Tobi Lutke, the founder and CEO of $48 billion e-commerce cloud-software company Shopify, took to Twitter to remind us all that we don't need to work 80 hours a week to be successful. Business Insider reports: "I realize everyone's twitter feed looks different. But I'll go ahead and subtweet two conversations that I see going by right now: a) How the heck did Shopify get so big this decade and b) You have to work 80 hours a week to be successful," he tweeted. He says he and his cofounders have grown this company from a profitable bootstrap to its multibillion-dollar status without him ever sleeping under his desk. "I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not," he tweeted.
Shopify has had a spectacular few years. Its revenues have doubled since 2017, solidly beating Wall Street estimates quarter after quarter, growing from over $171 million in Q3 September, 2017, to over $390 million in Q3 September 2019, its latest complete quarter. It's expected to finish the year at about $1.5 billion in revenues. And Wall Street has noticed. Shopify went public in 2015. In the past year, the stock has soared over 200% from around $134 to about $407 giving the company a $47.6 billion market cap. But even at the scale of its current operations, he says he doesn't let his job overshadow the rest of his life. "I'm home at 5:30pm every evening. I don't travel on the weekend. I play video games alone, with my friends, and increasingly with my kids. My job is incredible, but it's also just a job. Family and personal health rank higher in my priority list," he tweeted. "For creative work, you can't cheat. My belief is that there are five creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that four of those are channeled into the company," he wrote. "What's even better than people are teams," he wrote. "We don't burn out people. We give people space. We love real teams with real friendship forming." He adds: "None of that is even about product, or market fit, or timing. It's all about people. Treating everyone with dignity."
"We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome."
Basic extrapolations suggest that if there are other spacefaring civilizations in the Milky Way, they could spread across the entire galaxy with surprising speed. Why, then, have we found no irrefutable evidence of aliens visiting Earth? Popular answers to this puzzle -- that we are alone, that interstellar travel is impossible, that aliens are hiding from us -- all rest on assumptions that verge on implausibility.
A number of years back, there was a great deal of excitement about using viruses to target cancer. A number of viruses explode the cells that they've infected in order to spread to new ones. Engineering those viruses so that they could only grow in cancer cells would seem to provide a way of selectively killing these cells. And some preliminary tests were promising, showing massive tumors nearly disappearing.
But the results were inconsistent, and there were complications. The immune system would respond to the virus, limiting our ability to use it more than once. And some of the tumor killing seemed to be the result of the immune system, rather than the virus.
Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by a remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.
Enlarge / Southern Resident killer whales, an endangered population that recently lost the oldest known grandma orca to date. (credit: NOAA Fisheries West Coast)
There's a rare human trait that doesn't often make it into debates about what makes our species unique: menopause. Humans are among just a handful of species where females stop reproducing decades before the end of their lifespan. In evolutionary terms, menopause is intriguing: how could it be advantageous for reproductive ability to end before an individual's life is over?
One possible answer: the power of the grandma's guidance and aid to her grandchildren. A paper in PNAS this week reports evidence that supports this explanation, showing that killer whale grandmas who have stopped reproducing do a better job of helping their grandchildren to survive than grandmothers who are still having babies of their own.
It’s not all about the babies
The engine of evolution is offspring. In simple terms, the more babies you have that survive, the more your genes are passed on, and the better the chance of the long-term survival of those genes.
"ICANN has delayed its approval of the sale of .Org to private equity company Ethos Capital by requesting more information," reports Domain Name Wire:
According to its contract with Public Interest Registry (PIR) to run .org, ICANN had 30 days from when PIR notified it of the transaction to request more information. It has now done so. After it receives the responses, it has 30 days to either approve or withhold its consent of the registry transfer.
The Register recently published two articles criticizing ICANN's "opaque decision-making," while the General Counsel for ICANN has sent a letter to the CEOs of both PIR and ISOC saying they're also "uncomfortable" with the lack of transparency.
ICANN is requesting information "related to the continuity of the operations of the .ORG registry, the nature of the proposed transaction, how the proposed new ownership structure would continue to adhere to the terms of our current agreement with Public Internet Registry, and how they intend to act consistently with their promises to serve the .ORG community with more than 10 million domain name registrations...
"We acknowledge the questions and concerns that are being raised and directed to ISOC, PIR, and ICANN relating to this change. To ease those concerns and maintain trust in the .ORG community, we urge PIR, ISOC, and Ethos Capital to act in an open and transparent manner throughout this process...
"ICANN takes its responsibility in evaluating this proposed transaction very seriously. We will thoughtfully and thoroughly evaluate the proposed acquisition to ensure that the .ORG registry remains secure, reliable, and stable."
McGruber writes: In a reply to a Twitter post, Raspberry Pi Foundation's CEO Eben Upton announced that they have sold their thirty-millionth Raspberry Pi.
"We don't get sales returns from our licensees until month end," Upton acknowledged in a later tweet, but "at the end of November, we were at 29.8Mu, with a monthly run rate of 500-600ku..."
It's now possible to store the digital instructions for 3D printing an everyday object into the object itself (much like DNA stores the code for life), according to a new paper in Nature Biotechnology. Scientists demonstrated this new "DNA of things" by fabricating a 3D-printed version of the Stanford bunny—a common test model in 3D computer graphics—that stored the printing instructions to reproduce the bunny.
