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Gift link: https://on.ft.com/44rGTG4

It depends on what content you watch on TikTok. Many comedy content creators on TikTok have identical, mirrored copies of their content on Instagram (an example is Leenda Dong, who has been very popular on both TikTok and Instagram).

This was also tested in practice in India, when the country banned TikTok in 2020. Rest of World published a report in 2023 with the conclusion that most users simply switched to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts without much complaint, just as the previous commenter predicted: https://restofworld.org/2023/america-india-tiktok-ban/

Literacy is essential to living in society without getting scammed or taken advantage of.

There's a scene in Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" that illustrates practical necessity of reading comprehension for the average person, where a grandmother tells a mother to save enough money over time and make sure the granddaughter can read. An excerpt follows:

--

"Will it work, this saving?"

"I swear by the Holy Mother it will."

"Then why haven't you ever saved enough money to buy land?"

"I did. When we first landed, I had a star bank. It took me ten years to save that first fifty dollars. I took the money in my hand and went to a man in the neighborhood of whom it was said that he dealt fairly with people who bought land. He showed me a beautiful piece of earth and told me in my own language; 'This is thine!' He took my money and gave me a paper. I could not read. Later, I saw men building the house of another on my land. I showed them my paper. They laughed at me with pity in their eyes. It was that the land had not been the man's to sell. It was ... how do you say it in the English ... a schwindle."

"Swindle."

"Ai. People like us, known as greenhorns from the old country, were often robbed by men such as he because we could not read. But you have education. First you will read on the paper that the land is yours. Only then will you pay."

--

Yes, you can certainly be relatively more educated than you started by going to school, even if you are not literate by the end. But reading comprehension and literacy is a crucial skill that has practical value for living a better life.

I've been part of a space industry non-profit that partners with the Government of Canada to put experiments run by students on planes that do "parabolic flights" to simulate "weightlessness" while falling. Around when I first started, I proposed writing the term "zero gravity" on a webpage we were updating. But as my supervisor adamantly noted at the time, that would have been inaccurate.

The convention was to never use the term "zero gravity," since using that term would perpetuate a common misunderstanding. Instead, we've used the term "microgravity" in its place—which makes sense, as there are still small gravitational forces acting on every object in space.

NASA also published a webpage with a good explanation of what microgravity is, with a nice diagram of how it works (including a visual of the parabolic flight): https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/for-kids-and-student...

The headline chosen by the publication can give the impression that the selection of Excel as the data management tool over alternatives caused the problem, but the core issue appears to be poor record-keeping in general.

From the article: “The way Vowles and technical director Pat Fry reportedly recounted it, Williams has been using a spreadsheet that grew to include some 20,000 parts used to make its cars. […] Not only was this system amateurish and unnavigable (making it unsuitable for the hectomillion-dollar sport that is F1), it was also desperately lacking in important logistical info. […] The team reportedly didn't have a central resource that tracked what parts cost, how long they took to make, or even how many they had or where they were stored. This forced production staff to search for parts whose location hadn't been documented, wasting valuable time.”

Though PostgreSQL or another database tool would be a better fit for complex datasets, I’m curious if Excel could still effectively be used for a database like this one.

I’ve known a couple people who use Excel a lot for their work, and they’d probably tell me that having over 20,000 rows of data isn’t necessarily unmanageable, if the implementation is well-designed.

I'm glad to hear that "Postwar" by Judt has a great audio recording, as I've read that the is book highly recommended by academic historians. This puts it next on my listening list (other books on my list about the 20th Century include "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes and "Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze" by Harmsen).

I'm struggling to think of a top three list from audiobooks alone in terms of memorability and enjoyment, but I can list a few that had a measurable impact on my life.

1. "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" by Haruki Murakami, narrated by Ray Porter (coincidentally, also the narrator for the Bobiverse book you mentioned). This was a major influence of increasing my running volume and moving on to a more intense intermediate middle-distance program, and his experiences also gave me the motivation to push through discomfort in running and certain parts of life when necessary (with the ideas that "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional," and that even world-class elite runners have days when they don't feel like training, but they go out and do so anyway).

2. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, narrated by Sissy Spacek. This reading wasn't required by my school growing up, but I've wanted to read this book for several years due to its great reputation. The audiobook version helped me finally enjoy the book over a month or so. I still remember Atticus Finch's quote that "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view [...] until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it," and the idea helped navigate through some complicated negotiations and social situations at various times.

3. Various other classics (sneaking a bit around the limit of a top three). The audiobook version of Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" was an influence that led to an increased interest with space exploration and astronomy, and readings of Huxley's "Brave New World" and Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" helped me better appreciate the damaging effects of excessive escapism with entertainment, versus choosing efforts that require more struggle and difficulty.

I've also become more informed through listenings to Carreyrou's "Bad Blood" about the fall of Theranos, and Quinones's "Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic," though classic literature has interestingly been typically more relevant to my day-to-day life than non-fiction books so far, with the exception of certain memoirs such as Murakami's.