First The Bees, Now the Bats: White Nose Syndrome
Wow.
Though shrouded in unknowns, the basics are these: WNS has killed 90 percent or more of the bats in much of the Northeast in less than five years, and continues to kill nearly every bat it infects. And the disease is quickly spreading in several directions.
Wiggins Is Spot On
Riffing on a Taleb-esque point regarding how emulation will only get you so far:
Think of it this way: in any sufficiently complex system, there will not be any universally dominant strategies. Therefore, there will not be any rote formula that one can memorize or copy to succeed. Success will be won through the discovery of fleeting opportunities and precarious asymmetries that others don’t recognize. Which, by definition, means that you have to be thinking differently to recognize what others overlook.
Infographic: Visualizing the Afghanistan Scenarios
Amazing (and huge) infographic. Very cool. From here.
Stack Exchange As A Service
Joel Spolsky’s looking for a way to monetize a garden of Stack Exchange’s for a variety of topics ranging form law to whatever. The way this works:
You create a proposal, You get people to vote on which proposals are followed through, You do the beta test (where you seed questions and a few answers), You do the open beta, and then… you get the warm fuzzy feeling of using the live product and getting questions answered. Spolsky gets cash.
Count me out, unless there’s a revenue sharing model for the people with subject matter experience who do all the heavy lifting.
On Stephen Watt’s Incarceration
This is insane. Watt spent 10 hours coding a packet sniffer for the guy who went on to conduct the largest identity theft in human history. For free. Now he’s in jail for two years.
Prosecutors don’t dispute Watt’s claim that he wasn’t paid for the code, nor do they assert that he earned any profit from the stolen card data. But U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner felt the enormity of the TJX intrusion, which she called “mightily, mightily malicious and irresponsible,” demanded jail time.
The sentence would serve a clear message to Watt and others, Gertner said during one hearing, that “you cannot be a cog in this wheel knowing that someone else is stealing … even if you didn’t get a dime for it.”