn more
The brand will become the first major traditional automaker to ditch vehicles that rely solely on internal combustion engines. This is a meaningful move away from the oil that’s traditionally powered our transportation system. Tesla’s role as the catalyst for change is slowly being realized. | learn more
“When you meet someone new and they start talking about a topic you know everything about, let them finish.” Side benefit - the embedded Top Gear clip of a VW Beetle Dropped from Helicopter Vs Porsche in 1 Mile Race Against Gravity. | learn more
I already know you make great decisions - after all, you signed up for this newsletter! But you could probably do a little better. Read this - it’ll help. | learn more
Remember when retailers like Best Buy were getting clobbered by Amazon because people would look at products in store then buy online for less? Now, Amazon holds a patent for tech that prevents the practice called showrooming. While this author thinks they want to use it in their…
Not literally, but, “The rate on the [school district’s] bonds, which are supposed to stay extremely low because investors can resell them to banks periodically, jumped to a maximum 9 percent on March 1 from 4.64 percent the week before and has stayed there ever since, according to…
Follow the link and watch the video – totally worth it. “The plug-in sensor package they’ve developed monitors multiple phenomena in a room, including things such as sounds, vibration, light, heat, electromagnetic noise and temperature. With help from machine learning techniques, this suite of sensors can determine whether…
“The goal of the Blue Brain Project, which is based in Switzerland, is to digitally create a ‘biologically detailed’ simulation of the human brain. By creating digital brains with an 'unprecedented’ level of biological information, the scientists aim to advance our understanding of the incredibly intricate human brain,…
Researchers created a geek index, then started analyzing the index scores of almost 8,000 twins in the UK. They found evidence that older fathers tend to have geekier sons. The same result was not found in daughters. | learn more
“Montessori Schools, based in the Flatiron and SoHo neighborhoods of Manhattan, began accepting bitcoin, ether and litecoin in June.” | learn more
This great video quickly covers all of the highlights of the Roman Empire. | learn more
“Postal deliveries have been suspended in part of a Canadian city after a well-known crow called Canuck attacked a mailman.” | learn more
“Every company is in a value race. Not only do you have to create value for your customers, but you also have to do it before someone else does. Doing so requires the ability to say ‘yes’ to truly great ideas — and, more importantly, to say 'no’…