Naval Ravikant writes on Bitcoin (and more) as The Fifth Protocol. Fantastic read, and reminds me to read Snow Crash.
In April and May, there are Automattic team meetups and events happening in Budapest, Napa Valley, Pender Island, New Orleans, Barbados, Cardiff, Konstanz, Playa Del Carmen, Portland, Toronto, Saratoga Springs, Palermo, Edinburgh, and Lisbon. Did I mention that we’re hiring?
I did one of the “On My Phone” interviews for Vanity Fair, which is especially funny during Lent. You can read it here: WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg on Calm, Childish Gambino, and Giving Up His iPhone for Lent.
…there are vastly more possible comparisons than there are data points to compare. Without careful analysis, the ratio of genuine patterns to spurious patterns – of signal to noise – quickly tends to zero.
Tim Harford in the Financial Times has a great article called Big data: are we making a big mistake?.
The Quartz finds that The Million Dollar Homepage still exists, but 22% of it has rotted away. BTW, Alex Tew’s new venture is Calm.com which is one of my favorite sites/services/apps.
Whole Foods and Pseudoscience
Michael Schulson takes a great look at the contrast between Whole Foods and the Creationist Museum in Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience. It is a good reminder that we must try to use the best available data in decisions regardless of our preëxisting proclivities. Also good to check out is Grist’s series on GMOs, probably best summarized in What I learned from six months of GMO research: None of it matters or the NY Times A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops.
Two cool new WordPresses launched on VIP: Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight site, and the Facebook Newsroom, which I believe is the first WP-powered Facebook site. (Hopefully the first of many!) Also congrats to 10up and Beyond respectively for working on each of these sites.