PicoBlog

At about 6:30pm on September 7, 1978, while the Communist dictator of Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, was celebrating his 67th birthday in Sofia, a mortal enemy named Georgi Markov was walking past a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London. The 49-year-old was a freelancer for the BBC World Service, and the anniversary of Zhivkov’s birth would not have been far from his mind. The BBC, expected to maintain a degree of impartiality, allowed him to broadcast but kept him on a shorter leash than did his other employer, Radio Free Europe, where he was allowed to run free with a satirical show called In Absentia that frequently mocked Zhivkov as a buffoon who was way out of his depth running a country.

En 2014, el expresidente de Kenia, Uhuru Kenyatta, reforzó la ley sobre la poligamia. Desde entonces, y a través de la enmienda de ‘ley del Matrimonio’, los hombres pueden casarse con tantas mujeres deseen, sin el consentimiento de su primera esposa. Muchas de las parlamentarias presentes aquel día en el Parlamento, abandonaron el recinto. La ley era una excusa más para discriminar a la mujer.  Aun así, cuatro años más tarde, ni un 1% de los keniatas viven en hogares polígamos, según datos de Pew Research Center.

Today’s recipe is full of comforting amounts of chocolate and can be made in 10 minutes or less, which can mean only one thing: We have reached presidential election debate season again. (Would you be kind enough to click the heart-shaped “like” button above? It makes me and the algorithm sleep easier at night. Thank you.) For those of you who have been with me on Substack since the beginning, you know that I’ve created different ways of self-soothing before presidential debates and election nights.

Xavier shared with me recently the excellent piece of Fabrice Grinda about FJ Labs Investment Strategy. As an echo, I wanted to publish a post about Kima Ventures. Kima is the Angel Investment Arm of Xavier Niel, the owner of Iliad, Station F and 42. We are a team of three people (Alexis Robert, Jeanne Cluset and Myself), acting as a proxy of Xavier to invest in 100 new deals per year.

photo by Jonathan Borba“UNDER”, “WITH” AND “OVER” – THE POSTURES OF POWER Right before Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, he commissions his disciples with the famous words “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me …” (Matt 28:18) It is a stunning all-encompassing statement of Jesus authority over the world (in heaven and on earth) as the mission of God commences into the world.

When one brings up the topic of Celtic Christianity, it often conjures up images of an eco-friendly variation of the Christian tradition that bucks against a perceived imperialistic Catholic Church. The former image, while partially based on truth, only considers the superficial aspects and tends to neglect the more interesting aspects of its theology. The later, mostly derived from Anglican attempts to wrestle away a “purer” expression of the Christian faith, ignores the orthodoxy that was well-established in literature.

In today’s ever changing tech landscape, new frameworks, libraries and languages emerge every year and replace the existing one. Yet, despite this rapid evolution, companies still continue to use three decade old relational databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. Have you wondered how bank transactions are seamless, how double booking is prevented by flight and movie booking websites, and or why your social media data remains intact despite crashes? The answer lies in the ACID properties of databases.

I have to say when I came across a new paper by Manfred Kets de Vries from Insead Business School I thought I needed to borrow the title for this post. In it, he examines the nature of human stupidity and why even the smartest people sometimes do stupid things. But more importantly for our time, he also investigates why people abandon rationality altogether and hold on to stupid and bizarre ideas like conspiracy theories and why this phenomenon has spread so much that we are now talking about a post-truth world.

The Mean Time Between Critical Failures (MTBCF), a critical parameter in reliability engineering, measures the expected operational time elapsed between critical failures in a system or equipment. Critical failures are events that disable a system, inhibiting it from delivering its intended function or service. Understanding and evaluating MTBCF is essential in enhancing system reliability. But how do we accumulate the necessary data to calculate this vital metric? One efficient and practical approach is to add a datapoint to each work order record that identifies whether it was a critical failure.