Free Apps that I Love: Perplexity and Polymarket

There is no issue that I don’t run by both Perplexity and Polymarket these days. Here are some examples.

Pandemics and Percent of Population Dead

I have started to return to some of my ID books from the 1990s, including The Great Influenza, Pandemics, and Plagues. This is good stuff that I cut my teeth on as an ID fellow. I read that the Black Death Pandemic in the 1340s killed 50-60% of Europe. (By the way, 90-95% of Native Americans were killed by European infectious diseases).

Spanish flu killed 2.78% of the population, and Covid killed 0.0876%. Don’t trust me? Check out Perplexity.ai and find out.

Perplexity

Google AI is disappointing and biased. I have found Perplexity to be a better search engine, but it is still biased. For instance, ask it to support a point, and it will, and ask it to pick apart a point.

Did you know that Covid caused a strain of influenza to be eradicated from global circulation? A good thing that Covid did to the world!

Next time you want to search, try Perplexity.

Polymarket

There has been a lot of fake news about Avian Influenza, so I wanted to know what the betting market says about the chance of a bird flu pandemic.

Polymarket is an Ethereum-based stablecoin betting market that requires a non-US internet IP address. It called the presidential election before the news networks and is a lot of fun if you are interested in what people are willing to bet on.

Above, you can see a 3% chance of a bird flu pandemic in the next month and a 14% chance that it will happen in the next 7 months. I’d fade that bet, but it is not worth getting stablecoin and a non-US IP address.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to bet on what will happen.