Thought Shrapnel

I’ve used quite a bit of Ben Werdmuller’s software over the years. He co-founded Elgg, which I used for some of my postgraduate work, and Known, which a few of us experimented with for blogging a few years ago.

Ben’s always been an entrepreneur and is currently working on blockchain technologies after working for an early stage VC company. He’s a thoughtful human being and writes about technology and the humans who create it, and in this post bemoans the macho work culture endemic in tech:

It’s not normal. Eight years into working in America, I’m still getting used to the macho culture around vacations. I had previously lived in a country where 28 days per year is the minimum that employers can legally provide; taking time off is just considered a part of life. The US is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee any vacation at all (the others are Tonga, Palau, Nauru, Micronesia, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands). It’s telling that American workers often respond to this simple fact with disbelief. How does anything get done?! Well, it turns out that a lot gets done when people aren’t burned out or chained to their desks.

Ben comes up with some 'rules':

1. Take a real lunch hour
2. Take short breaks and get a change of scenery
3. Go home
4. Rotate being on call — and automate as much as possible
5. Always know when your next vacation is
6. Employers: provide Time Off In Lieu (or pay for overtime)
7. Trust
8. Track and impose norms with structure
9. Take responsibility for each other’s well being

All solid ideas, but only nine rules? I feel like there's a tenth one missing:

10. Connect with a wider purpose

After all, if you don’t know the point of what you’re working for, then you’ll be lacking motivation no matter how many (or few) hours you work.

Source: Ben Werdmuller

In last week’s newsletter, the first after a month’s hiatus over the summer, I asked the 1,500+ subscribers to Thought Shrapnel’s if they’d send me answers to the following:

1. What do you really like about Thought Shrapnel in its current format?
2. What do you dislike about it?

So far, six days later, I've received 15 responses, which represents 1% of the subscriber base.

Here’s an anonymised sample of what they said:

• "I like the diversity of links and ideas that you provide. Not sure if that helps."
• "I don't dislike it, but some of the more technical stuff -- blockchain -- is less interesting to me than the educational stuff."
• "You remind me of myself 40 years ago. Thank you."
• "In it’s current format, it’s hard to save to Pocket for offline reading on an airplane (or someplace else without an Internet connection."
• "I most appreciate your insight and perspective in these informational sources. That is to suggest...that I for one value when you provide context about the stories you're sharing. Furthermore, you dig in a bit deeper and educate about the nuance involved...but also the larger impact of this news."
• "I’m happy to support the continuing collation of, and reflection on developments. Your thinking touches on multiple fields, and this is something I find particularly valuable."
• "For me it's a better way of keeping up to date with what you're posting rather than getting notifications of each individual post through other channels."
• "I also like how you point to new robust technologies which I’m on the lookout for."
• "There's not much I don't like and, to be honest, I'm happy to skip the parts each week that aren't particularly relevant to me."
• "I don't know Google's parameters for clipping emails, but I do know that I can click the "view full email" option to see it all, but I usually don't."

It's always nice to see kind words written about your work, which I obviously appreciate. The main thing it would seem that I need to change is that the newsletter gets 'clipped' by GMail and other providers. In other words, I need to make it shorter.

 

“With your expertise and knowledge, but you’ll never be an artist

And I’m harder on myself than you could ever be regardless

What I’ll never be is flawless, all I’ll ever be is honest

Even when I’m gone they’re gonna say I brought it”

(Eminem)

I’ve been following Dan Meyer’s work on-and-off for over a decade now. He’s a Maths teacher by trade, but now working as Chief Academic Officer at Desmos after gaining his PhD from Stanford. He’s a smart guy, and a great blogger.

Dan’s particularly interested in how kids learn Maths (or ‘Math’ because he’s American) and is always particularly concerned to disprove/squash approaches that don’t work:

In the wake of Barbara Oakley’s op-ed in the New York Times arguing that we overemphasize conceptual understanding in math class, it’s become clear to me that our national conversation about math instruction is missing at least one crucial element: nobody knows what anybody means by “conceptual understanding.”

