One Rule of Presentations

There's a lot of advice out there about how to deliver effective presentations. Much of it is good but pretty unnecessary. There's just one simple recipe to at least guarantee that your presentation is decent. It won't make your presentation the unforgettable mind-blowing presentation-of-the-year, but if you follow this, you cannot fail: 

1. Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em

2. Tell 'em

3. Tell 'em what you told 'em

P and NP

Technology may be wrecking the middle class. 

This got me thinking about something my discrete math professor once said: "All problems in the world are either in P or NP. The problems in P will, inevitably, be automated and run by machines. Problems in NP are what humans are for. If you want to stay employed in the future, focus on NP."

For those not familiar with P=NP, Scott Aaronson sums it up nicely

This is also a great writeup in the New Yorker

Convenience

People are almost always willing to surrender some quality for the sake of convenience. A landline is a far more reliable channel with much better sound, versus the cell phone which often drops calls or garbled-up signal. Despite that, I've never had a landline.

As it turns out, it was true that the iPhone made e-mailing a more cumbersome experience. But it did everything else so much better that it didn’t matter. People were willing to give up some of the ease of e-mail use for everything else iPhones provided.
— http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/opinion/nocera-how-not-to-stay-on-top.html?_r=0