If you are a parent of a state school pupil in the UK, it is sports day across the country this week. Even though it is already Wednesday, tardily I’ve decided that we’ll focus on sports this week; coming first is not important, it’s the taking part that counts.

Sports day itself presents a variety of hazards for the modern parent. On average you can expect to lose two afternoons of work. Worse still you may get caught in an on-again, off-again spiral caused by the British weather. There is also the obligation to join what can be the life-threatening race between parents that normally concludes proceedings.

It’s no joke. A friend of ours once broke an achilles tendon in the fathers’ sack race. As far as I can recall, it took a good year to heal properly. And there’s worse when you consider the headline on the front page of Peak Performance sports science newsletter that dropped through the mailbox this morning screaming “Why fit athletes suddenly drop dead, and how to stop it happening“. Continue reading ‘42 and the meaning of life’

Five years ago, I wrote a letter to the bow tie-wearing Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matt Winkler. Finally, today I get an email back from the company. But, you guessed it, through the passage of five years they have managed to entirely miss the point of my original proposal! They want me, the Knackered Hack, holed up in the long-tail of journalism to promote a podcast they have done with Nassim Taleb. If you are me, there is a rich irony in all this. If you are not me, it is Friday afternoon and you have better things to do.

As I recall, the gist of that old letter to Winkler was to say what a good idea it would be for his news organization to be less hierarchical and develop a more networked model of journalistic interaction. My experience had suggested that that was the way large editorial groups needed to operate to have a chance of scaling our ever more complex news environment effectively, by sharing expertise more readily in real-time. Those people who know the Bloomberg news organization would probably tell me that I didn’t have a prayer. Continue reading ‘bloomberg not real-time at all’

At the risk of indigestion — though with a fitting break since the last serving — we reach the final course that has left the Knackered Hack out to lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb for so very long. One of the quant-professor-turned-essayist’s most digestible dictums is “don’t run for trains”. So, in full keeping with the Slow Food movement, this nutritional saga continues, unhurried yet inexorable, to its wafer-thin mint conclusion. Continue reading ‘caveman lunch with taleb – part 3′