Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed
👻 How to hide from a drone – the subtle art of ‘ghosting’ in the age of surveillance
♻️ How to Repurpose Your Old Gadgets
🎮 What Digital Doping Means for Esports—and Everything Else
💬 Sony clarifies PS5 voice chat recording feature following privacy panic
🚗 Split-Second ‘Phantom’ Images Can Fool Tesla’s Autopilot
Quotation-as-title from Pascal. Image from top-linked post.
Even while a thing is in the act of coming into existence, some part of it has already ceased to be
🤖 ‘Machines set loose to slaughter’: the dangerous rise of military AI
📏 Wittgenstein’s Ruler: When Our Opinions Speak More About Us Instead The Topic
🤨 Inside the strange new world of being a deepfake actor
🎡 Japanese Amusement Park Turns Ferris Wheel Into Wi-Fi Enabled Remote Workspace
Quotation-as-title from Marcus Aurelius. Image from top-linked post.
We all think we are exceptional, and are surprised to find ourselves criticised just like anyone else
🏞️ To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks
👶 Babies' random choices become their preferences
😨 Dystopia as Clickbait: Science Fiction, Doomscrolling, and Reviving the Idea of the Future
👃 Why Are the Noses Broken on Egyptian Statues?
🧙♀️ New online database tracks historic 'witch marks' carved into England's trees
Quotation-as-title by Comtesse Diane. Image from top-linked post.
At times, our strengths propel us so far forward we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them
🤑 We can’t have billionaires and stop climate change
📹 How to make video calls almost as good as face-to-face
⏱️ How to encourage your team to launch an MVP first
☑️ Now you can enforce your privacy rights with a single browser tick
Quotation-as-title from Nietzsche. Image from top-linked post.
The clever man often worries; the loyal person is often overworked
👏 Blue sky thinking: is it time to stop work taking over our lives?
🤦♂️ How Not To Kill People With Spreadsheets
🕸️ Viral Effects Are Not Network Effects
🤯 Inventing Virtual Meetings of Tomorrow with NVIDIA AI Research
Quotation-as-title from a Chinese proverb. Image from top-linked post.
Like the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall, from darkness into darkness
⚽ Is it too late to halt football’s final descent into a dystopian digital circus?
🎧 Why Music is Helpful for Concentration
😬 I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.
😷 COVID-19 map for schools (UK)
Quotation-as-title from St Bede. Image from top-linked post.
One is not superior merely because one sees the world in an odious light
😷 “Wear The Mask” poster now available as free download
🤔 Irish court rules Subway bread is not bread
🚀 Jet suit paramedic tested in the Lake District 'could save lives'
👍 Helsinki Design Lab Ten Years Later
Quotation-as-title by Chateaubriand. Image from top-linked post.
The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route
😍 Drone Awards 2020: the world seen from above
😷 Adequate Vitamin D Levels Cuts Risk Of Dying From Covid-19 In Half, Study Finds
🔊 The BBC is releasing over 16,000 sound effects for free download
👍 Proposal would give EU power to boot tech giants out of European market
🎧 The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music
Quotation-as-title by George Sand. Image from top-linked post.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can be very creative about it
🌱 From garden streets to bike highways: four ideas for post-Covid cities – visualised
💰 Should Employers Cut Your Salary If You Change Cities?
🏂 Friluftsliv, the Norwegian Concept of Outdoor Living
🐟 A whopping 91% of plastic isn't recycled
🤯 F1 Pit Stop In 2-Seconds: An In-Depth Analysis
Quotation-as-title by Richard Koch. Image from top-linked post.
An ounce of good sense is worth a pound of subtlety
🎨 The Opposite Of ‘Crappy Design’
😳 How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole
🤯 The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite
👍 Non-Boring Zoom Breakout Groups
Quotation-as-title from Baltasar Gracián. Image from top-linked post.
The most radical thing you can do is stay home
🐱 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2020 finalists revealed
😂 Extinction Rebellion 'go floppy' when arrested, complains senior Met officer
😮 Birthday party on ship may have led to oil spill in Mauritius, Panama regulator says
🤘 Barbados revives plan to remove Queen as head of state and become a republic
🛂 When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number
Quotation-as-title by Gary Snyder. Image from top-linked post.
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others
🧠 Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos
😫 ‘Ugh fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
👍 The Craft of Teaching Confidence
🏝️ Log on, chill out: holiday resorts lure remote workers to fill gap left by tourists
🎧 Producer 9th Wonder on Producing Beats for Kendrick Lamar
Quotation-as-title by Albert Camus. Image from top-linked article.
Lifequakes
One way of thinking about the pandemic is as inevitable, and just one of a series of life-changing events that will happen to you during your time on earth.
