We had a smoggy week here in the bay area due to the record-breaking wildfires along the west coast. The sky on Wed was Mars orange. It perfectly matched the scene from the movie I watched over the long weekend: Blade Runner 2049.
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One is SF from my friend feed; the other one is from the movie.
I am changing the structure of Sunday Reviews to make it more readable on the phone for newsletter subscribers. Hope you will like it.
Here is the digest of the best links I read this week.
Vitamin D and Coronavirus The discussions about their relationship is heated these days. Given some empirical evidence, people start to consider it as a supplementation if they are deficient (which is likely for many given the shelter-at-home practice).
However, read Dr. Moone’s series on Vitamin D first before you make a plan:
There is a big difference between correlation and causation in statistical analysis, especially in the case of Vitamin D. None of the reviewed studies are perfect.
One thing that seems increasingly clear is that in most cases low Vitamin D (truly low Vitamin D) is a marker of poor health rather than a cause. Vitamin D is made in the skin after exposure to sunlight. A chronically ill, frail individual may leave the house less often, leading to lower Vitamin D levels. Fixing the Vitamin D will not fix the chronic illness.
Don’t view it as a panacea. Use a reasoned approach to supplementation. There are known harms of taking too much. So, act in moderation.
AI and Publications Following the topic of interpreting results of growing amounts of research studies, what can we do to better explore the growing amount of public research and find trusted answers to our questions? arXiv.org releases a repository of 1.7M+ scholarly papers in machine readable format on Kaggle. This unleashes unlimited possibilities for what the developer community can build, “like trend analysis, paper recommender engines, category prediction, co-citation networks, knowledge graph construction, and semantic search interfaces.” We hopefully not only have a search engine for all information but one for knowledge.
The ABC’s of guiding the child Work-from-home creates a lot more opportunity for parents to spend time with their kids. This is great for more bonding but also can also create more tensions if it is not handled well. There are lots of great tips in this essay. Remember the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Have fun together.
Crypto and Blockchain I have been a long bullish on bitcoin and crypto in general. Recently, crypto as an investment has drew more attention given the public attention on economy, stock and investment in general.
Understanding the complete landscape of crypto world is hard, if not impossible. Here are five camps behind the crypto movements that may help you to focus the investigation:
- sound money camp that aims to build the real store of value, which a digital version of gold that no one can mess with;
- payments camp that tries to remove the inefficiencies and rent-seeking behavior in centralized fiat payment systems;
- open finance camp that builds new financial tools for under-served community;
- web3 camp that wanna build dapps to redistribute ownership in a more fair way;
- decentralized ledger technology camp that views blockchain as a new type of decentralized database.
However, do you have any real problem on hand that is or can be solved by blockchain? Or, is it just an amazing solution for almost nothing? I personally don’t agree with the arguments in this essay. Blockchain offers a better solution for many existing problems, but it takes time to win that advantage.
Creativity: For Good or Bad – a fun story I encountered over the weekend that perfectly explains:
The line between laziness and genius has always been a place of great innovation. But not always for the better.
That is how a cunning traveler ate 300 consecutive luxury meals for free by leveraging a combination of privileges for first-class passengers. 😂
Philosophy for The Week
The Gospel According to Peter Thiel looks into his idiosyncratic vision of Christianity, mediated by the work of French philosopher René Girard, that pervades Thiel Fellowship and the investor’s wider projects. The core of Girard’s theory is about scapegoat and the related notion of mimesis. “Simply put, Girard holds that human desire is rooted in an obsessive form of imitation…Societies deal with these inherently chaotic impulses by creating mythic and sacred narratives of legitimate violence, which identify a scapegoat: a chosen, if actually innocent, target for this complex system of violence and desire.”
The Problem of Thinking Too Much A mathematical explanation of the case that “as more and more data come in, we become surer and surer of the wrong answer.”
A Psychological Tip
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind, and you’re hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No — not so that chance shall decide the affair while you’re passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
Thanks for reading!