Autonomous, Trustless and Unstoppable (Part 2)

Applications of the blockchain beyond payment. This is part 2. Click here for part 1.

Shooting location: Malapascua and Kalanggaman Island, Philippines

Links:

Ethereum Frontier

Autonomous, Trustless and Unstoppable (Part 1)

Those sci-fi tech thrillers are about to get real. 

Shooting locations: Phuket, Thailand and Lembongan, Indonesia.

Sources:
Blockchain (by Melanie Swan)
Bitcoin clients

Nutrition and Habits: Do you Really Need To Eat Bread With Cheese?

Sources:

• Doug Mc Guff's Body By Science
• Tim Ferris' The Four Hour Body
• The Bulletproof podcast

How To Use Your Air Conditioning (For Westerners in Humid Countries)

I used to hate air conditioning... until I read the user manual.

Make Decisions Based on Estimates

My current job involves quantification activities, in particular to estimate the impact of process improvement changes. I have been browsing a book called How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard that brings a whole toolset and methods to go about this.

The main idea in this video is that you can make decisions based on simple calculations rather than relying on human judgement alone. There are at least 3 tools to help with measurement: decomposition, confidence intervals, and Monte-Carlo simulation.

The lush greenery in the background is Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.

Overloaded? Drink More Coffee or Monitor Your Work In Process

From SOX to Scrum: We've Come a Long Way...

If you're a hard-nosed developer you might not like the methods brought in 'from above'. You might think that scrum for instance is just another annoying management fad that is being imposed to you by ugly trolls.

Well stop mumbling like an old lady because it could be much worse. You don't really know what pain is until you've been through compliance changes such as Sarbanes-Oxley where any handoff between teams becomes an opportunity for setting up a quality gate and multi-layered document sign-offs. Customers are made guilty for requesting changes, developers are made guilty from any deviation from the plan...

Out of all methods/standards I was exposed to over over the years I prefer the agile family where the feedback of users facing a working product is the main driver for everything else. And agile is focused on making that feedback happen as often as possible. Check out this video shot between Tokyo and Singapore:

Aircon Abuse in Singapore

Places like Florida or South-East Asia are hot and humid. Without aircon or at least a fan you start sweating immediately. However my European friends often complain about how cold the air conditioning is. In a country where the outside temperature averages 30C any place indoors (office, taxi, mall) will blast cold air at 20C... is that really necessary?

I think air conditioning creates bad habits. It's not because you have a device that allows you to set the temperature that you should use it all the time. Cooling down to 20C sounds as over the top as heating up your house to 26C during a European winter.

The old-school way to cool down when it's too hot is to move air around. Before drying up air or making it colder just making it move helps. Everyone likes a nice summer breeze. And a fan can be less noisy than an aircon unit.

But if you really want to use your aircon, make it blow dry air. This way you take advantage of your natural body temperature regulation: as long as dry air moves around sweat evaporates from your skin and cools it down in the process.

I set my aircon unit to dehumidifier mode (see the small droplet icon in the photo below). This way it doesn't affect the temperature.

Even though temperature in my flat goes up to 27C it is still pleasant because humidity is relatively low (below 70%).

Tools I Use to Learn Tough Languages (2)

Learning Japanese in the London winter...