The third series of the sci-fi drama “For All Mankind” posits an alternative timeline in which humans visit Mars in the 1990s.The show envisions an alternative history where, instead of America landing on the Moon in 1969, the Russians did.This would have led to a fierce acceleration of the Apollo space programme, with America becoming desperate to catch up to and exceed their Cold War rivals.

A Fictional Alternate History

<ul><li>A manned mission to Mars is a challenge for modern NASA.</li><li>One of the big issues is the distance, along with the level of radiation the astronauts have to face.</li><li>Communication between the ship and Earth would be delayed by 10 minutes each way.</li><li>Around a third of everything that has tried to land on Mars has failed.</li><li>Food and supplies would require future planning. Initially, you would need to send your food and rocket fuel for your return journey in advance. Long-term, you could talk about <a href="https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/turning-the-red-planet-green-how-well-grow-crops-on-mars/">growing things on Mars</a>.</li></ul>

Challenges With A Manned MARS Mission

Between 2007 and 2017, an experiment called MARS-500 sought to simulate the psychological conditions of travelling to Mars by locking up crews of astronauts together for 520 days. The crews weathered it relatively well, although some did suffer from sleep and psychological issues on their return journey.

MARS Living Conditions: A Simulation

The third series of this sci-fi drama posits an alternative timeline in which humans visit Mars in the 1990s. So could we soon be flying to the Red Planet?

Stashed ideas

For All Mankind: What’s stopping us from going to Mars? | BBC Science Focus Magazine

A key strategy for getting better at things is hill-climbing: Try different things, keep doing the things that work, stop doing those that don’t.The strategy is named because you can envision it as finding the highest spot in a landscape filled with fog. You can’t necessarily see the highest point, but you can always walk uphill.Most of the time, this approach works fairly well. It likely explains how we get better at many things simply by doing them repeatedly. Where this strategy runs into trouble, however, is when you need to do something worse before you can do it better.

Hill-Climbing

Interestingly, learning itself seems to be one of these situations where we need to do worse before we can do better. The actions that improve your short-term performance on a task don’t always create much long-term improvement. Since short-term effects are easier to notice, this can create a trap. Students choose strategies that make them feel like they’re learning the material but fail miserably when the exam comes.

Getting Worse Before Getting Better

Desirable difficulties are actions that appear to work worse in the short-term but work better in the long run.These include:Spacing. Practising something ten times in a row vs. ten times spaced out (over hours or days). The latter feels harder but results in more permanent memory.Variability.  Intuition argues for mastering one thing before moving on to the next, but research suggests otherwise. Variable practice tends to result in better retention and transfer than blocked practice.

Desirable Difficulties

Should you re-read or do practice questions? Students overwhelmingly favour re-reading as a learning strategy. However, practice testing is one of the most effective learning methods that has been systematically studied, while re-reading is one of the worst.

Testing Yourself

What we learn is never erased from our minds. Instead, we forget things as our ability to retrieve them becomes weaker through competition with other memories.Successful access to hard-to-recall memory boosts retrieval strength more than if the memory was easier to access. It’s as if your brain is saying, “Whoa! That was important and I barely remembered it! Better strengthen that connection.” Easy memory access (say because you just immediately learned it or had the answer in front of you) sends the opposite signal, with correspondingly less benefit.

We Remember Everything

When you mix practice between two similar ideas or concepts, you’re better able to notice the difference between the two.
This discriminative account in favour of variable practice holds true for many problem-solving skills. Math problems are often taught in a blocked fashion. You learn some problem type and do it repeatedly until you’re good at it. Then, you move on to a different type of problem and repeat the same process. The issue with this blocked approach is that it doesn’t let you practice telling apart the different types of problems because, in each case, it’s obvious.

Mixing Concepts And Ideas

Cognitive load theory points out that many activities which increase the effort involved in learning tend to result in worse outcomes for typical students. These activities include solving problems you haven’t been taught how to solve, having to split your attention between different sources of information to understand an idea, or having redundant information you need to ignore to get at the answer.

Not All Difficulties Are Desirable

Can you learn more efficiently by making things harder for yourself? These three strategies let you learn faster (even if it feels slower).

