Franklin Faraday Insights Roundup for February 19, 2021
Technology + Common Sense + 7 Minutes of Terror
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It will take more than ice storms and kids who don’t even remember what the inside of a school looks like to stop our weekly roundup of actionable and interesting thoughts from Earth… and Mars!
This week:
— Mind Blowing Mars Photos or The Week We All Learned How to Spell “Perseverance” (and will totally rock the next Scrabble game)
— Software supply chains, hardware supply chains, and North Korean cryptocurrency
— Quantum failures and PR blunders
— Big company startups are an oxymoron
— Collapsing dams and freezing pipes
— Need a vaccine? Try a disguise.
— A COVID suit makes lawyers salivate
— Bezos vs. Zuck
— Citibank’s user interface was so bad that they lost $500 million and a judge laughed at them
— An AWESOME new year’s video from Malaysia
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Mind Blowing Photos
Here’s an illustration of the landing cycle for Perseverance:
Check out this terrifying picture of the rover on its way to touchdown… dangling in the “Skycrane maneuver.” (Coming to a toy store Christmas 2021.)
THIS IS INSANE! You can read how and why NASA came up with this idea here.
(If you were wondering what happened to the skycrane after it dropped off the rover, we understand it flew a “safe distance away” and then “crashed by design.”)
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (spying on Martians from… um… orbit around Mars) took this photo of Perseverance in the descent stage…
Finally, some photos on the ground (or a West Texas movie set.)
(All Perseverance photos Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.)
Because “7 minutes of terror” is not enough, soon NASA will launch Ingenuity, the first helicopter on another planet!
If you want to see even more, you can check out all of NASA’s photos and videos as well as the best and worst Mars landings and plans for the first 100 days.
Bubblicious
No one rings a bell at the top, but they do start SPACs called “Just Another Acquisition.” Bloomberg reminds us that by March, this year’s SPAC issuance will surpass 2020’s $83 billion, which is more than the previous decade combined.
Hmmm sure sounds like a “company for carrying an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
Cybersecurity
The SolarWinds software supply chain hackers got access to some of Microsoft’s source code, though the press stories and Microsoft’s own blog differ considerably in their level of alarm (for obvious reasons.) While the “just buy more stuff from us” aspect of Microsoft’s blog is somewhat irritating, the multiple posts are required reading to begin to understand what happened.
(Of course, the blog’s subtle sales pitches are not as irritating as a user of Microsoft Azure spinning up a Ubuntu Linux instance and then getting hit on his personal linked in account by a third party sales rep.)
Bloomberg had an excellent story on the very disturbing China Supermicro hack saga. It’s clear that the people talking to the press on this don’t know, and the people who know aren’t talking.
The U.S. Government indicted three North Koreans for a shockingly long list of computer crimes, including causing billions of dollars worth of damage and attempting to steal $1.3 billion, though they “only” got $121 million. Most interestingly, the North Koreans had a plan to issue their own cryptocurrency called Marine Chain, which supposedly would let users purchase stakes in cargo ships (Hmm.. sounds better than basing a cryptocurrency on dogs, but there’s no North Korean Elon Musk to pump it.)
#FAIL
In 2018, a Dutch researcher funded by Microsoft claimed he had observed an “elusive” subatomic particle called a Majorana fermion, but last month he had to retract that claim. Unfortunately, Microsoft gambled that this discovery would lead to a quantum computing breakthrough… and lost. Our take: Particle physics is hard, Quantum is really hard, and no one has figured it out. The space is rife with charlatans, hyperbole, and wishful thinking. There are good people working the problem, and we’ll interview them in the coming months.
DoorDash spent $5 million to advertise their $1 million charitable donation. Must have been the added delivery fees.
Entrepreneurship
If you try to start a new venture inside a big company (or government), Waze co-founder and CEO Noam Bardin says it will fail. His answer to “Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long” is a must read, especially for his comments on what happens to every Western CEO who thinks he or she will be successful in China. (Spoiler: the CEO leaves with “experience” and the Chinese leave with everything else!) Hunter Walk also posted his thoughts on Bardin’s discussion, having been at YouTube when it was acquired by Google.
Environment
The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health says that by 2050 most of the world’s population will be located downstream of dams built in the 20th century. There are already 19,000 large dams more than 50 years old (the average estimated life span without major repairs), and China and India alone have 28,000 dams in their 40s. Yale’s School of the Environment is a great source on this topic, with this recent article as well as one here (2019), and this one on the uncertainty over the future of large scale hydropower (2018).
There’s a lot of debate over the Texas power outages, including articles being promoted by various political factions (even on twitter) claiming that green power and frozen turbines are or are not to blame. However, Texas natural gas infrastructure also had cold weather difficulties that led to blackouts in 2011. Of course the required upgrades—likely expensive and difficult for an industry dealing with very low natural gas prices for many years—still haven’t been completed. Scientific American had a balanced view of the situation.
A lot of people have pointed to wind farms in Antarctica as an example that turbines can be made to work in extreme temperatures, but this ignores the design tradeoffs for major power production in the U.S. Even the Antarctic turbines have failed spectacularly.
Health
Two women in Florida dressed up as little old ladies to get the COVID vaccine. We hope they wore red riding hoods…
This guy says we will have herd immunity for COVID in the U.S. by April. We say “hope you’re right” but no one knows, and anyone who claims to know is lying.
Based on up close and personal experience, we also say: COVID is killing people who are careful, it’s airborne, it’s spreading asymptomatically, and you can have it WITHOUT a fever or losing taste and smell, as symptoms are all over the map.
Law
Our lawyers were giddy about a spouse suing her husband's employer for getting COVID.
Leadership
We enjoyed this thread on “Bezos vs. Zuck”
Software
Poor UI design cost Citibank $500 million. Amazingly, three different people signed off on an erroneous transaction, and none of them could find the mistake. The judge wrote, "To believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1 billion—would have been borderline irrational." Hope he’s not applying for a loan anytime soon…
Random
Definitely do not miss this video:
Shout out to our friend Mike W. for his suggestions this week. Check out his personal blog here.
From our fast talking, very expensive lawyers:
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