The discovery presents a great business opportunity. I am looking for a venture capital company to finance moon water extraction, bottling and delivery to earth. Next on the to do list - negotiate with the Michael Jackson estate to license his moonwalk moves for the Super Bowl commercials. This will be a smash hit.
I used to follow Belle de Jour - the diary of a London call girl - back in the days when I was still living in the UK capital. It was titillating and seemed authentic despite the anonymity of the author. The writing was excellent and the subject matter was naturally quite interesting. I was not surprised when the blog won the Guardian best written blog award in 2003. The online success was followed by a few books that proved quite popular (but I never read). However, the identity of the author remained elusive. Until now.
Behold, Belle de Jour is Dr Brooke Magnanti, a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science. She is a specialist in neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology currently working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. In an interview for the Sunday Times she confirms that she was a call girl for 14 months:
From 2003 to late 2004, Brooke worked as a prostitute via a London escort agency; she started blogging as Belle de Jour — after the Buñuel film starring Catherine Deneuve as a well-to-do housewife who has sex for money because she’s bored — shortly into her career as a call girl, after an incident she thought funny enough to write down.
She charged £300 an hour for her services, of which she got £200. The average appointment lasted two hours; she saw clients two or three times a week, “sometimes less, sometimes a great deal more”. How many men has she slept with for money? “A lot.” Dozens? Hundreds? “I can’t honestly remember,” she says, laughing. “Somewhere between dozens and hundreds.”
1. Deep Thinkers - the more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be
2. Overoptimism
5. Efficient Market Theory and the Crisis
6. How an American soldier is made (in pictures)
Apparently today everyone who goes by Dimitar or some derivative has a name day. I had totally forgotten about it. So when my boss saw me in the morning and headed toward my desk smiling I thought, “Damn, I must be really good at this job if I’d accomplished something praiseworthy even before fully waking up.” Alas, my parents had done the laudable deed by following the naming convention of the day. A bit of a downer.
Here is what wikipedia has on Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki:
During the Middle Ages, he came to be revered as one of the most important Orthodox military saints, often paired with Saint George. His feast day is 26 October for Christians following the Gregorian calendar and 8 November for Christians following the Julian calendar.
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The earliest written accounts of his life were compiled in the 9th century, although there are earlier images of him, and accounts from the 7th century of his miracles. The biographies have Demetrius as a young man of senatorial family who was run through with spears in around 306 AD in Thessaloniki, during the Christian persecutions of the emperor Diocletian or Galerius, which matches his depiction in the 7th century mosaics.
That is right - I have not one but two name days. But if I remember correctly, as a kid I would have much preferred to have two birthdays instead.
Yana Buhrer Tavanier is one of the best journalists I know. She has just completed a four-month long undercover investigation of institutions for people with mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities located in Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania. Yana finds out that the people in our society who need most care get least. This also holds on a micro level in the institutions responsible for those men and women - the patients in direst states are the most neglected. Here are the first few paragraphs.
Reform is coming too slowly to institutions for adults with intellectual and mental health disabilities in Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, where chronic neglect, filthy conditions, and the use of physical restraints and high-dosage drugs to control behaviour remain routine.
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By Yana Buhrer Tavanier in Sofia, Goren Chiflik, Svilengrad, Radovets, Oborishte, Belgrade, Kulina, Churug, Bucharest, Mocrea and Gura Vaii
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Someone is screaming.
Someone is screaming her head off in what seems a desolate part of the yard. There is a fence surrounding some shacks and, with each step taken towards it, the shrieks get louder. Ten more steps and there’s a gate in the fence. Another ten and all hell is let loose.
There is the screaming woman – barefoot, skinny and dressed in rags.
There is another woman, unable to walk, rolling on the ground outside. She is literally covered in flies – fifty, perhaps a hundred flies on her face, filthy clothes, bare feet, hands and the two chunks of bread she’s holding.
The story is available in English and Bulgarian. You can find more by browsing the site.
Great job Yana.
Eric Fitz nick playing mitko in online chess. he will be crushed like bug!
When I saw it the first thing I thought was that Nick was supervising a shuttle launch. However, a careful inspection of his screen reveals nothing but a chess board. Dear Nick, this is an invitation to have your revenge this weekend. Are you up for it?
1. The Man Who Found Quarks and Made Sense of the Universe
2. Why capitalism fails - yet another look
3. The 50 best things to eat in the world, and where to eat them. Drool on!
4. Here is how to free yourself from Google. It is by Google. They have too much of your data but also provide a way out. Evil or not? I get confused. You make the call.
5. Nine Workspaces Where Famous Folks Get Stuff Done
6. They called him “Mr. Bubble.” And it is a bubbly world…
for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples
I had thought he might eventually get it but this came much sooner than I expected. Anyway, good for him!
A cup has approximately 98.75 percent water, the rest is soluble plant matter. Wired Magazine has the complete list. Here are a few ingredients that bring back memories of my chemistry classes as well as help rationalize occasional excessive coffee drinking on my part.
3,5 Dicaffeoylquinic acid
When scientists pretreat neurons with this acid in the lab, the cells are significantly (though not completely) protected from free-radical damage. Yup: Coffee is a good source of antioxidants.Trigonelline
Chemically, it’s a molecule of niacin with a methyl group attached. It breaks down into pyridines, which give coffee its sweet, earthy taste and also prevent the tooth-eating bacterium Streptococcus mutans from attaching to your teeth. Coffee fights the Cavity Creeps.
On a somewhat relevant note, if you need a favor from me it is generally a good idea to ask for it over a cup of joe.
Dominic Johnson and James Fowler have a nice paper titled The Evolution of Overconfidence. In a nutshell:
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains including job performance, mental health, sports, business, and combat. Many authors have suggested that overconfidence — defined here as believing you are better than you are in reality — is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, resolve, morale, persistence, and/or the bluffing of opponents. However, too much overconfidence can cause arrogance, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters, and wars, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing accurate beliefs. Here, we present an evolutionary model that shows overconfidence actually maximizes individual fitness and populations will tend to become overconfident, as long as the resources at stake during conflicts exceed twice the cost of competition. This is because overconfident individuals make more challenges when there is uncertainty about the strength of opponents (and thus the outcome of conflicts), while less confident individuals shy away from many conflicts they would win. Where the value of a prize is at least twice the cost of trying, overconfidence is the best strategy. The model suggests that the conditions under which humans would have evolved to have a “rational” unbiased view of their own capabilities are exceedingly rare, and it helps to explain why resource-rich environments can paradoxically create more conflict. Moreover, the fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable may be one reason why overconfidence persists today in politics, business, and finance, even if it causes occasional disasters.
I have been at both ends of the confidence spectrum. My experience and anecdotal evidence suggest that overconfidence indeed is the way to go most of the time. The funny thing is that in such a state I feels better about myself and the task at hand. I guess this is nature’s way to show me what works best.
Of course, there can always come that painful moment when ability and luck come short. In such a case I suggest - panic. Then get over it as fast as you can and try, try again.
