Quentin Peel:

For a woman who is seen around the world as a disciplinarian, given to lecturing her European partners on the dangers of drowning in debt, the most surprising thing about Angela Merkel is her irrepressible sense of humour. It is hardly something you would expect from the chancellor of Germany when she greets you at the door of her office with a businesslike handshake and marches you smartly to a plain working table, boasting no more than a pot of coffee to serve to her guests.

The former scientist – daughter of a Protestant clergyman, brought up under communist rule in East Germany, who now dominates not only the domestic politics of her reunited homeland but also the interminable crisis-management of the EU – is cool and controlled. She thinks carefully before answering questions, and weighs all her words.

In countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain in southern Europe, where drastic austerity measures are blamed on the German chancellor, she has been lampooned by furious demonstrators as a jackbooted Nazi. Yet in northern Europe she is respected in many countries – including neighbouring France – above their own domestic politicians, according to a recent survey.

Chana Joffe-Walt:

“They pay attention to so much detail,” he said. “I never saw a Lego piece … that couldn’t go together with another one.”

Lego goes to great lengths to make its pieces really, really well, says David Robertson, who is working on a book about Lego.

Inside every Lego brick, there are three numbers, which identify exactly which mold the brick came from and what position it was in in that mold. That way, if there’s a bad brick somewhere, the company can go back and fix the mold.

Michael Cameron:

The growth of big data and availability of APIs is providing exciting new opportunities for making sense of travel data, even for a fledgling start-up like Rome2rio.

Airfares fluctuate wildly, but do follow certain obvious trends; longer flights cost more, and some airlines are more expensive per mile flown than others.

We recently started an internal project aiming to model approximate/typical air fares for the flight itineraries assembled by our system. Our aim was to use this model to improve the accuracy of our multi-modal routing engine. However, in the process we generated some interesting data worth sharing with the industry.

We modeled airfares using some simple parameters. To do this, we examined the economy class airfares displayed by Rome2rio to users over the past 4 months, totalling some 1,780,832 price points. We grouped the airfares by distance and selected the 20th percentile fare for each distance (where 20% of fares are less, and 80% are more), to produce the following graph:

Fabius Maximus:

9-11 changed the course of a great nation, turning America decisively toward the dark side. Massive internal surveillance, militarization of police, endless war, hatred of Islam., torture, lifetime detention without trial, incessant propaganda, and a stream of fake terror plots (created by the government).

We pay for this with larger deficits, loss of global leadership, and corruption of our people (eg, jingoism, bloodlust). We see celebrate these things, the death of the America-that-once-was, by applauding the film “Zero Dark Thirty”.

Welcome to The New America! Brought to you by al Qaeda and the US government, with the willing assistance of the US people.

Slashdot.org:

Last week, you asked questions of Eugene Kaspersky; below, find his answers on a range of topics, from the relationship of malware makers to malware hunters, to Kasperky Labs’ relationship to the Putin government, as well as whitelisting vs. signature-based detection, Internet ID schemes, and the SCADA-specific operating system Kaspersky is working on. Spoiler: There are a lot of interesting facts here, as well as some teases.

Dave Winer. Well worth reading.

Lori Nickel:

When the Green Bay Packers suffered an embarrassing loss to the New York Giants in which they looked overmatched and outplayed, it could have demoralized a team with too many starters and stars on the sidelines in casts and on crutches.

Three days later, almost everyone expected a verbal lambasting from coach Mike McCarthy.

“But he gave this speech,” said nose tackle B.J. Raji, “and it just threw me.”

McCarthy quoted Corinthians from the Bible: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

“The room was in complete silence,” said Raji. “It was not a long speech. I was surprised. And shocked. And kind of impressed. Losing a four-touchdown game on prime time, that’s cause for a fire-and-brimstone type of speech. It just shows how much he understands the players he’s coaching. I think the message got across.”

The message was to learn from the loss and convert it into something useful and therefore something meaningful.

You’ll never hear McCarthy say he’s out to prove the doubters wrong. You’ll never hear him vent his defenses to critics. One of his survival tactics is that he doesn’t waste his energy on anything he perceives as negative.

“I feel the ability to grow the positive is the best way to accomplish things,” McCarthy said last week in a one-on-one interview.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor “chance” and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress.

Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, “aim”), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck cannot lead to formal research policies; one cannot systematize, formalize, and program randomness. The driver is neither luck nor direction, but must be in the asymmetry (or convexity) of payoffs, a simple mathematical property that has lied hidden from the discourse, and the understanding of which can lead to precise research principles and protocols.

MISSING THE ASYMMETRY

The luck versus knowledge story is as follows. Ironically, we have vastly more evidence for results linked to luck than to those coming from the teleological, outside physics—even after discounting for the sensationalism. In some opaque and nonlinear fields, like medicine or engineering, the teleological exceptions are in the minority, such as a small number of designer drugs. This makes us live in the contradiction that we largely got here to where we are thanks to undirected chance, but we build research programs going forward based on direction and narratives. And, what is worse, we are fully conscious of the inconsistency.

transparency.org:

Looking at the Corruption Perceptions Index 2012, it’s clear that corruption is a major threat facing humanity. Corruption destroys lives and communities, and undermines countries and institutions. It generates popular anger that threatens to further destabilise societies and exacerbate violent conflicts.

The Corruption Perceptions Index scores countries on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). While no country has a perfect score, two-thirds of countries score below 50, indicating a serious corruption problem.

Nabeel Qurishi:

“I suspect that when the history of the 21st century is written circa 2100, he [Girard] will be seen as one of the great intellectuals” – Peter Thiel

When Blake Masters was posting his great notes on Peter Thiel’s lectures at Stanford, I found myself fascinated by the influence of Rene Girard.

Girard’s an original thinker. I’m not fully persuaded by his worldview: it explains a lot, but not everything. I’ve summarized his views here.

1. Mimesis determines what you want: In Girard’s view, people have appetites, which are your basic evolutionary needs: e.g. hunger; and desires, which are all other wants, e.g. the desire for a diamond ring. Girard’s belief is that people form desires based on what others around them want.

This is known as the ‘mimetic mechanism’. People take their cues from the people around them. They use other people as ‘models’, and (subconsciously) want what other people want, while rationalizing the whole time. In the diamond ring example, companies like DeBeers create a want artificially, and it catches on like a virus. People want diamond rings because other people want them, but they rationalise it by saying “it shows that my partner loves me”.