Via The Conversation: "The internet currently accesses about 15 zettabytes of data, and is growing at a rate of 70 terabytes per second. It is an admittedly leaky vessel, and content is constantly going offline to wind up lost forever.
Massive and desperate efforts are underway to preserve whatever is worth preserving, but even sorting out what is and what is not is itself a formidable undertaking. What will be of value in 10 years – or 50 years? And how to preserve it?
Acid-free paper can last 500 years; stone inscriptions even longer. But magnetic media like hard drives have a much shorter life, lasting only three to five years. They also need to be copied and verified on a very short life cycle to avoid data degradation at observed failure rates between 3% and 8% annually."
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The Prisoner (1967) Brit TV show, episode 1 "Arrival".
Via Yes!: "According to the 2019 World Happiness Report, negative feelings are rising around the world—and the United States is particularly hard hit with an 'epidemic of addictions.' Tellingly, the report also shows a widening happiness gap, with some people reporting much more well-being and others showing much less within each country. Released annually on the International Day of Happiness, the World Happiness Report ranks countries based on their life satisfaction in the Gallup World Poll. Residents rate how satisfied they are with their lives on a scale of zero to 10, from the worst possible life to the best possible life. This year, the most satisfied country was Finland, followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Netherlands. [...]
One trend is very clear: Negative feelings—worry, sadness, and anger—have been rising around the world, up by 27 percent from 2010 to 2018. [...]
One thing is certain, says Sachs: 'The U.S. is suffering an epidemic of addictions.' This includes an addiction to technology, which researcher Jean Twenge largely blames for the worrying mental health trends among U.S. adolescents. In her chapter of the report, she argues that screen time is displacing activities that are key to our happiness, like in-person social contact. Forty-five percent of adolescents are online 'almost constantly,' and the average high school senior spends six hours a day texting, on social media or on the internet. But we’re hooked on more than just technology. According to researcher Steve Sussman, around half of Americans suffer from at least one addiction. Some of the most prevalent are alcohol, food, and work—which each affect around 10 percent of adults—as well as drugs, gambling, exercise, shopping, and sex."
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Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics. Authors: Charlotte Brand, Alberto Acerbi, Alex Mesoudi.
Emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics
Cultural evolution April 25th, 2019
Via Center for Open Science: "The cultural dynamics of music has recently become a popular avenue of research in the field of cultural evolution, reflecting a growing interest in art and popular culture more generally. Just as biologists seek to explain population-level trends in genetic evolution in terms of micro-evolutionary processes such as selection, drift and migration, cultural evolutionists have sought to explain population-level cultural phenomena in terms of underlying social, psychological and demographic factors. Primary amongst these factors are learning biases, describing how cultural items are socially transmitted from person to person. As big datasets become more openly available and workable, and statistical modelling techniques become more powerful, efficient and user-friendly, describing population-level dynamics in terms of simple, individual-level learning biases is becoming more feasible. Here we test for the presence of learning biases in two large datasets of popular song lyrics dating from 1965-2015. We find some evidence of content bias, prestige bias and success bias in the proliferation of negative lyrics, and suggest that negative expression of emotions in music, and perhaps art generally, provides an avenue for people to not only process and express their own negative emotions, but also benefit from the knowledge that prestigious others experience similarly negative emotions as they do."
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From an altitude of 255 miles, an Expedition 59 crewmember photographed the Richat Structure, or the "Eye of the Sahara," in northwestern Mauritania. The circular geologic feature is thought to be caused by an uplifted dome—geologists would classify it as a domed anticline—that has been eroded to expose the originally flat rock layers.
Via Quartz: "...a team of psychology researchers began to challenge his ideas using a technique called paradoxical thinking. The premise is simple: Instead of presenting evidence that contradicts someone’s deeply held views, a psychologist agrees with the participant, then takes their views further, stretching their arguments to absurdity. This causes the participant to pause, reconsider, and reframe their own beliefs."
"When the Organ Played 'O Promise Me' " (1943) by Cecil Stokes.
