Non-Tech

It’s the Grim Reality of Frequent Work Travel: Health Problems. Travel is glamorous, except it also sucks when done in excess. My recent trip to Asia reaffirmed this. Sitting in a plane and eating airport food? Gross. And if this is part of your job? It’s about as awesome as being a long-haul truck driver. Number one tip on traveling is to eat healthy and exercise if possible. (NYTimes)
The American List. Believe it or not, we still actually make things in America. Great things. Have a look. (A Continuous Lean)
Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands. People like to talk shit on Excel. Fine, let them. Even though I’m a long time data scientist and analyst, I still think Excel is still the best tool for quick, ad hoc analysis of tabular data. Hands down. Show me how you can build a better tool for quick analysis using a dataframe. I’ll wait while you do that, meanwhile getting my answers in Excel. Do you need ad hoc answers, or want to build an overly complicated monstrosity of a financial report? Go for it in Excel. Just don’t blame the tool. Blame the user. (WSJ)
NATO Officially Developing Offensive Strategies For Cyber Warfare. Welcome to the new age. (Inquisitr)

Tech

Want to Understand Blockchains? Start Experimenting. Like it or not, the technology underlying Bitcoin is here to stay. And it holds promise of totally changing nearly everything. Just like the first version of the Internet did before it. Paying attention and hacking at it are the best ways to learn where it goes from here. (Hackernoon)
The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover: desi, agnostic, politically independent and… work in progress. When language changes frequently, depending on location, it becomes real work to tie it together for a voice assistant. Very good story on how the Alexa team embarked on training Alexa in one of the world’s hardest language areas (FactorDaily)
Expensify sent images with personal data to Mechanical Turkers, calls it a feature. As an Expensify user, I always wondered how they were able to classify my receipts so accurately. My receipts were all very hodgepodge images (some handwritten), so the training data must have either been immense, or…someone was involved. Now it makes sense. (ArsTechnica)
There’s an implosion of early-stage VC funding, and no one’s talking about it. Money is getting tight for early stage. Understand why. (TechCrunch)