Pedro A. Taboada

Stubb: Ukraine is killing 30–35k Russians a month; Russia can’t replace losses. About 95% of kills are by drones. Ukraine is retaking ground and in March launched more drones/missiles at Russia than vice versa. This isn’t charity anymore — the West needs Ukraine’s know-how. 1/

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years. Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered: Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures. Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing. He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success: The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren. He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above. His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics. He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades. The results split into three groups. The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives. And the bottom group? By any measure, failures. The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic. It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families. Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity. There's a concept called "capitalization rate." It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing? In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college. If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else. Here's something stranger. Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team: January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th... 11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March. This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too. Why? The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st. When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated. So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games. We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest. Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best. Self-fulfilling prophecy. The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero. We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar. Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college. 11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity. Now here's the part about math. Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing. Some people say it's genetic. It's not. It's attitudinal. When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it. When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't. Here's the proof. The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes. It's so long most kids don't finish it. A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed. Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance. The correlation was 0.98. In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high. If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time. If they can do it, they're good at math. Why do Asian cultures have this attitude? Gladwell's theory: rice farming. His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays. A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year. Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work. There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry." His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry." If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup. When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly. Now consider distance running. In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day. In the United States, that number is probably 5,000. Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%. Kenya's is probably 95%. The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention. Here's the most fascinating finding. 30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability. Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email. This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability. How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood? You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead. 80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs. By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership. Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle. They say it's the reason they succeeded. A disadvantage that became an advantage. Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand: When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability. We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become. We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table. We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair. The capitalization argument is liberating. It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation. It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out. If we choose to pay attention. This 60 minute Microsoft talk will teach you more about success than every self-help book you've ever read combined. Bookmark this & give it an hour today, no matter what.

Ante la pregunta ¿son los webinarios una buena herramienta educativa? Por mi mente pasan cosas como esta 👇

On the beach!🏖️😎

A wild optical illusion compilation makes the brain glitch from the first second 🧠

A 15-pound honey badger can survive a cobra bite that would kill a full-grown man in under two hours. Then it finishes eating the snake. A biology grad student at the University of Minnesota wanted to know how. She needed badger blood to find out, and the only samples she could get were from two American zoos in San Diego and Indiana. What she found in the DNA was one tiny change. There's a small socket on your muscle cells that your nerves plug into to tell your muscles to move. Cobra venom kills you by jamming that socket shut, so your lungs stop working. The honey badger's socket has a swapped-out amino acid that gives it a positive electrical charge. Cobra venom is also positively charged. Like magnets pointing the wrong way, the venom gets pushed off before it can lock in, and the muscles keep firing. The same workaround showed up separately in hedgehogs and pigs. Mongooses got there too, with a slightly different molecular trick. Four different animals with no shared ancestor all arrived at the same solution because venomous snakes kept biting them for millions of years. That only covers snakes like cobras and mambas. Puff adders work differently, destroying tissue instead of paralyzing muscle, and the DNA trick doesn't help there. So when a puff adder lands a solid bite, the badger collapses into a kind of coma for two or three hours. Then it wakes up groggy and eats the snake anyway. The skin is maybe the unfairest part of all this. It's about a quarter inch thick, rubbery, and so loose it fits like a wetsuit two sizes too big. A lion can clamp its jaws on a honey badger and the badger will twist halfway around inside its own skin and start clawing the lion's face while still in its mouth. Bee stingers barely get through. Porcupine quills don't either. Which brings us back to the bees in that photo. They're annoying. A few sneak through to the face, and enough stings have killed honey badgers in the wild. Honey badgers still die. But they're running three different defense systems at the same time, and one of them is a genetic lottery ticket evolution has pulled four times.

