Links of the Week
Innovation - Eli Dourado on the unintended consequences of the speed limit of Mach 1 in US airspace. Long story short - blame regulation for why we don’t have supersonic flights (the problem of sonic booms apparently isn’t a problem anymore).
Sports - Really interesting New Yorker article on the rise of extremely high-scoring star players in the NBA. Interesting parallels to the rise of the ‘10X’ programmer. (Link)
The surprise, and the irony, is that the more good players there are, the more important the great ones have become. The proliferation of offensive threats has meant that defenses can’t train their attention all on one person; that means that there are better shots for the best players to take, and the best players have become even better at making them. They have more room to drive to the basket, where shots are hyper-efficient. They are more practiced and skilled at hitting long threes. They are better at drawing fouls and savvier about off-ball movement, picks, and screens.
Culture - From the age of exceptionalism in sport to the age of average in art and culture. This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. (Link)
According to data shared by Jökull Solberg, around 40% of cars sold in 1996 were monochromatic (black, white, silver or grey). 20 years later that figure had increased to 80%.
There are many suggestions for why this might be. Perhaps these colours come as standard and everything else is an optional upgrade. Perhaps brighter colours fade more quickly. Maybe people buy less vibrant colours when times are more turbulent. Maybe the resale market for monochromatic cars is more buoyant. Or maybe the pared-back design of smartphones informed stylistic trends in the auto industry.
Regardless, the result is the same.
Startups - Useful article on inculcating speed as a habit within startups. (Link)
It’s not that everything needs to be done NOW, but for items on your critical path, it’s always useful to challenge the due date. All it takes is asking the simplest question: “Why can't this be done sooner?” Asking it methodically, reliably and habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of your organization.
Science - Absolutely jaw-dropping article on how hard it is to determine causal pathways for things that seem self-evident. Scurvy, the cure for which was widely known during Napoleonic times, continued to be a scourge for seamen until the lack of Vitamin C was finally proven as the cause in the early 20th century. (Link)
Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world—depression, autism, hypertension, obesity—will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?
AI - Somewhat speculative article on the impact of AI on employment across industries. A massive revolution is coming.
Crime - Gripping story of how a group of seemingly common folks found a way to beat roulette. (Link)
But the way Tosa and his friends played roulette stood out as weird even for the Ritz. They would wait until six or seven seconds after the croupier launched the ball, when the rattling tempo of plastic on wood started to slow, then jump forward to place their chips before bets were halted, covering as many as 15 numbers at once. They moved so quickly and harmoniously, it was “as if someone had fired a starting gun,” an assistant manager told investigators afterward.
Happy reading!