All Biological life on earth is possible because of a discrete digital mechanism of preservation and replication.
More from Carlos E. Perez
It's a very different perspective when we realize that our bodies consist of an entire ecology of bacteria and viruses that are also passed to our ancestors. Mammals rear their young and as a consequence transfer the microbiome and virome to their offspring.
What does it mean to treat our individuality as ecologies? We are all ecologies existing in other ecologies. Nature is constantly performing a balancing act across multiple scales of existence.
There are bacteria and viruses that are unique to your ancestry as that of your own DNA. They have lived in symbiosis with your ancestor and will do so for your descendants.
It is an empirical fact that the microbiome in our stomach can influence not only our own moods but also our metabolism and thus our weight and health.
It is also intriguing to know that brains evolved out of stomachs and that our stomachs contain hundreds of millions of neurons. Humans can literally think with their gut.
What is the nature of our (evolved) relationship with viruses? We are literally flooded by them. Welcome to the human virome, with harmful but also beneficial members. Great paper in @sciam "The Viruses Inside You" https://t.co/aWszsNq61d pic.twitter.com/eFsoxV4M9K
— Ricard Sol\xe9 (@ricard_sole) December 12, 2020
What does it mean to treat our individuality as ecologies? We are all ecologies existing in other ecologies. Nature is constantly performing a balancing act across multiple scales of existence.
There are bacteria and viruses that are unique to your ancestry as that of your own DNA. They have lived in symbiosis with your ancestor and will do so for your descendants.
It is an empirical fact that the microbiome in our stomach can influence not only our own moods but also our metabolism and thus our weight and health.
It is also intriguing to know that brains evolved out of stomachs and that our stomachs contain hundreds of millions of neurons. Humans can literally think with their gut.
Programming in abstractions is very different from a system that is capable of its own 'abstracting'. But what does abstracting mean? We only know of its inputs and outputs, but we fail to describe its inner workings.
I like this short video about living in space. This is because it makes you realize the gaps in your knowledge when you turn off something (i.e. gravity) that you have always assumed to be present.
Perhaps we can understand 'abstracting' better if we turn of many assumptions that we unconsciously carry around. Perhaps we need to get rid of the excess baggage that is confusing our thinking about abstraction.
Turning off gravity and living in space is a perfect analogy. We somehow have to turn off a cognitive process to understand the meaning of abstraction.
The first step to divorce ourselves from our habitual cognitive processes is to realize the pervasiveness of 'noun-thinking' .
I like this short video about living in space. This is because it makes you realize the gaps in your knowledge when you turn off something (i.e. gravity) that you have always assumed to be present.
What does living in space do to the human body? pic.twitter.com/kzIlEEr7pp
— Tech Insider (@techinsider) December 20, 2020
Perhaps we can understand 'abstracting' better if we turn of many assumptions that we unconsciously carry around. Perhaps we need to get rid of the excess baggage that is confusing our thinking about abstraction.
Turning off gravity and living in space is a perfect analogy. We somehow have to turn off a cognitive process to understand the meaning of abstraction.
The first step to divorce ourselves from our habitual cognitive processes is to realize the pervasiveness of 'noun-thinking' .
More from Science
An interesting thing about carp is that they can go into anoxic hibernation and switch to an anaerobic metabolism based on converting glycogen to ethanol.
The waste ethanol is diffused out the gills
https://t.co/V3D1umHf04
Carp can switch over to an anaerobic metabolism and quietly exhale booze until the situation gets better.
They basically evolved the same metabolic pathway as yeast, independently.
In theory, if you spent a few thousand years breeding carp for it, you could use them to make booze.
They'd be enormous, almost entirely glycogen deposits with a fish added as an afterthought.
The really interesting thing about anaerobic carp, is that they can go 4-5 months without oxygen by relying on liver glycogen.
You, a human, have only about 100 grams of glycogen in your liver, about 400 more grams in your skeletal muscles. Call it 500 grams total.
In humans, glycogen is also burned for energy. This is where the marathon runner's bonk comes from: you only have about 2,000 calories worth, and running a marathon burns those 2,000 calories.
The waste ethanol is diffused out the gills
https://t.co/V3D1umHf04
Carp can switch over to an anaerobic metabolism and quietly exhale booze until the situation gets better.
They basically evolved the same metabolic pathway as yeast, independently.
In theory, if you spent a few thousand years breeding carp for it, you could use them to make booze.
They'd be enormous, almost entirely glycogen deposits with a fish added as an afterthought.
The really interesting thing about anaerobic carp, is that they can go 4-5 months without oxygen by relying on liver glycogen.
You, a human, have only about 100 grams of glycogen in your liver, about 400 more grams in your skeletal muscles. Call it 500 grams total.
In humans, glycogen is also burned for energy. This is where the marathon runner's bonk comes from: you only have about 2,000 calories worth, and running a marathon burns those 2,000 calories.
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1/“What would need to be true for you to….X”
Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?
A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:
2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to
- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal
3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:
Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.
Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.
4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?
To get clarity.
You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.
It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.
5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”
Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.
Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?
A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:
Next level tactic when closing a sale, candidate, or investment:
— Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg) February 27, 2018
Ask: \u201cWhat needs to be true for you to be all in?\u201d
You'll usually get an explicit answer that you might not get otherwise. It also holds them accountable once the thing they need becomes true.
2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to
- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal
3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:
Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.
Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.
4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?
To get clarity.
You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.
It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.
5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”
Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.
I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.
I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.
In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.
So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.
Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.
Ironies of Luck https://t.co/5BPWGbAxFi
— Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) March 14, 2018
"Luck is the flip side of risk. They are mirrored cousins, driven by the same thing: You are one person in a 7 billion player game, and the accidental impact of other people\u2019s actions can be more consequential than your own."
I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.
In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.
So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.
Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.