Quote of the day:
You can’t turn off touch. It never goes away. You can close your eyes and imagine what it’s like to be blind, and you can stop up your ears and imagine what it’s like to be deaf. But touch is so central and ever-present in our lives that we can’t imagine losing it.
~DAVID LINDEN, author of Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind
THE MIND
What a child can teach a smart computer, WSJ | Tweet
Everyone knows that Alan Turing
helped to invent the very idea of computation. Almost no one remembers that he also thought that the key to intelligence would be to design a machine that was like a child, not an adult. He pointed out, presciently, that the real secret to human intelligence is our ability to learn.
CREATIVITY
‘You are sooo random!’- Randomness & Creativity Research [The Mating Mind
], The Creativity Post | Tweet
Creativity does not only involve looser association, defocused or focused attention, lack of fixedness, etc. (suggested in literature), but most likely it is about being flexible, and knowing (either consciously and/or subconsciously) what is functional and when.
SCIENCE
9 Surprising facts about the sense of touch, Vox | Tweet
Touch is perhaps the most overlooked sense. Every one of us receives tactile information about the world around us every second of the day. Right now, if you’re sitting, your butt is being squished into your chair. Your fingertips are probably touching a mouse, or swiping the glass of your phone. All this information is so omnipresent, in fact, that the only way to make sense of it is to tune most of it out — you probably weren’t paying attention to these sensations until you read those words.
BUSINESS
Netflix’s secret special algorithm is a human, The New Yorker | Tweet
On the opening night of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, two films, as usual, had their premières, gaining maximum exposure to reporters and critics. The first was “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” a documentary about the singer and civil-rights icon Nina Simone
. It was funded by Netflix, based at least in part on data the company collects about its users: information about what we watch, when we watch, how highly we rate what we’ve seen, and even when we hit rewind.
The business of fake diplomas, Priceonomics | Tweet
With a four-year college degree generally averaging around $80,000, a diploma is the most expensive piece of paper most people ever earn. Though it’s just a flimsy sliver of dead tree embossed with a stamp and signed by the lords of higher education, it’s also a symbol of the hard work — the blood, sweat, and tears — that went into being admitted. Unless, of course, you purchase your certificate from one of the dozens of websites offering fake diplomas for as little as $400.
TECHNOLOGY
New dating apps cut the chase, set up dates quickly, LA Times | Tweet
People poring over profiles to separate the cream from the creeps, messaging back and forth for weeks or months with potential partners, investing energy trying to impress only to meet in person and realize in an instant there’s no personal chemistry — for many, it felt like a waste of time. But, Peters thought, if you can tell in half a minute of meeting someone whether there’s chemistry, then why not cut to the chase and just meet up?
SUCCESS
The key to long-term success in one day daily formula [The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness]
, Quartz | Tweet
Change doesn’t usually happen in big waves; it’s really, really unlikely that one thing you do today will be the difference between success and failure in the long run. Instead, success and failure usually happen little by little, over time, when you consistently do the small things that add up to big results in the long run.
BOOKS
Philip Anschutz: billionaire, philantropist, investor–and now, author, Business Journal | Tweet
He’s out with a book, Out Where the West Begins: Profiles, Visions & Strategies of Early Western Business Leaders
published by Cloud Camp Press. It’s a collection of historical narratives about 50 men who shaped the modern American West, movers and shakers of the period from 1800 — just before the Louisiana Purchase — to 1920. They were bankers and miners, railroad men, marketeers —people like Henry Wells and James Fargo, Fred Harvey, Levi Strauss and Adolph Coors.
WRITING
S.L. Huang: On the subject of unlikable women protagonists, Terrible Minds | Tweet
I love asshole protagonists. Or rather, I love a particular breed of them: protagonists who are brusque and violent, egotistical and snarky, but when the chips are down and the friends they’d never admit they care about are in danger, they’ll break the world to save them. Characters like Tony Stark, Sherlock Holmes, the Doctor, Rodney McKay, Spike, Wolverine, Artemis Fowl, Dean Winchester…
The external story vs. the internal story, Romance University | Tweet
All romances have internal stories, but for the most part, romantic suspense and action/adventure are more focused on the external plot. The external plot is what makes the subgenre so exciting. Something is always happening.