Whereas some people seem to think that life should be trouble- and pain-free, it's clear by even a cursory glance at history that this an impossible expectation.
This article is a useful one for reframing the pandemic as a change that we're literally all going through together, but which will affect us differently:
Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are a predictable and integral part of it. While each change may be novel, major life transitions happen with clocklike regularity. Life is one long string of them, in fact. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a book called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. After interviewing hundreds of people about their transitions, he found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge ones—what Feiler calls “lifequakes”—happen three to five times in each person’s life. Some lifequakes are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.
Arthur C. Brooks, The Clocklike Regularity of Major Life Changes (The Atlantic)
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of demand
💬 Welcome to the Next Level of Bullshit
📚 The Best Self-Help Books of the 21st Century
💊 A radical prescription to make work fit for the future
👣 This desolate English path has killed more than 100 people
Quotation-as-title by Josh Billings. Image from top linked post.
Inside your pain are the things you care about most deeply
I listened to this episode of The Art of Manliness podcast a while back on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and found it excellent. I've discussed ACT with my CBT therapist who says it can also be a useful approach.
My guest today says we need to free ourselves from these instincts and our default mental programming and learn to just sit with our thoughts, and even turn towards those which hurt the most. His name is Steven Hayes and he’s a professor of psychology, the founder of ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — and the author of over 40 books, including his latest 'A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters'. Steven and I spend the first part of our conversation in a very interesting discussion as to why traditional interventions for depression and anxiety — drugs and talk therapy — aren’t very effective in helping people get their minds right, and how ACT takes a different approach to achieving mental health. We then discuss the six skills of psychological flexibility that undergird ACT and how these skills can be used not only by those dealing with depression and anxiety but by anyone who wants to get out of their own way and show up and move forward in every area of their lives.
Something that Hayes says is that "if people don't know what their values are, they take their goals, the concrete things they can achieve, to be their values". This, he says, is why rich people can still be unfulfilled.
Well worth a listen.
The world needs less philanthropy and more equality
I've been skeptical about the motives of philanthropic organisations for a while now. This article in The Guardian is a long read, but worth it.
Here's an excerpt:
The common assumption that philanthropy automatically results in a redistribution of money is wrong. A lot of elite philanthropy is about elite causes. Rather than making the world a better place, it largely reinforces the world as it is. Philanthropy very often favours the rich – and no one holds philanthropists to account for it.
The role of private philanthropy in international life has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s 260,000 philanthropy foundations have been established in that time, and between them they control more than $1.5tn. The biggest givers are in the US, and the UK comes second. The scale of this giving is enormous. The Gates Foundation alone gave £5bn in 2018 – more than the foreign aid budget of the vast majority of countries.
Philanthropy is always an expression of power. Giving often depends on the personal whims of super-rich individuals. Sometimes these coincide with the priorities of society, but at other times they contradict or undermine them. Increasingly, questions have begun to be raised about the impact these mega-donations are having upon the priorities of society.
To be in process of change is not an evil, any more than to be the product of change is a good
🌐 Unlimited Information Is Transforming Society
📱 Your Smartphone Can Tell If You’re Drunk-Walking
🚸 Britain's obsession with school uniform reinforces social divisions
🤖 Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy
Quotation-as-title by Marcus Aurelius. Image from top linked post.
Enforced idleness
Some people think it's the Protestant work ethic, others that it's a genetic predisposition. Me? I think it's to do with the highly competitive nature of western societies.
Whatever you think causes it, the inability of adults, including myself, to spend a day doing nothing is kind of problematic. It's something I often discuss with Laura Hilliger (and she refers to it regularly in her excellent newsletter)
There's a university in Hamburg, Germany, giving out 'idleness grants' for people to do absolutely nothing. Emma Beddington's answers to the questions on the application form aren't too different to how I'd answer:
What do you not want to do? I want not to compare my achievements, or lack of them, with others’. If successful, for the duration of my idleness grant I will crush the exhausting running mental commentary that points out what those with energy, drive and ambition are achieving and enumerates my inadequacies. When one or other of my nemeses tweets the dread phrase “some personal news” (always the precursor to an announcement of professional glory), I will not feel bad, because I will have accepted that “being quite lazy” has inherent merit in 2020.
Emma Beddington, Doing nothing is so easy for me. But how to feel good about it? (The Guardian)
It's always possible to do more and be more, but sometimes it's important to just spend time being who you already are.
What is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above
There is something very strange about walking up mountains only to come back down again. But I love it, as did the French surrealist poet, philosopher, and novelist René Daumal:
You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again…
So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully.
René Daumal, via Brain Pickings
While you're in the midst of self-imposed adversity you can also escape your self-imposed psychic prison.