Karel Escobar

Columbus pitched this exact trip to Spain in 1492. He said it was a 3,500-mile journey. The real distance is more than 8,000 miles. He survived only because two entire continents nobody in Europe knew existed happened to be sitting in his path. The first mistake was a translation problem. Columbus was working off a calculation by a 9th-century Persian geographer named Al-Farghani, who said one degree around the Earth was about 57 miles. That was correct, but Al-Farghani measured in Arabic miles. Columbus assumed Roman miles. Same number, different ruler. Roman miles were shorter, so his version of Earth came out 25% smaller than the real one. Then he made it worse. He read Marco Polo and decided Asia ran way further east than anyone else thought. So he redrew his maps to match. Japan ended up sitting right next to the Azores, the Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic. The actual Japan is on the other side of the entire Pacific Ocean. He moved a whole country 8,000 miles to make his pitch work. Spain’s royal experts ran his numbers in 1486 and rejected him. They were right. They told Ferdinand and Isabella that Columbus had badly underestimated the size of the planet. He got funded six years later anyway, but not because his math improved. Spain’s long war at home had just ended, and they wanted in on the Asia trade before Portugal locked it up. A Greek librarian had already figured out the actual size of Earth in 240 BC. That puts him 1,700 years ahead of Columbus. The librarian was named Eratosthenes. He used a stick, a deep well in southern Egypt, and the angle of the noon sun on the longest day of the year. His answer: about 25,000 miles around. The real number is 24,901. He was off by maybe 1 to 2%, depending on the Greek length unit he was using. He did this with hand tools, almost 2,000 years before anyone built the first telescope. Columbus knew about that calculation. He just didn’t like it. The bigger number meant the trip was impossible. No 15th-century ship could carry enough food and water to sail 8,000 miles nonstop, let alone the 15,000-plus to actual eastern China. So he picked a smaller number that fit the boat. He got lucky. The Americas were in the way. The map in this post does work in a literal sense, but it cheats. Flat maps stretch everything sideways. Any east-west line looks straight on them, even when it actually curves on a globe. If you’ve ever flown to Tokyo, you’ve seen the flight path arc up over Russia on the seatback screen. The arc is the actual shortest route. Columbus’s plan was wrong. The map that makes it look possible is wrong in a different way.

33 años después, el enigma del virus Málaga por fin tiene respuesta. Ha sido muy emocionante cerrar el círculo. Gracias por acompañarme en esta historia. linkedin.com/pulse/dos-bytes…

German Chancellor Merz calls for single European stock exchange on.ft.com/4qdtue7

Falcon 9 completes its 500th landing after lifting off from pad 40 in Florida

Thomas Peterffy is the 23rd richest person in the world, a chief architect of modern finance, and has one of the most remarkable stories in business. Yet he remains virtually unknown. Born in a Budapest basement during a Soviet bombing raid in September 1944, his father left when he was 2, his mother couldn't hold a job, and for the first 20 years of his life, Peterffy lived in fear of starvation as an ‘enemy of the communist state.’ At 21, he escaped to New York. Within a year, he was drafted to fight in Vietnam. A sympathetic NYU dean saved him from the war. A chance encounter with programming opened the door to everything else. Over the next three decades, he transformed Wall Street's chaotic trading floors into computerized markets that worked on math. He invented options pricing theory before the Black-Scholes model, a handheld computer before the iPad, and the first automated trading system in Wall Street history. His firm, Timber Hill, became the largest options market maker on Earth. In 1993, he launched Interactive Brokers to give ordinary investors the same technological advantages he had built for himself. That business is now worth over $100 billion, and Peterffy owns 70% of it. It operates with higher profit margins than Visa while offering some of the lowest trading costs in the industry. The man who grew up where markets were forbidden devoted the rest of his life to building systems so everyone could participate in capitalism. At 80, he's still working on that mission every day. Thomas Peterffy is one of the most important people in finance, and you can learn about him in @domcooke's latest profile.

Californians now travel millions of miles each month in driverless taxis— After only two years, California’s driverless taxis now transport passengers for more than four million miles per month. Although they still make up only a fraction of taxi trips in the state, they are expanding quickly. This chart shows the monthly distance traveled in driverless trips in California. It measures the total number of passenger-miles, summing up the distance traveled by all passengers. In August 2023, California regulators fully approved self-driving taxi services in San Francisco for companies Cruise and Waymo. However, Cruise stopped operating in late 2023 due to safety and regulatory issues, so the recent growth reflects only Waymo’s service. Trips stayed under half a million miles per month until mid-2024. But since then, growth has taken off. Within a year, usage multiplied eightfold, climbing past four million miles by May 2025, the latest data available. (This Data Insight was written by @redouad and Veronika Samborska.)

> be Google in 2017 > small team drops “Attention Is All You Need” on arXiv > execs nod politely, go back to selling ads for socks > let Transformer gather dust for 5 yrs like a vintage Beanie Baby > be Noam Shazeer, OG wizard > quits, builds AI-boyfriend app “Character.AI” > millions of lonely hearts pay $9.99 to e-date 2B from Nier > Google HR: “any chance you wanna come back?” > Shazeer: “busy, my e-gf is calling” > 2022, OpenAI drops ChatGPT > world loses its mind, Google stock does bungee jump > Sundar holds all-hands: “guys, we need a response by Q2” > team ships Bard in 3 weeks using 12 interns, 2000 TPUv4s, and pure panic > Bard hallucinates that the earth is flat > Wall Street: “sell sell sell” > Sergey hears the screams from his yacht > flies back on a carbon-negative jet, reclaims unofficial crown > merges GoogleBrain + DeepMind like Dragon Ball fusion > axes Bard, slaps Gemini sticker on everything > Gemini launches, immediately generate a black Abraham Lincoln > Twitter dubs them “Bing’s woke cousin” > Shazeer finally answers HR’s 47th email >“fine, but I want my own parking spot and unlimited LaCroix” > returns, waves wand, Gemini 2 & 2.5 drop > context window so big it can summarise the Bible + your group chat > Google processing 980T tokens/month, equal to 40 % of human SMS traffic > someone sneezes “Nano Banana” into the Play Store > overnight it’s #1 app, turns ur selfie into big-tiddy anime waifu