Desirable Difficulties: When Harder is Better for Learning - Scott H Young

Peer-to-peer payment networks are having an extended moment. About <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/946109/digital-banking-users-usa/">65 percent</a> of Americans are expected to bank online in 2022. Cash and credit card use has been in decline for years and the pandemic accelerated people’s move to contactless payments. There are also 63 million Americans whose only financial options are money transfer apps. People use Cash App as their primary bank account, and in some cases as their only bank account.

Peer-To-Peer Money Transfer

Cash App didn’t invent #CashAppFriday. Cash App’s genius was to get on the trend. #CashAppFridays mark giveaways to people who tweet at it. Cash App figured out that: a) people use financial apps their friends are using, so creating social engagement is critical for growth; and b) the fastest way to social influence is to piggyback on the already existing social influence and amplify it through a go-to-market strategy that emphasizes social activity among Cash App’s initial following.

Cash App Lessons: Community

Cash App collaborated with everyone from Travis Scott to Red Bull to Cardi B to Meghan Tee Stallion and Miley Cyrus. These collaborations include cash and stock giveaways, tutorials and Cash App financial wisdom. Through linking itself with celebrities, Cash App embedded itself not only in communities of its users and fans, but also in the wider culture. Collaborations extend to charitable causes, like matching donations and emerging artist promotions.

Cash App Lessons: Collaboration

Cash App curates its brand narrative around the hustle ethos, hip hop aesthetics, and voices of those who have often been traditionally excluded from the establishment but who are in charge of cultural innovation. Cash App started with empathy for a particular group of people and their particular interests, tastes and values. The outcome is that Cash App’s users feel like there’s nothing out there that’s like it - and that they are creating culture together with the app and all others who use it. The commercial activity becomes cultural activity.

Cash App Lessons: Curation

Over time, Cash App created recurring content streams, delivered in Gen Z-meets-hip hop aesthetics and revolving around democratization of investing and improving financial literacy. “Cash App Wisdom” is a series of explainers focused on everything from the basics of stock investing to account protection. Various money lessons are regularly delivered by Meghan Thee Stallion. A Red Bull Racing content partnership brings one up to speed on everything crypto. Content creates a massive following and differentiates Cash App from other financial applications

Cash App Lessons: Content

Why turning commerce into culture is the best go-to-market strategy

Lessons from Cash App 

Product engineers are experts at identifying, understanding and solving problems. But the problems you tackle – and therefore the impact that you have – don’t have to be limited to the work you do within a text editor or integrated development environment.
Having an impact outside the code editor is about finding ways to shape your company’s culture as much as you build the product. That way, your positive impact will be felt far and wide.

Problem-solving outside the code editor

Encourage engineers to share their knowledge with others in ways that enrich the community. If they've solved a problem that others have struggled with, they should be able to share those solutions. These are great opportunities to build your own engineering culture, learn from other engineers, and foster innovation in the wider community. It’s important that engineers are given the support to feel comfortable doing this.

Being a brand ambassador

Getting involved in interviewing candidates is perhaps the most obvious and direct way a product engineer can help out with hiring. As your team grows, the two biggest challenges are ensuring the quality of candidates is high enough and that broader alignment is maintained. The interview process gives you a chance to gauge both quality and alignment or identify the risk of misalignment, so it is a crucial opportunity for any engineer to contribute to the long-term health of the engineering team.

Interviewing

Onboarding is often treated as a one or two-day interlude before we get to our “real” work. It’s focused on meeting a bunch of people, setting up our computer, walking through benefits, etc.
While these steps are important, this type of onboarding is generic and shallow and leaves huge gaps. When high-impact engineers invest in helping a new person become impactful themselves, it acts as a force multiplier and will pay dividends for the team and company.

Onboarding

The world’s best products are built by teams, not singularly brilliant and lone engineers. A defining characteristic of a product engineer is that they spend the time making sure that newer or more junior engineers that may be unfamiliar with the tech or processes not only understand what they are doing, but also why they are doing it.
In practice, this means a product engineer demonstrates technical leadership by creating processes that other people can follow, thereby enabling delegation and multiplying their effectiveness.

