my daily coffee

"Motivation is in the mind; follow-through is in the practice. Motivation is conceptual; follow-through is practical. In fact, the solution to a motivation problem is the exact opposite of the solution to a follow through problem. The mind is essential to motivation. But with follow through, it’s the mind that gets in the way.
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Shut down the conversation that goes on in your head before it starts. Don’t take the bait. Stop arguing with yourself."

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[On science writing]:

“So I invented rules, such as you won’t go through two chapters without meeting a real human character. How does one write the history of the epidemiology of cigarette smoking, for example – which is so abstract, and a story we all know superficially – how can one write that as if it’s a discovery, so that you feel it’s a discovery?
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He has that impenetrable sheen of the Ivy League star – effortlessly sophisticated and erudite, but ultimately rather unknowable – but his aversion to medical dogma is clear.
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You might have a chronic remitting relapsing cancer and imagine it’s remitting because you’re drinking apple juice. But I don’t think it’s true. I think you’re having a chronic remitting relapsing cancer – and that’s the nature of your cancer.

“Maybe there are miracle substances out there that change the behaviour of particular cancers,” he adds diplomatically. “But history suggests to us that we have to be sceptics here. If it was so simple then it would have been solved a long time ago.”

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"[on respect:] “In assassinations, there are gradations of respect,” said Gladki. “The lowest is strangling. If you strangle someone, it is a sign of severe disrespect.” Using a pistol, he said, is “50/50” – kind of an OK, but not brilliant way to be killed. “And then there is the Kalashnikov. To be shot by a Kalashnikov assault rifle is the ultimate form of respect. It is a very good death for a Russian."

"Rave Mobile Safety, for example, started off helping universities broadcast messages to their students.
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they had two unique assets. First, they had developed relationships with all mobile phone service providers. […] Secondly, Rave Mobile had close relationships with university police departments.
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Rave Mobile is coordinating assets and modernizing the 911 phone system. “The 911 infrastructure was really built on landline infrastructure. It relies on people calling from landline phones for us to be able to tell where they are calling from. But 60 to 70% of calls today come from mobile devices,” Tom explains.
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the true advantage comes from coordinating the uncoordinated."

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The app works by pointing your phone’s camera at the company’s red holiday season coffee cups and 47 additional objects, such as bags of coffee, on display at Starbucks retail locations.

Doing so will produce animations involving five characters — an ice skater, a squirrel, a boy and a dog sledding and a fox — on your screen. You can also interact with the characters. For instance, if you tap the boy on the sled he does a somersault. Those who activate all five characters can qualify to win an as-yet-unnamed prize.

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"New research we’ve just conducted this year shows that the best salespeople actually coach the customer on how to buy, they don’t ask the customer to coach them on how to sell (this showed up in our data as a hallmark of core-performing salespeople). When every solution is unique, it’s unreasonable to expect customers to know how to buy them…and the best sale[s]people know this."

"No one disputes the value of a good marriage, of course. Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in fact tried to calculate that value, based on tens of thousands of happiness surveys collected here and in the U.K., and found that it’s worth $100,000—or roughly doubling your salary, because working Americans earn, on average, $46,996 per year. But you know what else was worth $100,000? A large circle of friends. And it turns out that Aristotle was right when he wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that friends are the glue that binds cities together"

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A metaphor, perhaps, but this isn’t the first time a little applied Wittgenstein has been put to work at Google, intentionally or not. Part of Google’s search power is in its intelligent handling of context: Searches for “hot dogs” yield results for the food rather than puppies, working on the insights of family resemblance. In Steven Levy’s recent book about Google, In the Plex, an interview with search engineer Amit Singhal suggests that the Wittgenstein influence was deliberate, and was a key breakthrough. Another example: “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that ‘bio’ means ‘biography,’ ” Levy quotes Singhal. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means ‘biological.’ ” In other words, Google’s search engine learns its semantics from human input and improves with more data, just as Google Translate does.

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Google Translate used to trip up more in its early days, when its data was skewed to the formal legalese of U.N. and EU documentation: Bellos recalls how searches for “avocado salad” in French (salade à l’avocat) would return “lawyer salad” in English—”avocat” being both avocado and lawyer in French, and in the corridors of the EU, “avocat” being more likely to mean lawyer.

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"While talking about their neighbors, one of whom was a woman who was married to an wealthy unattractive man, Alexis says Martha gave her this little piece of advice: “[My] mother actually told me when I was a small child, ‘Now Alexis, if this ever happens, you make sure you have sex with somebody else to have their baby. Don’t have his baby.’ She was very practical about it. It was a survival skill — you have someone rich and ugly who takes care of you, and you have someone who’s hot and makes attractive babies."