Madoff is condemned. Good, he is the biggest swindler of all time. However, in this Madoff case the real question is: isn’t our western society a huge Ponzi scheme? Specifically, aren’t our insurances huge Ponzi schemes (Pension, unemployment, health (Medicare), but also finance, car and home insurances)?
The founding principle of an insurance is: the ones (young, employed, rich and healthy) pay for the others, provided that most people are young, employed, and healthy*. Even for private insurances (cars, home…) the principle is the same, everybody contributes, only a few people need insurance reimbursements. That is, some pay for the others. So what is the link with a Ponzi scheme? “Newcomers pay for the old ones”. Yes, it is the same!

I have been using Twitter only for a couple of months and I love it. Here is why.

The twittosphere is a thinkosphere

A tweet pretends to be an answer to the question “what are you doing?”. But clearly people answer the questions “What are you thinking about?”. For instance they post a link to an article they are reading, they post a link to a blog post they wrote. They tell you what they like or dislike.
At some point people were indeed telling what they were doing. A lot of tweets as fascinating as “I am eating an apple” or “I am going to brush my teeth” were made. But, as you guess, this quickly bored people and so they started elevating the debate, by speaking about technology, politics, news etc.
So Twitter is a set of thoughts. It is a sphere of thoughts, it is a … thinkosphere. I have been (slowly) developing a website called ThinkoSphere for a few years now. So you see why I can only love Twitter. For those who wonder, I’ll come back in a future post on the main similarities and differences between ThinkoSphere and Twitter. Twitter is called a microblogging application. Well, a micropost for a blog is nothing else than a thought. A tweet is a “Quantum of thought”, taking the expression from this very good article: The Future of Social Media: Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought? by Wired.

[EDIT 27/02/2010] A good article by Der Spiegel about the The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447.

When I started the blog post series about autopilots, I did not think flight control systems would become that of a hot subject. And seen the horrible tragedy of Air France flight AF447, I would have preferred it to remain a technical subject for specialist and not something that is in all the media.