Knowledge sharing

A shared set of values that your whole team buys into will help maintain the elements of company culture you hold dear. Defining and iterating on values bottom-up as well as top-down means our values are something engineers have a sense of ownership of. In this way, they are not just empty words, but something we all have the opportunity to shape.

Defining values

High performing product engineers should look for opportunities beyond writing code to increase their impact and become a force multiplier.

5 ways engineers can make a positive impact outside the code editor

Financially intelligent managers understand the four distinct skill sets:<ol><li>The Foundation. They can read an income statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement. Can differentiate between profit and cash.</li><li>The art of finance. They can identify the artful aspects of finance and know how applying them differently can lead to different conclusions.</li><li>Analysis. They use ratios, return on investment (ROI) analysis, etc. to make better decisions.</li><li>The big picture. Numbers can’t (and don’t) tell the whole story. Financial results should be understood within the framework of the big picture.</li></ol>

Four skill sets of finance and accounting

The art of accounting is taking a limited set of data to get an accurate description of how well a company is doing. Definitions to understand.<ul><li>Revenue is when a service/product is delivered.</li><li>The income statement shows sales/revenues, costs/expenses, and profit. You can often tell what’s important to a company by looking at the biggest numbers relative to sales.</li><li>Operating Expenses: Day-to-day costs needed to keep the business going, e.g., salaries.</li><li>Capital Expenditure: The cost of purchasing an item is considered a long-term investment, such as computer systems or equipment.</li></ul>

You can’t always trust the numbers

Accountants use accruals and allocations to attempt an accurate picture of the business for a month.<ul><li>Accruals: An accrual is the part of a revenue or expense item that is recorded for a specific period, e.g., product development costs. The purpose is to match costs to revenues in a given timeframe.</li><li>Allocations: Theses are apportionments of costs to different departments or activities in a company.</li><li>Depreciation: Allocated cost of equipment and other assets to the total cost of product and services shown on the income statement.</li></ul>

Spotting assumptions, estimates, and biases

Understanding how the numbers are used and what are assumptions puts you in control of the decisions. <ul><li>Goodwill: The difference between the net assets acquired and the amount of money the acquiring company pays form them.</li><li>Balance sheet: The balance sheets show the assets, liabilities, and owners’ equity.</li><li>Cash shown on a balance sheet is money in the bank and things like stocks and bonds that can be turned into cash.</li></ul>

Reason for increasing your financial intelligence


It consists of three main categories:<ul><li>Sales or revenue during a given time period. It includes sales (revenue) and Earnings-per-share (EPS)</li><li>Costs and expenses: “Above the line” are the cost of goods sold (COGS), cost of services (COS). “Below the line” are operating expenses, interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.</li><li>Profit: Profit is an estimate. You can’t spend estimates. </li></ul>Different kinds of profit:<ul><li>Profit = Revenue - expenses</li><li>Gross profit = Sales - COGS</li><li>Operating profit (EBIT) = Gross Profit - Operating expenses</li><li>Net Profit = Operating Profit - (interest + taxes + other costs)</li></ul>

Cracking the code of the Income Statement

A balance sheet shows what a business owns at a particular time. A balance sheet always balances. Assets = liabilities + owners’ equity.<ul><li>Assets: What the company owns. It is more estimates and assumptions. Assets include cash; accounts receivable; inventory; property, plant, and equipment (PPE) minus accumulated depreciation; goodwill; intellectual property, patens; accruals.</li><li>Liabilities: What the company owes.</li><li>Equity: The assets - liabilities.</li></ul>

Understanding the balance sheet

A good manager is aware of how both cash and profits affect a balance sheet. A balance sheet shows if a company is financially healthy. The balance sheet answers the following questions:<ul><li>Do the assets outweigh the liabilities?</li><li>Can the company pay its bills?</li><li>Is the owner’s equity growing?</li></ul>

The income statement always affects the balance sheet

Profit is not cash. A healthy business needs both profit and cash. Inflows: Cash moving into a businessOutflows: Cash moving out of a business Types of cash flow:<ul><li>Cash from operating activities</li><li>Cash from investing activities</li><li>Cash from financing activities</li></ul>Financing a company: Getting a company the cash it needs to start up or expand. Cash flow can be calculated by looking at the income statement and two balance sheets. When you know a company’s cash situation, you can understand what’s going on now, where the business is headed, and the priorities of senior management.

