26 July 2020

Welcome back to the Week That Was series where I highlight a few things from the interwebs which I thought were interesting, noteworthy and probably worth your time.

Articles📝, Tweet(s)📱, Videos🎥, Charts 📈 all fair game with or without attendant commentary.

🛢️⛽

🍺📈 Frothy Markets

Things remain interesting in marketsland, particularly where Tesla is concerned. At some point this week the automaker was valued at twice the market cap of Toyota. 2X Toyota; a company which has continued turning a profit during the coronavirus crisis and did the same back in 2008 while others were being bailed out.

At $300 billion it was valued higher than all of US auto manufacturing sans Tesla itself.

Rumours of possible S&P500 listing (declaring a quarterly profit would make it eligible for inclusion on the index - the biggest ever new entrant by market cap) caused price spikes. Spikes with significant volatility: during one session it traded up 15% only to close the day 2% down - with no significant news or announcements.

The $TSLA price ticker often makes the heady days of the 2017 Bitcoin bubble seem positively pedestrian. In this podcast Vitaliy Katsenelson hypothesizes that Tesla’s market cap has traveled through a wormhole from the future to the present.

📝 Here’s a writeup of the podcast and a 📝 link to his 37-page Tesla breakdown.

Although $TSLA is enjoying it’s own rollercoaster, markets in general remain frothy and difficult to parse. The What Goes Up team attempt to read the confounding tea-leaves with Rob Arnott, chairman and co-founder of Research Affiliates, who’s spent a lot of time studying market bubbles.

📊 Entry Level

Experience requirements for software engineering jobs listed in India according to this analysis using python screenscraping.

Credit

🔥🐸 Boil The Frog

Paul Lamere creates music recommenders at Spotify. Here’s a cool tool he created called “Boil the Frog” which can “Create a (nearly) seamless playlist between (almost) any two artists”

Here it took twenty hops to go from classical composer Johann Sebastian Bach to independent rapper Immortal Technique.

(Michael Jackson –> Nirvana was just 6 hops).

🎧Try it

🦠🧼🖐💦⚕ Greenzone

Ryan Lynn

🎨 Covid Noir Stephen Bach

💬🤔 Beliefs

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

🐘 Ele..what?

fewer things bring me more joy than people in the Middle Ages trying to guess what an elephant looks like pic.twitter.com/dXaXoOJ6Rq

— Owl! at the Library 😴🧙‍♀️ (@SketchesbyBoze) June 28, 2020

🎨👴🏽👵🏽 Forever Always

“Forever Always”, Octavio Ocampo, Paint, 1943

☄️🌌 Open Skies

This 40-image conglomerate, digitally enhanced, was captured a few days ago by Zixuan Lin through the dark skies of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia, China. It shows the magnificence of comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)’s two tails, ions and dust. [MORE]

Per Phil Plait:

We find the vast majority of exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars — indirectly. But some we see smiling for the camera. Here is an ACTUAL IMAGE of two planets orbiting a star very much like the Sun, the first time this has been done!

He explains the phenomenon in greater detail in 📝this post, where he also calls out this short simulation showing the orbits of the newly analysed star system.

💰 Oh…and one more thing

Change in richest person per country over 2 decades (Click the GIF if it’s stopped)

[OC] The race amongst the richest billionaire from every country over the past 20 years. from r/dataisbeautiful

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