What’s Next — Maps, Paperwork, Productivityby Jordan Gonen | 2.5.2018
by Jordan Gonen | 2.5.2018
Hi there 👋 Welcome to February. Writing this from my dorm room in Hong Kong.
Enjoy the newsletter 🙂 Let me know if I can be helpful! Articles to Read.
Using Statistics to Eject Deadweight From Your Life:
The quality of your life will, to a large extent, be decided by whom you elect to spend your time with. Supportive, caring, and funny are great attributes in friends and lovers. Unceasingly negative cynics who chip away at your self-esteem? We need to jettison those people as far and fast as we can.
The problem is, how do we identify these people who add nothing positive — or not enough positive — to our lives?
How Spotify’s Discover Weekly Works:
This Monday — just like every Monday — over 100 million Spotify users found a fresh new playlist waiting for them. It’s a custom mixtape of 30 songs they’ve never listened to before but will probably love. It’s called Discover Weekly, and it’s pretty much magic.
So how does Spotify do such an amazing job of choosing those 30 songs for each person each week?
Why Your Train Gets Delayed (Video):
When Lost Paperwork Can Mean Life or Death:
I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma when I was a teenager. It’s the rarest, deadliest form of skin cancer. The disease is typically easy to detect and highly treatable in its early stages. But left unchecked, tumors grow aggressively and spread until, in sometimes as little as six weeks, the cancer becomes incurable.
“Let’s just do a quick biopsy. We’ll let you know if anything’s wrong,” my dermatologist said, assuring me the procedure was routine. A biopsy is scary for a teenager, but by the time I got home, my anxiety had completely dissipated. In fact, I thought nothing of it for months — the doctor said she would reach out if anything was wrong, and she hadn’t reached out.
Unfortunately, the poor timing of my diagnosis was a result of lost paperwork and poorly coordinated medical teams. The results of my biopsy simply fell through the cracks. Suddenly my summer aspirations were swiftly usurped by surgical suites and bed rest — for no reason other than administrative inefficiency.
Like brands, the opportunity to build networks exists in response to shifts in societal thinking. Snapchat could have only existed after everyone got bored of non-ephemeral sharing. Bitcoin wouldn’t have been possible without the 2008 financial collapse.
The main competitor to social networks isn’t Facebook. It’s WhatsApp. To scale through the orifice of mobile distribution you need to be sufficiently different from what people can already do in a WhatsApp group. What that in mind, here are some different areas for new social networks:
16 Questions About Self-Driving Cars (video):
Everything that moves, says a16z partner Frank Chen, will go autonomous. But what does that really mean?
Nobody puts Bitcoin in the corner:
Suppose for a moment bitcoin never existed. And ethereum never existed. And the whole crazy world of cryptocurrencies never happened.
Someone comes along and tells you to imagine an electronic network, for moving money anywhere in the world, that no-one owns. It’s an intriguing idea. It’s an unprecedented idea. In the entirety of human history such a thing has literally never existed.
Would your response really be: ‘lol the true value of bitcoin is zero’?
The Largest Early World Map Unveiled For the First Time:
July 25, 01585, near the end of a century of unprecedented change, four Japanese boys stopped in Milan on their way back home to Japan. They’d been sent as the first Japanese Embassy to Europe three years earlier by the Jesuit missionary Alesandro Valignano. Their European tour took them through Spain, where they met King Philip II, and to Rome, where they met with the Pope. Now, in Milan, they encountered Urbano Monte, a gentleman scholar from a wealthy Milanese family whose interests had lately turned to geography. Writing about meeting the Japanese boys, Monte “commented on their appearance and manners; the former he found odd but he thought their manners impressive and their eating habits fascinating.”
More to Check Out:
– How One Typeface Landed on the Moon
– A Guess on Who Satoshi Is
– Men Put Her on the Ballot as a Sexist Joke, then She Won
– US Soldiers Revealing Sensitive Data While Jogging
– Meet the Woman building Facebook’s Ebay KillerSee My Full Reading List
My Update:
– Have now been publicly blogging every single day for 711 days in a row. Almost 2 years!
– Launching something this week (small). Follow my Twitter to stay tuned.
– Will be traveling tons over next few months. Excited for new experiences.
By jordangonen on February 5, 2018.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.