Tim O’Reilly vs Paul Graham: fight!
‘In his essay on Income Inequality, Paul Graham credited me for pre-publication feedback. Because he didn’t do much with my comments, I thought I’d publish them here.’ … ‘Mostly, I think you are picking a fight with people who would mostly agree with you, and ignoring the real arguments about what inequality means and why it matters.’
(tags: inequality silicon-valley tech paul-graham tim-oreilly piketty politics economics wealth startups history work stock-options)
Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers
Analysis showed Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, and could be traced back to when eastern and western Indo-European languages split – more than 5,000 years ago. Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old. A folk tale called The Smith and the Devil was estimated to date back 6,000 years to the bronze age. The study employed phylogenetic analysis, which was developed to investigate evolutionary relationships between species, and used a tree of Indo-European languages to trace the descent of shared tales on it, to see how far they could be demonstrated to go back in time. Tehrani said: “We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written. They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language.”
(tags: history mythology stories folk-tales jack-and-the-beanstalk rumpelstiltskin language phylogenetic)
Transform your oyster travelcard with sugru!
probably totally dodgy where the Oyster rules are concerned, but still pretty damn cool