retail therapy
Meet the company that sells your lost airplane luggage
“If you’ve ever permanently lost a checked bag, your stuff probably ended up for sale at a store in Scottsboro, Alabama.” | learn more
to your health
NIH starting a ‘flurry’ of large studies of Covid-19 treatments
So far there are only two medicines shown to work effectively: “In clinical trials, Gilead’s remdesivir reduced the time it took patients to recover; dexamethasone, a steroid, prolonged survival in the sickest patients in a study conducted in the U.K.” | learn […]
better doing
Why OKRs don’t work for some companies
“After many years of being a very vocal advocate for the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) technique, in the majority of companies I meet, I have stopped recommending the practice.” | learn more
better doing
Invert, always invert
A short blog post with some examples of Jacobi’s maxim in action. | learn more
tech, startups, internet
The new standard in AI language
“GPT-3, which stands for “Gaussian Process Tracking 3,” is a language processing model – or a text generator – based on Artificial Intelligence. It can predict the next word in a sentence if it is given a few words. This […]
tech, startups, internet
Garmin global outage caused by ransomware attack
Earlier this year I published a primer on ransomware. Garmin, famous for their GPS navigation devices, has been under attack since Wednesday. It’s taken down all their services as well as their contact center. Reading between the lines, a key challenge […]
tech, startups, internet
The Slack social network
First came Slack, taking the world of chat software by storm. Then came Microsoft Teams, drawing some competitive ribbing from Slack in a full page ad in the NY Times. Then within a few years, Teams’ adoption overtook Slack’s by a wide […]
oh, chicago
The FBI’s interest in a Chinatown parking lot
House Speaker Mike Madigan seems to be at the center of yet another investigation, in addition to the ongoing ComEd patronage scandal. This one is thin on details, but entertaining because most visitors to Chinatown have parked in this particular lot. | learn […]
oh, chicago
Read fun texts between Mayor Lightfoot and police union boss
They don’t seem to like one another. | learn more
fun facts
Thousands of company origin stories
There’s a lot of history here! One fun one I pulled out: “1933: After an attempt to sell lighters imported from Austria fails, Blaisdell designs his own lighter, which he christens the “Zippo,” and begins manufacturing in Bradford, Pennsylvania.“ | learn more