Count the times the word “culture” came out of reporters’ mouths last week, and you’d think they were anthropologists. Usually in this context: “The culture of white supremacy has gone fully mainstream.* “The bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities…  is that white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat.”**

If you’ve drunk the MBA kool-aid, you believe VCs and M&A bean-counters rationally price their investments. If an honest professor has confessed to you that company valuation is a black art, i.e., that there’s a heavy dose of intuition involved, you’ve been ahead of the game. The Twitter cockup now shows valuation to be a total dice-roll. 

My nice Plaxo online address book disappeared when the host company was sold and the buyer discontinued the service. My contacts, up in smoke.

Dropbox (cloud storage and data synch) and TunnelBear (VPN) both decided not to support my OS any more, as did Google Chrome. I face expensive upgrades.

Our eyes see only a tiny band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Matter is mostly empty space, but we see and feel it as continuous solid. Why don't we comprehend the world as it really is? It is because evolution has prepared us to survive and reproduce. Evolution has no interest in preparing us to see the world as it is. There is no reproductive value in seeing the whole truth.

The way Chief Justice Roberts tosses red herrings, he could get a job at Seattle’s Pike Market. The court may make unpopular decisions, he says, but that’s no reason to question the Supremes’ legitimacy. He’s right, but he’s right in a way that totally misses the point.

“We got rich fast here,” a man in Beijing told me, “and we’re fast getting richer. Those lazy Taiwanese aren’t getting richer at all.” It is fashionable on the mainland to diss Taiwan, but – as I was too polite to inform my interlocutor – Taiwan residents have created a fine civil society and have learned to get along well with each other, tasks that are much harder than just getting rich.