DNA has four chemical building blocks—adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C)—which constitute a type of code. Information can be stored in DNA by converting the data from binary code to a base 4 code and assigning it one of the four letters. As Ars' John Timmer explained last year:
Once a bit of data is translated, it's chopped up into smaller pieces (usually 100 to 150 bases long) and inserted in between ends that make it easier to copy and sequence. These ends also contain some information where the data resides in the overall storage scheme—i.e., these are bytes 197 to 300. To restore the data, all the DNA has to be sequenced, the locational information read, and the DNA sequence decoded. In fact, the DNA needs to be sequenced several times over, since there are errors and a degree of randomness involved in how often any fragment will end up being sequenced.
DNA has significantly higher data density than conventional storage systems. A single gram can represent nearly 1 billion terabytes (1 zettabyte) of data. And it's a robust medium: the stored data can be preserved for long periods of time—decades, or even centuries. But using DNA for data storage also presents some imposing challenges. For instance, storing and retrieving data from DNA usually takes a significant amount of time, given all the sequencing required. And our ability to synthesize DNA still has a long way to go before it becomes a practical data storage medium.
There are people who object to newfangled technologies that address our reliance on dirty energy. For them, claims like this are irresistible catnip: electric vehicles aren't actually cleaner than their gas-burning counterparts. What a delicious I-told-you-so to those naïve environmentalists! The only problem with these claims is that they aren't true.
This particular assertion is based on the idea that the manufacturing of big batteries for these cars generates so much emissions that all later savings are canceled out. Sometimes, this argument requires unfair assumptions, like expecting an internal combustion vehicle to last far longer than an EV. But it always requires cherry-picking a high estimate for battery manufacturing emissions.
One of those estimates came from a 2017 study from the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute. Based on the data that it had to work with, the institute's study put the emissions at 150-200 kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity—one of the highest estimates that has been published.
Ground-penetrating radar could help archaeologists spot otherwise invisible ancient footprints, suggests a recent experiment at White Sands National Monument, New Mexico.
Tracks left behind in layers of hardened mud and sand at the site record where humans crossed paths with giant sloths and mammoths during the last Ice Age. But some of the tracks appear only when conditions are just right—usually after a rain—which makes them difficult to study. Archaeologist Thomas Urban of Cornell University and his colleagues used ground-penetrating radar to spot these so-called ghost tracks. The radar images also revealed layers of compressed sediment beneath mammoth tracks, which could reveal information about how the now-extinct woolly giants strode across the Pleistocene world.
Invisible ink
To test the method, Urban and his colleagues pulled a radar antenna across the pale gypsum sands of the former lakeshore, pacing out a grid pattern over a site where, 12,000 years ago, a human and a mammoth crossed paths. Excavations at the site had already revealed “ghost prints” left by a person who walked north, and then back south, for about 800 meters (2,625 feet).
Roberto Escobar, brother of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, has announced a foldable smartphone that is "very difficult to break" thanks to the screen's "special type of plastic." The Escobar Fold 1, as it is called, significantly undercuts Samsung's Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X with a price of only $349. Neowin reports: While all the foldable phones announced so far have a price tag of at least $1,500+, the Escobar Fold 1 will be available from only $349 which includes free shipping and a case as well. It will be sold unlocked and work on all compatible networks worldwide. This makes it cheaper than other non-foldable flagship smartphones available in the market right now.
The drug lord's brother has been able to price the phone so low by cutting out the middlemen like networks and retailers. He is also preparing to file a $30 billion class-action lawsuit against Apple for scamming people and wants the company to "give some of their illegal profits back to the people." Like the Huawei Mate X, the Escobar Fold can be unfolded to turn it into a tablet with a screen size of 7.8-inches. The expanded AMOLED display has a 4:3 aspect ratio and an FHD+ resolution. The design language is different from the Samsung Galaxy Fold which features two separate displays, one of which folds.
"A new photo shows the solar system's second confirmed interstellar visitor in an impressive new light," writes Space.com.
elainerd (Slashdot reader #94,528) quotes their report:
A team of astronomers from Yale University in Connecticut imaged Comet 2I/Borisov last Sunday (Nov. 24) using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, revealing the object's tail to be nearly 100,000 miles (160,000 kilometers) long. That's about 14 times Earth's diameter, and more than 40% the distance from our planet to the moon. "It's humbling to realize how small Earth is next to this visitor from another solar system," Yale astronomy professor Pieter van Dokkum said in a statement. Borisov's tail dwarfs its body, of course; researchers think the comet's nucleus is just 1 mile (1.6 km) or so across.
The comet was discovered in late August by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov. Analysis of the object's speed and trajectory revealed that it came into our solar system from afar, making it the second known interstellar interloper after the mysterious body 'Oumuamua, which was first spotted in October 2017. Astronomers didn't see 'Oumuamua until it had already zoomed past Earth on its way toward the outer solar system, limiting the opportunity for detailed study. But Comet Borisov is a more obliging target.
Surprisingly enough, I had zero idea this was going on.
Using the Pi 4 as a reference platform is interesting, but I wonder if I could get it to work on older boards (with the touch screens I have lying around) to build a home automation console…
