Borges´ memory was famously prodigious. But just as exceptional was his appetite for books. If you read his lectures or transcribed dialogues, you will feel that he has read everything He could cite the most obscure writers of any epoch and region by heart. Persian myth, medieval German writers, ancient Japanese poets or monks, Scottish folklorists, theologians and heresiarchs, belonging to antiquity, the Middle Ages or recent times. You name it. And then he would relate all of those with daily occurrences. He would hear a rhyme from a street peddler, find in it an implicit philosophical paradox and recite a verse from ancient Carthage or a medieval Chinese tractate to provide a solution. He also had a penetrating intuition, and his conclusions, reached by himself through personal intuition and later woven into his stories, often turn out to be confirmed by later scientific research. It´s hard to understand how he managed to grasp reality with such depth. It really seems as if his mind was of a greater order of complexity than that of mere mortals. In a way similar to Einstein´s.
I love these lectures, his sonorous, lilting voice and surprisingly acute comedic timing, like a native english speaker. Never never quite realised it until you put it down like that, just how he weaves a whole cloth out of these cross cultural threads.
If there are any other hidden gems, these dialogues for example, please do share!
I really enjoy his writing, which is why I really want to know what this might be:
"Asked about the Etruscans, Mr. Levine said he thought Mr. Mystal might be referring to one of his favorite anecdotes from Herodotus. It was actually about the Persians, he said. He fetched his copy of “The Histories” and read it to me.)"
From a section on Persian customs, somewhere in 130-135 of book one (which is as precise as my copy gets): “If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”
BQ doesn't have primary keys. Perhaps you are thinking of the id that can be supplied with the streaming insert? This has very loose guarantees on what is de-duplicated (~5m iirc)
yea I think within the context of BigQuery the most sensible thing would be to do an aggregate per the column that would be considered a primary key. For example [0]. That said, Streaming API de-dupe window is very nice in practice.
I mentioned elsewhere on Google Cloud the most elegant way of doing this is with Google Cloud Dataflow [1]
Whilst I'm not the target market (I enjoy cooking from scratch way too much), I think there are a few things wrong with the analysis:
- Surely this isn't the first business to make a loss on acquisition in expectation of breakeven. That in of itself doesn't make this untenable. I also feel that the Groupon analogy is a bit underbaked: Groupon (and the ilk) were also I suspect totally unsustainable for the end businesses.
- There is substantial scope for curation. This in & of itself may not not be enough of course, but this doesn't seem like total commodity land either. Also it isn't just about getting the ingredients bundled together. It is harder than you'd think making sure standard measures of stuff in the supermarket doesn't go to waste from spoilage when trying to cook whilst keeping repetition low. Optimising for this is probably an interesting and not super simple problem.
I've only been exposed to the UK variants. The above may not hold true for other places though.