It's worth reading the whole post (and the comment section), but I just wanted to pull out a couple of things which I think are useful:

A student who has procedural fluency but lacks conceptual understanding …

• Can accurately subtract 2018-1999 using a standard algorithm, but doesn’t recognize that counting up would be more efficient.
• Can accurately compute the area of a triangle, but doesn’t recognize how its formula was derived or how it can be extended to other shapes. (eg. trapezoids, parallelograms, etc.)
• Can accurately calculate the discriminant of y = x² + 2 to determine that it doesn’t have any real roots, but couldn’t draw a quick sketch of the parabola to figure that out more efficiently.

I find this all the time with my own kids, and also when I was teaching. For example, I knew that the students in my Year 7 History class could draw a line graph in Maths, but they didn't seem to be able to do it in my classroom for some reason. In other words, they were 'procedurally fluent' in a particular domain.

Children are very good at giving the impression to adults that they understand and can do what they’re being told to do. Poke a little, and you come to realise that they don’t really understand what’s going on. That’s particularly true in History, where it’s easy to regurgitate facts and dates, without any empathy or historical understanding.

Another thing that Dan points out which I think we should all take to heart is that we should learn a bit of humility. He criticises both Barbara Oakley (op-ed in The New York Times) and Paul Morgan (author of an article with which he disagrees for not having what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call ‘skin in the game':

If you’re going to engage with the ideas of a complex field, engage with its best. That’s good practice for all of us and it’s especially good practice for people who are commenting from outside the field like Oakley (trained in engineering) and Morgan (trained in education policy).

Everyone's got opinions. The important thing is to listen to those who are talking sense.

Source: dy/dan

A colleague, who also works remotely, shared this article recently. Although I enjoy working remotely, it’s not without its downsides.

The author, Martin De Wulf, is a coder writing for an audience of software engineers. That’s not me, but I do work in the world of tech. The things that De Wulf says makes remote working stressful are:

1. Dehumanisation: "communication tends to stick to structured channels"
2. Interruptions and multitasking: "being responsive on the chat accomplishes the same as being on time at work in an office: it gives an image of reliability"
3. Overworking: "this all amounts for me to the question of trust: your employer trusted you a lot, allowing you to work on your own terms , and in exchange, I have always felt compelled to actually work a lot more than if I was in an office."
4. Being a stay at home dad: "When you spend a good part of your time at home, your family sees you as more available than they should."
5. Loneliness: "I do enjoy being alone quite a lot, but even for me, after two weeks of only seeing colleagues through my screen, and then my family at night, I end up feeling quite sad. I miss feeling integrated in a community of pairs."
6. Deciding where to work every day: "not knowing where I will be working everyday, and having to think about which hardware I need to take with me"
7. You never leave 'work': "working at home does not leave you time to cool off while coming back home from work"
8. Career risk: "working remotely makes you less visible in your company"

I've managed to deal with at least half of this list. Here's some suggestions.

• Video conference calls: they're not a replacement for face-to-face meetings, but they're a lot better than audio only or just relying on emails and text chats.
• Home office: I have one separate to the house. Also, it sounds ridiculous but I've got a sign I bought on eBay that slides between 'free' (green) and 'busy' (red).
• Travel: at every opportunity. Even though it takes me away from my wife and kids, I do see mine a lot more than the average office worker.
• Realistic expectations: four hours of solid 'knowledge work' per day plus emails and admin tasks is enough.

Source: Hacker Noon

You may not be able to detect it, but fluorescent lights flicker. They trigger my migraines. In fact, they affect me to such an extent that, when I worked at the university, I was on the ‘disabled’ list and had to have adjustments made. These included making sure I sat near a window to maximise the amount of natural light in my workspace.

In this HBR article, written by a partner at a HR advisory and research firm, the author cites a survey which shows that all employees want access to natural light

In a research poll of 1,614 North American employees, we found that access to natural light and views of the outdoors are the number one attribute of the workplace environment, outranking stalwarts like onsite cafeterias, fitness centers, and premium perks including on-site childcare.

