Learning and Earning week 6

My sixth week of @matkodurko's What did I learn yesterday? challenge, based on an idea by Tim Ferriss ('Tools of Titans' book).

• Mon 28 - Amber the red panda escaped from Belfast zoo (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-47026062) but didn't get far. Apart from an excuse to show pictures of red pandas, the story is notable for the police's press release:
  When the animal went missing, police said it was believed to be "taking in the sights of beautiful Glengormley". They warned motorists to be vigilant as "our curious friend has not yet learned the green cross code".
  
  This may not count as learning, but red pandas are always worth a picture
• Tue 29 - More gas has been found underneath the North Sea. You'd think this was good news for the UK, with the impending national economic suicide, but the find is owned by a Chinese state company. because decades ago the conservative government privatised all of our national assets, mineral rights, etc. to pay for another election cycle of tax cuts. Sigh.
• Wed 30 - Read a whole lot about Unified Modelling Language and the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge book. There was some useful stuff about different diagram types, but most of this wasn't new stuff, so much as understanding the formal structure of the knowledge. All part of prepping for a job interview, which went well, thanks...
• Thu 31 - Boffins studying moon rock brought back by an Apollo mission in the 60's have found flakes of rock which appear to come from Earth. Popular theory is that the moon was once a part of Earth and got pinged out into space by a particularly nifty cosmic pool shot. This flake is from a later period - about 4 billion years ago, so 1/2 billion years after the moon was formed, and was effectively the result of a second shot in the same game. At which point I wonder whether anybody has sunk the black yet?
  ScienceMag
• Fri 1 - Listened to an article about the evolution of the written alphabet, thanks to link posted by @anaerwu here. Answered a couple of the questions I've mused over in museums, but still not the basic question of why there is an alphabetical order?
  Useful Charts
• Sat 2 - Apparently there's no point worrying about internet corporations taking your data, as they have no idea what to do with it. Yes, there are hackers trying to steal it to defraud you, but they get that data from company databases where it's stacking up like crates in that giant warehouse at the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark.
  A friend sent me this link which is an amusing read, especially on how all the recommendation engines aren't just rubbish, but they need to be rubbish for commercial reasons. Netflix is the example and it's a compelling argument. If the recommendations are too good, you will only get a few and they will probably be very good. But if they're bad (when you're a new customer and there's not much data to work with) they may be so off-target that you stop watching and unsubscribe. Instead they need a recommendation engine that pushes you to stuff that's okay enough to sit through, so that the next night you go back and watch another whatever-it-is.
  It also points to an article saying that Pandora's recommendation engine is very good because it takes a different approach to cater for a subtly different form of consumption.
• Sun 3 - Discovered that the rules for Merchants of Venus we were taught by friends way back when were not exactly as written in the rule book. This has set my next game review back a week as I'll have to learn how to play the damn game again...