When Google started out, its basic contract between itself and the rest of the Internet was pretty simple:
We scrape your websites for information, try to understand it to do cool stuff with it, and as a reward, we send you the people who are looking for that information.
Our “fee” is the advertising we display on our page, and your benefit is that you get a lot of visitors, with whom you can do whatever your business model is.
That was a pretty cool contract, but silently, unbeknownst to mostly everyone, Google stopped honouring it.
You might have noticed that Google search became pretty smart. When you look up a flight, or want to translate between metric and imperial units, look up song lyrics or perform a similar task, Google already presents you the answer in some kind of structured format.
You get the answer you are looking for straight away, without the need to click on anything. These so-called “Zero-Click Searches” are a great user experience, but of course a problem for everyone else. You go to Google, enter your search, get your answer, leave again. No click, no visit to another website.
A couple of years ago, you might have been taken to a website like Flight Tracker, but now Google shows you information on its own site. Good for you, good for Google, bad for Flight Tracker.
Those Zero-Click Searches now represent more than half of all Google Searches. That’s right: More than half of all Google users do not visit a website after their search, effectively transforming Google from a network into a Walled Garden.
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Women are winning Ultra-Endurance Events
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Fiona Kolbinger, winner of the 2019 Transcontinental Race. Source.
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Here’s an interesting story about gender bias:
When Ellie Pell won the Green Lakes Endurance Run, a 50k running event, she was given the “1st Place” trophy, and the “1st Place Female” trophy for her win.
The person placed second did not receive a “1st Place Male” trophy, because the organiser didn’t have one. It was simply unconceivable to them that a women might be faster than the men, and so they thought it would be ok to just have a “overall category winner”, which they thought must be male anyway.
Some time ago, I got into an argument (of course on the Internet) when people were arguing that it's cool that male athletes get more money and attention than women, because they were better at doing sports things.
I voiced the opinion that I think this is mostly due to the fact that most competitive sports is geared towards the strengths of males, putting women at an immediate disadvantage. I pointed out that women tend to perform better the longer an event is, but this usually shows only outside of the distances/times performed in organised competitive sports (for example, in running, women are consistently roughly 10% slower then men).
Without a lot of evidence to bolster my opinion, I got - of course - trashed. And just now, we’ve seen a couple of remarkable things happen:
First, Fiona Kolbinger won the Transcontinental Race, a 4.0000 km ultra-endurance race from the Black Sea to Brittany. The newcomer to the ultra-endurance scene didn’t win the women’s category. She won the race. Like, you know, overall. Like, fastest person. Faster than all the men. You know, that kind of win. The “and the winner is …” kind of win.
Then, Lael Wilcox came in second in the Silkroad Mountain Race, what is arguably the toughest ultra-endurance bike racing format at the moment.
And finally, Emma Pooley just won the Further Journal race, a tough race that saw only 8 of its 29 starters finishing. Again, the “fastest person” kind of win.
So, are women the better long-distance athletes? It’s hard to tell, but there is mounting evidence that longer events level the playing field, removing the advantage of men (that mostly comes from muscle mass, even in endurance type of events).
In any case, these events are not flukes. The women winning these races are not outliers or freaks that can be argued away. For me, these are clear signs that when the tilt towards men is removed, the “difference” between men and women is removed as well.
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E-Scooters aren’t as green as you might think
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Ooooohh, how cool, another “I told you so” moment. This issue of Let’s be Fwends is turning into some kind of personal vendetta, it seems.
See, I have a beef with those E-Scooters turning now nearly every European City into a heap of electronics-on-wheels-trash. They are advertised as an eco-friendly inner-city transportation alternative, but I always doubted that. I get it: If a person doesn’t use their car but instead hops on an E-Scooter, that might be a good thing.
But that’s not what’s happening. Because if you look at who uses E-Scooters, where they are used, and how they are used, it’s pretty clear that they replace three other modes of transportation, all vastly superior to anything else: Walking, Riding a Bike and Public Transport.
And now there’s some science supporting my old man’s rant.
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The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders
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Dementia is a condition that affects roughly 50 million people globally. Memory, thinking and behaviour deteriorate, and the ability to perform everyday tasks is severely affected.
I think we can all use a little more understanding about different health conditions, and what they mean for us, and for the people affected by it. The best way of understanding is seeing, hearing, talking, interacting. The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders is exactly that - a restaurant where you might not get what you ordered because the person bringing you your food has dementia.
But in the end it doesn’t matter. Because people aren’t difficult, or useless, or hard to work with. They are just different, but every bit as important as you are, and everyone else. And much more important than the food you get, which might or might not be the one you ordered.
So treat them with respect.
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Are you one of those people who seem to be an arrow that can only point in one direction? Then high-fives to you, because we all know in which direction this arrow is pointing. The only way is up! ⬆️
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