Aviacion de Cubana There was no toilet paper on the Russian-made Antonov 158 plane which took me and 15 other passengers to Havana. The Cuban state airline, Cubana de Aviacion, clearly does not need have to meet profitability targets. Even the dry sandwich they served tasted of an iron curtain.
Not unlike the other living political museum of China, immigration and customs is relatively straightforward. If you had to guess the political system of a country based on the border control procedures you’d probably guess the United States is authoritarian.
The books I finished reading recently that I thought might be interesting to comment upon were Steven Pinker’s The better Angels of Our Nature, Mo Yan’s Big Breast’s and Wide Hips, Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun, Robert Mazur’s Infiltrator and David Maurer’s Big Con . Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, wrote a (way too long) book to argue the world is becoming less, not more violent. What about ISIS, Ukraine, gang warfare and mass shootings?
Prediction markets have the Republican nomination for President of the USA going to billionaire reality TV host and megalomaniac Donald Trump. On the other side of the aisle, self-described socialist Sanders is making Hillary Clinton’s campaign sweat. This isn’t “politics as usual” for anyone except the writers of The Simpsons. According to the party decides theory (or at least my interpretation of Nate Silver’s interpretation) the party, as a loose coalition of opinion forming individuals, can heavily weigh in on who gets nominated.
A few books I recently finished reading are Ben Bernanke’s Courage to act, Dr Philip Tetlock’s Superforecasting, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, an unofficial biography on George Soros, and collection of druggie short stories titled Acid House by Irvine Welsh. I do not expect to do justice to the arguments in the books (read a real book review if you want that), I’m just sharing the lessons I learned from them as a little exercise.
I bought my Kindle slightly over a year ago, and since it has accompanied me everywhere I’ve been. It has provided me with entertainment on long journeys and education in subjects where I had none. I would like to share some of my favourite quotes. I have sorted them based on when I started reading them, with some slight editing.
December (2014) The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse.
This year has been an adventure. I've been on three continents, countless countries and dozens of cities. I thought it would be an interesting project to quantify it all by visualising on a map the places where I slept.
In September, images of anti-riot police in a standoff with desperate migrants were shown on television, inspiring many people to volunteer and even more people to chatter about the situation. Yet the problem with our handling of crises is that we often wait for one to happen before doing anything (even just notice something is amiss). Humans are vulnerable to overlooking gradual phenomena with no easily distinguishable onset. There is an ongoing global demographic transition and it will influence most shifts in the next 25 years, be it in politics, business or international relations.
A few friends and I are involved in the Budapest public bicycle data science competition. As of right now we are in the top ten, although in all honesty, it hasn’t really started yet. We signed a non-disclosure agreement, so I cannot really share any cool details. What I can share however, is the function I wrote in R to get calculate the distances and duration of bike trips using Google Maps’ API.
#distance calucations #### This script uses RCurl and RJSONIO to download data from Google's API library(RCurl) library(RJSONIO) #define api key as: api<-"YOURAPI" #the function assumes address input in following dataframe: #lat1,lng1,lat2,lng2 DistDur <- function(address,time = as.