I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
Newborn 0-3 mo
Infant 3-6 mo
Baby 6-12 mo
(Parents are always tired)
Toddler: 1-3 yrs
Pre-schooler: 3-5 yrs
(Parents are always late)
Grade-schooler: 5-13 yrs
Teenager: 13-20
(Parents are apparently always wrong)
Philadelphia is old enough a city that its business community has lived many lifetimes.
Though its Quakerly tradition shunned ostentatious consumption, there are old roots. In 1732, The Rowland Company became one of the first incorporated businesses in the country (and it still operates in Philadelphia). 1881, Wharton became the first college-level business school. The Philadelphia Contributionship(1752) is the country’s oldest property insurance company; Rawle & Henderson (1783) is the oldest law-firm and (since relocated) D. Landreth Seed Company (1783) is the oldest seed companies (George Washington was a customer).
Philadelphia’s global clout declined in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Many of its prominent manufacturing businesses did not adapt to a changing world. Out of my own curiosity I’ve started a running tab of some of the more prominent closures from that time.
Continue reading A list of once-great, now closed Philadelphia manufacturing giantsEnglish is one in a long line of global lingua francas. If it’s the last, we’ll lose an important bit of culture, and reinforce elements of inequality.
That’s what Rosemary Salomone argues in her 2021 book The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language.
In 2010, British Nicholas Ostler author argued that English will be the last lingua franca, due to the values-lock of technology today. Salomone’s book is an exhaustive review of how English came to its vaulted position today – beating French, replacing Latin and joining others like Arabic, Italian and Greek that played versions of the global language of commerce of the past.
I enjoyed the book, though dense, and recommend it for language and history nerds. Below find my notes for future reference.
Continue reading The Rise of EnglishIn June 2009, the veteran lead pilot of Air France 447 was awoken from his scheduled nap to find his junior crew in trouble. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he had three minutes to determine which of the conflicting alerts from the plane’s automated system to respond to, and what were false alarms.
He failed. Nearly 250 crew and passengers died in the Atlantic Ocean.
That’s from the easily most gripping chapter in economics journalist Tim Harford’s 2016 book Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. That tragic story is a cautionary tale for our age, demonstrating the paradox of automation: “The better the automatic systems, the more out of practice human operators will be, and the more unusual will be the situations they face.”
How quickly could you look up from your smartphone if your autonomous vehicle alerted you that it had disengaged? Software, like many managers and orderly obsessives, wants a tidy world but the world is actually quite messy. That’s Harford’s message: Embrace the mess.
Below are my notes from the book for my future reference.
Continue reading Creativity is ‘Messy,’ notes on Tim Harford’s 2016 book
