Daily Chart: the world’s largest container ports. Singapore nabs the top slot.
The displacement of Europe and the US from this list by China (and Asia ex-Japan more generally) is less interesting to me than the fact that the volume moving through the busiest port in the world 20 years ago wouldn’t make the top 20 today. Incredible explosion in world trade.
This is pretty wild:
Here’s a a demonstration video of EmoRate, a software program that uses the Emotiv 14-electrode EEG headset to record your emotions via your facial expressions. In the video you’ll see EmoRate record my emotions while I watch a YouTube video, then index that video by emotion, and then navigate that video by simply by remembering a feeling.
“There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must … invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth.”
My cab driver coming back from LaGuardia this afternoon handed me a clipboard and a pen and said, “Will you draw me a painting?” I am quite obviously not a skilled artist, but I obliged.
His name is Fabio Peralta, and he asks everyone in his taxi to “paint” when they get in. (I am not the first person to write about him.) He has been driving a cab for 41 years, but the picture requests have only been going on for 3 1/2 years. He said he was inspired by then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama, who made him feel like “I could be and do whatever I wanted.” He has collected 35,000 “paintings” — he refers to them exclusively as “paintings” — and he sells a book of his favorites to riders for “whatever you think it’s worth.” I gave him 10 bucks, though it was clearly worth a lot more. I hope you are lucky enough to hail him down someday.
“Most UGC sites try to spend time converting lurkers to contributors. Don’t. 90% of all users will never contribute anything to your company. They are there to ingest content.
I wish Twitter understood this better. If they did then they would run marketing campaigns to let users know that “it’s OK to turn up and just consume content. Twitter’s great for that, too. You don’t ever need to send a Tweet to love Twitter.” I never understood why they don’t communicate that more broadly because I think most people’s fear of Twitter is that they don’t want to tell the world what they ate for lunch.”
