Friday Dinner at Harry Hotel followed by Messina ice cream 🍨 Tyson Julie and Mindy Exposed to Brunch Howell Oonie Pizza 🍕
In praise of mischievous people. Their wit and light-heartedness make the world a better, more amusing place
Opinion | Highlighting one of the best pieces of journalism this year
Harvard Business Review: “From ordering food to buying a new book to making a charitable donation, more and more decisions that used to be made on paper are now being made on digital devices like tablets, phones, and computers. And this trend toward digitalization has many advantages, in particular when it comes to efficiency and sustainability — but could it also be negatively influencing how we make decisions? We conducted a series of studieswith more than 2,500 participants across the U.S. and China to explore the impact of the medium you use to make a decision, with a particular focus on decisions with some sort of moral component, such as whether or not to make a donation to a charity, or whether to choose a healthy or unhealthy entrée at a restaurant. We asked the participants to make a variety of these sorts of choices using either a paper form or a digital tablet, and despite controlling for all other variables, we consistently found that people who used paper made more-virtuous decisions than those who used a digital device: For example, participants who read their options and made a selection on paper were significantly more likely to give money to charity, choose a healthy entrée, and opt for an educational book rather than something more entertaining…”
We Make More Virtuous Choices When Using Pen and Paper - Harvard Business Review
The Qantas chief who brought a new travel disruption term to Australian vernacular
To be ‘Joyced’ is a word now in use to describe being severely inconvenienced at an airport by luggage delays or flight problems
To be “Joyced” is a new term that has crept into the Australian vernacular to describe being severely inconvenienced at an airport by flight cancellations or luggage going astray. It is a reference to Alan Joyce,
the long-serving chief executive of national carrier Qantas, who has become the conduit for criticism of an array of customer service problems at the “flying kangaroo”. While airports and airlines around the world made steep staff cuts during the pandemic and have struggled to cope with the return of international travel as a result, some are taking drastic measures in response.
Qantas, for one, took the unusual step this week of asking senior managers to volunteer to fill 100 ground handler jobs for three months while it tries to recruit more people.
It has also said it will lengthen the connection time for passengers changing between domestic and international flights by half an hour to 90 minutes, to act as a buffer for transiting luggage and delayed flights. Joyce has always had a high profile in a country that still feels a strong sense of ownership toward its national airline.
But his recent troubles started at the baggage carousel. Qantas itself says it is mishandling — or losing — nine of every 1,000 pieces of luggage, roughly twice the normal rate. This is adding to flight delays because passengers are trying to cram more bags into the cabin instead.
These problems, along with unusual levels of flight cancellations because of staff shortages and absences due to illness, mean that passenger frustration is running high, particularly after Joyce commented in April that travellers were “not match fit” and that there were long queues in airports because people were forgetting to prepare their hand luggage properly for security. Other statements have been much more emollient. Earlier this week he admitted: “While there are lots of good reasons why, the simple fact is our operational performance hasn’t been up to the standard our customers are used to, or that we expect of ourselves.”
This is the Salary You Need to Buy a Home in 50 U.S. Cities
Visual Capitalist – “Depending on where you live, owning a home may seem like a far off dream or it could be fairly realistic. In New York City, for example, a person needs to be making at least six figures to buy a home, but in Cleveland you could do it with just over $45,000 a year. This visual, using datafrom Home Sweet Home, maps out the annual salary you’d need for home ownership in 50 different U.S. cities. Note: The map above refers to entire metro areas and uses Q1 2022 data on median home prices. The necessary salary was calculated by the source, looking at the base cost of principal, interest, property tax, and homeowner’s insurance…”
analysis: Backyard hens' eggs contain 40 times more lead on average than shop eggs, research finds
Seven Games War Games by Oliver Roeder — let us play Humans have always loved to play games such as chess and poker, whether for reasons of survival, control or just plain fun
Back in 2016, Lee Sedol, at the time the world’s best go player, was beaten soundly by AlphaGo, a powerful computer built by Google’s artificial intelligence division.
The South Korean expected to win easily. Instead he found himself crushed, losing 4 games to 1. Yet he won an ovation at the press conference following his single victory nonetheless, as if humanity had been suddenly redeemed in the face of overwhelming defeat.
Similar face-saving scenes have occurred in chess, most obviously two decades earlier when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer took apart grandmaster Garry Kasparov. “The Deep Blue Team was asked by the corporate PR divisions to dress well and not to smile during the closing ceremony — in deference to the human race,” as Oliver Roeder writes in Seven Games.
A journalist and gaming geek, Roeder’s book is part memoir and part meditation on the way in which overwhelming machine superiority is changing both games and those who play them. His account is perceptive in particular on the oddities of gaming subcultures, most notably those he plays well himself such as Scrabble, where he was briefly one of the 200 or so best players in the US.
Historically, the author suggests, game playing was a kind of Darwinian survival technique, teaching humans how to calculate probabilities and strategy The seven games in question — the other six being checkers, backgammon, chess, go, poker, and bridge — have been affected by computational progress in different ways. Chess is enjoying a machine-driven renaissance, as players flock to compete and watch online.
Rather than giving up, computers are even inspiring human improvement. Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, not merely the world’s best player but arguably the best of all-time, says he has learned to play in an even more attacking style having studied games played by AI-powered machines. Not every pastime has been livened up. Roeder spends an enjoyable chapter recounting his travels to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker, a tournament once known for glamour and high-stakes excitement.
Rather than a contest dominated by outsized personalities and the drama of bluffs and tells, however, he found top players sitting quietly in sunglasses and hoodies, ignoring their opponents while quietly recalling from memory the optimal strategies taught by software.
Seven Games seeks to answer one further question: why do humans play at all? Individual games can come in and out of fashion. Backgammon was cool in the 1970s; poker grew popular in the 2000s; chess is having a moment now, also helped along by The Queen’s Gambit, a hit Netflix series. Yet board games in general seem as popular as ever, even in the face of smartphones and other digital distractions.
Historically, the author suggests, game-playing was a kind of Darwinian survival technique, teaching humans how to calculate probabilities and strategy. Now they are popular for different reasons, most obviously their ability to satisfy our deep psychological desires “to solve an elegant problem,” as Roeder puts it.
At their best games provide a sense of control and agency in an often-chaotic world. Will their popularity endure? It has done so this far at least, proving wrong those who worried that players would lose interest in pastimes in which humans were demonstrably inferior best to computers — or indeed those, like checkers, which computers have long ago solved in their entirety.