"When the Organ Played 'O Promise Me' " (1943)
Auroratone by British filmmaker Cecil Stokes March 27th, 2019
Via YouTube: "This is an Auroratone produced and created by British filmmaker Cecil Stokes for use in the treatment of mental disorders - definitely a kinder, gentler alternative to the electric-shock treatments which were then in vogue! The soundtrack features Bing Crosby and organist Eddie Dunstedter. An online biography of Bing Crosby notes that he was a shareholder in Mr. Stokes' Auroratone Foundation. It also notes that Mr. Crosby made exclusive recordings of Ave Maria, Home on the Range, and When You Wish Upon a Star, for Auroratones, but there's no mention of this film's soundtrack When the Organ Played Oh Promise Me. It's possible that Mr. Stokes used a recording that Bing and Mr. Dunstedter had made several years earlier. [...]
Regarding the films themselves, I've found scant information other than a few mentions in psychiatric journals from the period. Several websites devoted to experimental film do mention Mr. Stokes and briefly describe his work and technique, but none of them offer any visual examples at all. One website promises to teach you how to create The Auroratone Effect for a fee - but its preview shows a modern re-creation only. It appears that my YouTube clip is currently the only example of an original Cecil Stokes Auroratone that exists on the internet anywhere."
Thanks to Jan Wagner !
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Anna Karenina is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer based in São Paulo, Brazil.
Via TED: "When we needlessly apologize, we end up making ourselves small and diminish what we’re trying to express, says sociologist Maja Jovanovic. [...]
Jovanovic, who teaches at McMaster University and Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, became interested in this topic when she attended a conference four years ago. The four women on a panel were, she says, 'experts in their chosen fields. Among them, they had published hundreds of academic articles, dozens of books. All they had to do was introduce themselves. The first woman takes a microphone and she goes, ‘I don’t know what I could possibly add to this discussion’ … The second woman takes the microphone and says, ‘Oh my gosh, I thought they sent the email to the wrong person. I’m just so humbled to be here.’' The third and fourth women did the same thing.
During the 25 panels at that week-long conference, recalls Jovanovic, 'not once did I hear a man take that microphone and discount his accomplishments or minimize his experience. Yet every single time a woman took a microphone, an apologetic tone was sure to follow.' She adds, 'I found it enraging; I also found it heartbreaking.' [...]
We can eliminate the sorrys from our sentences — and still be considerate. The next time you bump into someone, Jovanovic says, 'you could say, ‘Go ahead,’ ‘After you’ or ‘Pardon me.’ Similarly, during a meeting, Jovanovic says, 'instead of saying, ‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ why not try ‘How about,’ ‘I have an idea,’ ‘I’d like to add’ or ‘Why don’t we try this?’ The idea is to be polite while not minimizing yourself.
The sorrys that fill our written interactions also need to be noticed — and banished. For emails, Jovanovic says, 'There’s a Google Chrome plug-in called just not sorry that will alert you to all the needless apologies.' With texts, she points out, 'Every single one of us has responded to a text you got when you weren’t able to respond right away. What did you say? ‘Sorry.’' She says, 'Don’t apologize — say, ‘I was working,’ ‘I was reading,’ ‘I was driving, ‘I was trying to put on Spanx.’ Whatever it is, it’s all good. You don’t have to apologize.'
And, in some of the instances when we’d typically throw in a sorry, we could just use the two magic words: thank you.
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"Midnight Ballet"/ 24"x 24"/ oil on wood by Kisung Koh.
Deep Work
How to Actually, Truly Focus on What You’re Doing January 27th, 2019
Via The New York Times: "The first rule is to 'work deeply.' The idea here is that if you want to successfully integrate more deep work into your professional life, you cannot just wait until you find yourself with lots of free time and in the mood to concentrate. You have to actively fight to incorporate this into your schedule. It helps, for example, to include deep work blocks on my calendar like meetings or appointments and then protect them as you would a meeting or appointment. [...]