The language of cash flow

Explains what business numbers mean and why they matter, and addresses issues that have become more important in recent years, including questions about the financial crisis and accounting literacy.

Financial Intelligence

The biggest perk of traveling to space is the view. Just past the boundary between space and Earth, passengers can catch a stunning glimpse of our planet juxtaposed against the wide unknown of space. The view is meant to be awe-inducing, and the experience even has its own name: the Overview Effect. Another perk of these trips is that space tourists will feel a few minutes of microgravity, which is when gravity feels extremely weak. That will give them the chance to bounce around a spacecraft weightlessly before heading back to Earth.

What will people actually be able to see and experience on a space trip?

<ul><li>Right now, space tourism flights have only reached suborbital space, which means that flights enter space but do not enter orbit around Earth. Scientifically, that’s not a new frontier (done by NASA back in the early 1960s).</li><li>Right now, it’s not clear these trips will offer scientists major new insights, but they might provide information that could be used in the future for space exploration. These trips are also being marketed as potential opportunities for scientific experiments.</li><li>Suborbital spaceflight might also create new ways to travel from one place on earth to another.</li></ul>

Does commercial space travel have any scientific goals, or is it really just a joyride?

Right now, it’s not entirely clear just how risky space tourism is.<ul><li>One way space tourism companies are trying to keep travelers safe is by requiring training so that the people who are taking a brief sojourn off Earth are as prepared as possible.</li><li>On the flight, people can experience intense altitude and G-forces. </li><li>There’s also the chance that space tourists will be exposed to radiation, though that risk depends on how long you’re in space.</li><li>Some tourists will likely barf on the ride.</li><li>There doesn’t seem to be an age limit on who can travel, though.</li></ul>

Is it safe?

The leaders in commercial space tourism already claim they have a market to support the industry. While Jeff Bezos hinted the price would eventually come down — as eventually happened with the high prices of the nascent airline industry — for now, ticket prices are in the low hundreds of thousands, at least for Virgin Galactic. That price point would keep spaceflight out of reach for most of humanity, but there are enough interested rich people that space tourism seems to be economically feasible.

How much will tickets cost?

<ul><li>The emissions of a flight to space can be worse than those of a typical airplane flight because just a few people hop aboard, so the emissions per passenger are much higher. That pollution could become much worse if space tourism becomes more popular.</li><li>The carbon footprint of launching yourself into space in one of these rockets is incredibly high, close to about 100 times higher than if you took a long-haul flight.</li><li>These flights’ effects on the environment will differ depending on factors like the fuel they use, the energy required to manufacture that fuel, and where they’re headed.</li></ul>

What impact will commercial space travel have on the environment?

<ul><li>The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has generally been given the job of overseeing the commercial space industry. But regulation of space is still relatively meager.</li><li>One of the biggest areas of concern is licensing launches and making sure that space flights don’t end up hitting all the other flying vehicles humans launch into the sky, like planes and drones.</li><li>There’s a lot that still needs to be worked out, especially as there are more of these launches.</li><li>In the meantime, no government agency is currently vetting these companies when it comes to the safety of the human passengers aboard.</li><li>There doesn’t seem to be an abundance of travelers’ insurance policies for space.</li></ul>

Who is regulating commercial space travel?

Six questions to consider before launching yourself into space.

Six questions to consider before launching yourself into space

The brainchild of IKEA is the late Ingvar Kamprad, a Swedish businessman. He envisioned a store full of functional furniture that&#39;s easy to assemble.
He started his first business at age five. He bought matchbooks in bulk and sold them individually. When he was 10, he was selling pens, pencils, seeds for flower, and Christmas tree decorations. Kamprad started IKEA in 1943 when he was 17 years old.