Tennis players live 9.7 years longer than sedentary people. Not 9.7 months. 9.7 years. Nearly a decade. The Copenhagen City Heart Study tracked 8,577 people for 25 years and ranked every sport by how much life it adds. Badminton: 6.2 years. Soccer: 4.7. Cycling: 3.7. Swimming: 3.4. Jogging: 3.2. Tennis almost triples jogging. A separate study of 80,000 adults found racket sports cut all-cause mortality by 47% and cardiovascular death by 56%. Swimming hit 41%. Aerobics hit 36%. The question is why racket sports destroy everything else. Three mechanisms stack on top of each other. First, the physical demands. A tennis rally requires explosive sprints, lateral cuts, and sustained aerobic output. You're training fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers simultaneously. Most cardio only trains one system. Second, the cognitive load. You're reading spin, predicting angles, adjusting position, and executing motor patterns in real-time. Your brain is solving spatial puzzles at 80+ mph. That hand-eye coordination and strategic processing builds neural connections that protect against cognitive decline. Third, and this is the one researchers keep coming back to: you literally cannot play alone. Every racket sport requires another person on the other side of the net. That forced social interaction triggers neurochemical benefits that solitary exercise cannot replicate. Strong social connection alone increases your chance of longevity by 50%. Jogging is you and your thoughts. Tennis is you, a strategic opponent, and a community. Dr. Daniel Amen is right. The data is overwhelming. If you want the single highest-ROI activity for a longer life, pick up a racket.

El gran Tony Espigares nos habla de cómo manifestar lo que quieres. Toma nota. Cuaderno y Lápiz.

En un restaurante de kebabs en Alemania, regalan uno gratis si paras el cronómetro en el segundo 10. Un niño lo consiguió…

Another blow to American interests due to Trump‘s capricious threats, and his loyalty to Putin, will be ending the dependence much of the world had on US weapons, starting with Europe and the Gulf states. One of the many pax Americana benefits Trump is throwing away.

El CERN acaba de transportar antimateria en un camión. Apenas 92 antiprotones. Un grano de sal tiene1.200.000.000.000.000.000 átomos. Si algo hubiera salido mal, no habría explotado, simplemente se habría desaparecido en un parpadeo de luz

Asistimos desde hace tiempo a una “tontuna” mayúscula en el lenguaje, no solo científico, sino general con el uso de anglicismos prescindibles que parecen aportar un toque más “fashion” a la conversación. 🤓 Abro 🧵 con ejemplo -real- reciente: 👇🏻 #oncologia #StopSpanglish

“ADHD is not a disorder of not knowing what to do. It’s a disorder of not doing what you already know.” Dr. Russell Barkley just delivered one of the clearest explanations of ADHD I’ve ever heard. He says the brain can be split in two: the back part acquires knowledge, the front part (the executive system) uses it. ADHD acts like a meat cleaver that severs the two. You already have the skills and information other people your age have. You just can’t apply them when it counts. That’s why life becomes an endless series of last-minute crises. You’re time-blind — you can only deal with what’s right in front of you. The further away a goal or deadline is, the less real it feels. The solution isn’t teaching more skills. It’s changing the environment at the exact point where the problem occurs — the “point of performance.” It’s a game-changing way to understand why traditional approaches often fail.

En “Cinema Paradiso”, es imposible no convertirse en un mar de lágrimas cuando Salvatore descubre que todos aquellos besos censurados por el cura del pueblo en su infancia, fueron guardados por Alfredo, el proyeccionista. Uno de los momentos meta más bellos de la historia del cine.

Lo pijoúltimo de @IgnacioIsusi y sus amigos Bosco y Pelayo. Lo dicho el otro día: sigo siendo un fan.

Mark Sykes jamás vio el infierno que acababa de crear. El aristócrata británico murió repentinamente de gripe española en París en 1919, con apenas 39 años de edad, justo cuando se preparaba para asistir a la trascendental conferencia de paz de Versalles.

La revelación causó un auténtico terremoto en el mundo árabe. Los líderes beduinos se dieron cuenta de que habían sido utilizados como simple carne de cañón, pero, tras la victoria aliada, ya era demasiado tarde. Los ejércitos europeos ocuparon toda la región.

Pero la deslealtad no terminó ahí. En 1917, los británicos emitieron la Declaración Balfour. Prometieron a la comunidad judía un hogar nacional en Palestina, entregando por tercera vez una tierra que ya habían prometido a los árabes y a los propios aliados internacionales.

Pero todo era una farsa monumental. Mientras los árabes morían en las ardientes arenas del desierto creyendo que luchaban por su libertad, dos diplomáticos europeos se reunían en elegantes despachos de Londres para trazar un mapa completamente distinto al acordado.