Juan Orbea

You are a node in each of the networks to which you belong. The other nodes – people – give you your ideas, your words and phrases, your assumptions, your desires, your fears and your beliefs. They give you your belonging, your affection, your shame, your fear, and your hopes.

The underlying mechanism for Zipf’s law is not yet agreed on but the main hypothesis is that it’s an outgrowth of the Principle of Least Effort. In short, systems that survive and operate at steady state optimize for efficiency. When they do, things tend to look like Zipf distributions.

No phrase better encapsulates science investing today than the challenge of “condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.”

The first idea is you can think about any social system using those layers. The second idea and (the more important point) is to think about the way that the layers can actually be traded off against each other.

Which acquaintance is most likely to know a lot of people that you’re compatible with? Not all people have equally large networks, and some people you know may be “hubs” that have a large number of connections. If you can find someone like this, they are usually quite helpful in meeting new people. “Hubs” frequently have weak ties to a lot of... See more

We all have a finite amount of time to live, and within that mortal countdown we devote some fraction towards our work. Even for the most career-focused, your life will be filled by many things beyond work. This is the sign of a rich life, but one side-effect is that time to do your work will become increasingly scarce as you get deeper into your... See more

PrinciplesYou is a free, best-in-class personality assessment that gives rich, comprehensive insights into what someone is really like and how they interact with others.

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it... See more