I haven’t been blogging much but I’ve been reading many more articles lately online. Here’s what I’ve been queueing up on Instapaper (a mixture of some older articles and some newer ones):

• What I Lost In Libya
  One reporters account of what happened when he and several other reporters were captured during the Arab Spring
• The Turnaround Men
  The story of a con men and how he milked a number of investors (a la Madoff) in order to support his lifestyle and “companies”. Although Tom Petters is not a household name, some of his companies are known such as Redtag.com.
• Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible
  This article has been making headlines again recently, with its claim to fame being that it talked about Jobs’ forthcoming death in 2008. I haven’t read (and don’t plan to read) the his recent biography from Isaacson, but I found this article to be interesting and well written, revealing some insights into the motivations and personality of Jobs. It’s certainly a much shorter read and well written to boot.
• Trust Issues
  This article talks about compound interest and a hobby amongst rich people in the 19^th century to donate their fortune to a perpetual trust lasting centuries.

  Beginning in 1936, he sluiced $2.8 million into a series of five-hundred- and thousand-year trusts—just one of which, allocated to the Unitarian Church, would be worth $2.5 quadrillion upon its maturation in the twenty-fifth century. A thousand-year fund dedicated to the state of Pennsylvania would yield $424 trillion; the money was to be applied to abolishing the state’s taxes. Holden didn’t even live in Pennsylvania—he’d picked the state as an homage to Franklin.

• What You Don’t Know Can Kill You
  This is an interesting article from Discover Magazine which discusses how humans are not very good at estimating risk; generally over-estimating risks that they can visualize.

  But it is heuristics—the subtle mental strategies that often give rise to such biases—that do much of the heavy lifting in risk perception. The “availability” heuristic says that the easier a scenario is to conjure, the more common it must be. It is easy to imagine a tornado ripping through a house; that is a scene we see every spring on the news, and all the time on reality TV and in movies. Now try imagining someone dying of heart disease. You probably cannot conjure many breaking-news images for that one, and the drawn-out process of athero­sclerosis will most likely never be the subject of a summer thriller. The effect? Twisters feel like an immediate threat, although we have only a 1-in-46,000 chance of being killed by a cataclysmic storm. Even a terrible tornado season like the one last spring typically yields fewer than 500 tornado fatalities. Heart disease, on the other hand, which eventually kills 1 in every 6 people in this country, and 800,000 annually, hardly even rates with our gut.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: apple, instapaper, psychology