The beginnings of IKEA

<ul>
<li>The name IKEA comes from Ingvar Kamprad&#39;s initials, followed by the name of the farm he grew up on and the name of his home village: Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd.</li>
<li>Kamprad made a mail-order catalogue - an essential part of IKEA&#39;s business from a remote location.</li>
<li>At first, he sold small household goods like pens, wallets, and picture frames. Five years later, the store started selling furniture made by local manufacturers. The prices were so low that people questioned the quality, so Kamprad rented an old workshop to display his furniture.</li>
</ul>

IKEA: From household goods to furniture

Ingvar Kamprad solved the problem of shipping large furniture when he disassembled a coffee table so it could be packed flat. From then on, as many products as possible were packed this way.
By 1955, Kamprad&#39;s manufacturers were boycotting IKEA due to its low prices. He addressed the issue by designing and producing in-house.

Designing self-assembling furniture

IKEA expanded to other countries, Norway in 1963, Denmark in 1969. Over the next decade, IKEAs spread to countries like Germany, Japan, Australia and Canada.
There is a system to the unusual product names. Beds have names of places in Norway. Sofas are named after towns in Sweden. Kitchen tables get their names from geography in Finland. Rugs have Danish names. Chairs are named after men. Glasses and cups have adjectives as names.

IKEA expanding. Weird product names

If you’ve ever been inside an IKEA, you know how hard it is to leave the store in any sort of timely manner. You didn’t know you needed five new dishtowels, but there you go, it’s yours now. And don’t forget the Swedish meatballs and lingonberry jam on the way out. All of this is the brainchild of the late Ingvar Kamprad, a Swedish businessman who came up with the idea for a store full of functional furniture that’s easy to put together. Kamprad passed away in 2018, but the story of how he built IKEA into one of the world’s best known brands is a rags to riches story for the ages. Today, we can get our “Billy” bookcases with ease and that’s thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of Ingvar Kamprad.

Money

A brief history of IKEA: From cheap bookcases to Swedish meatballs

It is a three-digit number that lenders use to assess your creditworthiness and your ability to pay your bills on time.
<ul>
<li>The score ranges between 300 and 850.</li>
<li>The higher the score, the more creditworthy you are, and the more likely lenders will lend you money at a lower interest rate.</li>
<li>The FICO score is the most widely used, but there are also other systems.</li>
<li>Your history of payments determines your score as well as your credit utilisation.</li>
<li>Your credit report determines your credit score.</li>
</ul>

The credit score

Bill Fair and Earl Isaac developed credit scores in the 1950s to create a standard system to measure credit. They called it Fair, Isaac, and Company, known as FICO. Another credit score is the Vantage Score.
Both FICO and Vantage Score base their scores on analysing each credit report as collected by the three major credit reporting agencies: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. But FICO and VantageScore use different methods for a credit score, taking various data into account.

The history of the credit scores

Mortgage lenders usually use FICO scores to determine one's ability to pay them back. Since the three credit bureau scores are different, some banks look at all of them to get an average, or tri-merge, score.
Two common factors in determining your creditworthiness are timely payments and credit utilization. Other factors like credit history, types of accounts, and recent hard inquiries are used to varying degrees. It means that the score you see may be different to the score a lender use.

The reason for different scores

<ul>
<li>Late or missed payments will drive down your credit score and remain on your record for seven years.</li>
<li>Credit utilization is the percentage of available credit you're currently using. If you use more than 30% of your available credit, scoring models will consider you unreliable.</li>
<li>Credit history considers your long-standing credit accounts. A long account history in good standing increases your score.</li>
<li>Too many recently-opened credit accounts can be seen as risk.</li>
<li>Having different credit accounts increases your credit score.</li>
</ul>

Factors that make up your credit score

A credit report documents your credit history, your current status of accounts and payments, and when companies have pulled your report when you've applied for credit. A credit report is the source of your credit score.
It is vital to keep an eye on your reports and notice anything that could cause long-term damage to your credit. You can request a free credit report per bureau every year.