The second rule is to 'embrace boredom.' The broader point here is that the ability to concentrate is a skill that you have to train if you expect to do it well. A simple way to get started training this ability is to frequently expose yourself to boredom. If you instead always whip out your phone and bathe yourself in novel stimuli at the slightest hint of boredom, your brain will build a Pavlovian connection between boredom and stimuli, which means that when it comes time to think deeply about something (a boring task, at least in the sense that it lacks moment-to-moment novelty), your brain won’t tolerate it. [...]
The third rule is to 'quit social media.' The basic idea is that people need to be way more intentional and selective about what apps and services they allow into their digital lives. If you only focus on possible advantages, you’ll end up, like so many of us today, with a digital life that’s so cluttered with thrumming, shiny knots of distraction pulling at our attention and manipulating our moods that we end up a shell of our potential. In Deep Work, I introduced this idea mainly to help professionals protect their ability to focus, but it hit a nerve, and eventually evolved into the popular digital minimalism movement that I’ve been writing about more recently. For example, I’ve never had a social media account, and though I may have missed out on various small advantages here and there, I’m convinced that it has had large positive impacts on my professional output and personal satisfaction. [...]
'Shallow work' is my term for anything that doesn’t require uninterrupted concentration. This includes, for example, most administrative tasks like answering email or scheduling meetings. If you allow your schedule to become dominated by shallow work, you’ll never find time to do the deep efforts that really move the needle. It’s really important, therefore, that you work to aggressively minimize optional shallow work and then be very organized and productive about how you execute what remains. It’s not that shallow work is bad, but that its opposite, deep work, is so valuable that you have to do everything you can to make room for it."
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Hundred Largest Islands of the World by David Garcia.
Advertising as a Major Source of Human Dissatisfaction
Via University of Warwick: "Advertising is ubiquitous in modern life. Yet might it be harmful to the happiness of nations? This paper blends longitudinal data on advertising with large-scale surveys on citizens’ well-being. The analysis uses information on approximately 1 million randomly sampled European citizens across 27 nations over 3 decades. We show that increases in national advertising expenditure are followed by significant declines in levels of life satisfaction. [...]
Further research remains desirable. Nevertheless, our empirical results are some of the first to be consistent with the hypothesis that, perhaps by fostering unending desires, high levels of advertising may depress societal well-being."
Via Kent Hendricks: "Contrary to popular belief, violent movies actually lead to a slight decline in violence, because, even though people who are likely to commit violent crimes enjoy watching violent movies, they don’t commit violent crimes while sitting in a movie theater. Over a decade, the violent movies led to the direct decline of roughly 1,000 assaults every weekend. (New York Times)
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The fake smile—the kind you do for a posed photograph—didn’t exist until the eighteenth century, when the upper classes could afford the services of dentists. (Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain)
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There are strict rules about conversation that cross all languages and cultural boundaries. Of all yes-or-no questions, 75% receive a “yes” and 25% receive a “no.” It takes about 150 milliseconds to respond with “yes,” or “no.” At 650 milliseconds the listener responds with “I don’t know,” and at 835 milliseconds, they’ll say “huh?” or the original speaker will repeat the question. Additionally, the words “uh” and “um” occur about once every 60 words (50 for men and 70 for women), and “uh” is followed by a 250 millisecond pause, while “um” is followed by 670 millisecond pause. (N. J. Enfield, How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation)
People spend roughly one hour each day traveling or commuting, regardless of city size or form of transportation. This is called Marchetti’s constant. Whenever faster forms of transportation have been invented—the domestication of horses, the invention of trains, cars, and then planes—people do not reduce the amount of time spent commuting, they simply commute farther. Walking speed is around 5 km per hour, so the maximum size of a walking city is roughly 20 square kilometers; there are no large ancient cities built prior to 1800 larger than this. As transportation has become faster, and transportation networks have expanded, the physical size of cities has expanded in direct proportion. When people spend less time commuting or work at home, they make up for in it other days, including by going on walks that last as long as the remaining time that would be allotted for commutes. Even people stuck within the confines of prison spend around an hour a day walking around. (Wikipedia)"