Credit scores are different from credit reports

Common factors that could damage your credit score are negative items, such as bankruptcies, foreclosures, late payments, high credit utilization, and credit inquiries from potential lenders.
Some people employ the services of credit repair companies to dispute incorrect or fraudulent credit items on your behalf, but the outcome is not guaranteed.

Credit repair companies

A guide to the differences between FICO and VantageScore credit scores, what goes into them, and how to improve them.

What Is a Credit Score?

<ul>
<li>This is the most basic indicator of the overall market value of a nation's finished domestic goods and services and the country's health and size.</li>
<li>There are two types of GDP: real and nominal. The former is the economic output after inflation is factored in while the latter does not take inflation into account.</li>
<li>The GDP is important because it gives us an idea of whether the economy of the country is growing or contracting.</li>
</ul>

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

In order to calculate the GDP you must add all of these components:
<ul>
<li>Consumer spending: this is the value of the consumption of the goods and services of the country's households; this is the largest part of the GDP</li>
<li>Government spending: ALL consumptions, investments, and payments made by the government for current use</li>
<li>Capital spending of businesses: Expenditure on purchases of fixed assets and unsold stock by private businesses</li>
<li>Net exports: represents the country's balance of trade</li>
</ul>

GDP: Component Overview

<ul>
<li>This is the metric used to measure a country's economic output that is produced by all the citizens of a country regardless of their location.</li>
<li>It represents how its nationals are contributing to the country's economy.</li>
<li>In order to calculate the GNP, you must add the same components above along with the net income by domestic residents and businesses from overseas investments, then subtract it from the net income earned by foreign residents and businesses from domestic investment.</li>
</ul>

Gross National Product (GNP)

Gross domestic product is the value of a nation's finished domestic goods and services during a specific time period. Gross national product is the value of all finished goods and services owned by a country's residents over a period of time.

GDP vs. GNP: What's the Difference?

Investing is about 9 percent theory, 1 percent execution and 90 percent emotion management.
Not everyone becomes a multimillionaire, at least not in the short run. The good news is that there are a lot of financial opportunities in the world, and it is possible to build wealth using public markets as a long term investment. Investment requires managing our emotions, and not to be bogged down by the ups and downs of the volatile markets.

Wealth In The Modern World

Stoicism is a life-survival strategy, a way to protect one’s sanity while facing the ups and downs of life. It helps us focus on what we can control and to let go of the stuff we cannot control. 
While not many are aware of this, stoicism embraces money and wealth, and advises a person to make money with honesty, dignity and trustworthiness.

Stoicism And Investing

No matter how little you earn using income-generating skills like writing, speaking, coding or managing, you can get started with investing by simply earning more than your expenses. 
One needs to focus on the income-generation part and create value out of nothing, using one’s skills.

Stoic Path To Wealth: Earn Money

We all have loss aversion, preferring to avoid losses even with the opportunity cost of gaining profits. Losing money, in fact, is a necessary rite of passage that most are not okay with. 
The best investors are the ones losing money, but who are smart enough to never lose more than 10 percent of their investment by applying diversification and other investment philosophies.

Stoic Path To Wealth: Lose Money

Stoic investors make smart, balanced bets. Most of us invest in secure funds with low returns. Investors looking at bigger returns opt for index funds. If you are okay with losing money, that does not mean that you should.
The 90/10 investing thumb rule states that we should put 90 percent of our money into stock investments in index funds with moderate to high returns. The rest of the investment money should be used to speculate on the short-term risks like currencies, Bitcoin etc, that offer a high upside.

Stoic Path To Wealth: Grow Money

The Stoic path to wealth is one that embraces money. But at the same time, it recognizes there are other important things.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Paisley
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For All Mankind: What’s stopping us from going to Mars? | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Desirable Difficulties: When Harder is Better for Learning - Scott H Young

Lessons from Cash App

5 ways engineers can make a positive impact outside the code editor

Financial Intelligence

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Paisley @pai

For All Mankind: What’s stopping us from going to Mars? | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Desirable Difficulties: When Harder is Better for Learning - Scott H Young

Lessons from Cash App

5 ways engineers can make a positive impact outside the code editor

Financial Intelligence

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Paisley
@pai