One of the best things about working remotely ('from home') is that you can go and sit somewhere that has good natural light. There's a coffee shop near us that has two walls completely made of glass. It's wonderful.

The study also found that the absence of natural light and outdoor views hurts the employee experience. Over a third of employees feel that they don’t get enough natural light in their workspace. 47% of employees admit they feel tired or very tired from the absence of natural light or a window at their office, and 43% report feeling gloomy because of the lack of light.

The next point is an important one about hierarchies:

Too often, organizations design workspaces for executives with large windows while lower level employees do not have access to light. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Airbnb has pushed the limits of designing its customer call center operation in Portland, Oregon. Rather than windowless work stations commonly found in call centers, the Airbnb Call Center is designed to be an open space with access to natural light and views of the surroundings while replacing desks and phones with long couches, standing desks and wireless technology. The benefits of these elements is is well recognized. In fact, some European Union countries mandate employee proximity to windows as part of their national building code! This is because they realize that an absence of natural light hurts overall employee experience, up and down the organization.

I've been reading Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham, which explores issues like these. Fascinating stuff.

Source: Harvard Business Review

“People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.”

(Ellen Ullman)

Austin Kleon makes a simple, but important point, about how to become a writer:

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you’re existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:

Kleon has previously recommended Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's How to Read a Book, which I bought last time he mentioned it. Ironically enough, it's sitting on my bookshelf, unread. Anyway, he quotes Adler and Van Doren as saying:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.

I read a lot of non-fiction books on my e-reader*, so the equivalent of that for me is Thought Shrapnel, I guess...

Source: Austin Kleon

* Note: I left my old e-reader on the flight home from our holiday. I took the opportunity to upgrade to the bq Cervantes 4, which I bought from Amazon Spain.

After a wonderful August, travelling with my family and taking time off from Thought Shrapnel, I’m back.

This is the 420th post here. I collect potential posts as drafts, which means I’ve currently got a backlog of 157 potential posts. Obviously, the vast majority of those are never going to see the light of day, so I thought I’d just link to them below.

Here’s a list of 10 articles from each of the first six months of 2018. They’re links that I never got around to writing about, but I think might interest you. Note that I’ve listed them in terms of when I discovered them, which is not necessarily when they were originally published.

January

1. Fake News about the Future of Education
2. Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy
3. 10 New Principles Of Good Design
4. Want to Change the World With Your Business? Grow Slow
5. How children’s TV went from Blue Peter to YouTube’s wild west
6. Autopsy of a Failed Holacracy: Lessons in Justice, Equity, and Self-Management
7. The Great Attention Heist
8. Android Users: To Avoid Malware, Try the F-Droid App Store
9. Showing Off to the Universe: Beacons for the Afterlife of Our Civilization
10. Will tech giants move on from the internet, now we’ve all been harvested?

February

1. Your Pills Are Spying On You
2. The Olympics are a mass propaganda tool for countries to assimilate their citizens
3. Truly open education will require sweeping changes
4. The media exaggerates negative news. This distortion has consequences
5. Humanity's Biggest Machines Will Be Built in Space
6. The usefulness of dread
7. The Internet Isn't Forever
8. Algorithmic Wilderness
9. Are We Ready For a Post-Work World?
10. If the elite ever cared about the have-nots, that didn’t last long

March

1. Education in the (Dis)Information Age
2. How Tiny Red Dots Took Over Your Life
3. If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
4. Twitter is not a public utility
5. The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News
6. Small, Regular Doses of Caffeine Offer the Biggest Mental Boost
7. Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous.
8. Beyond the Tree Octopus – Why we need a new view of k12 (digital) literacy in a Cambridge Analytica world
9. I work therefore I am: why businesses are hiring philosophers
10. Critical Thinking for Educators

April

1. Researchers develop device that can 'hear' your internal voice
2. 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
3. What Comes After The Social Media Empires
4. Coming up with a title
5. Eminent Philosophers Name the 43 Most Important Philosophy Books Written Between 1950-2000: Wittgenstein, Foucault, Rawls & More
6. An Open Education Reader
7. Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires
8. Say Goodbye To The Information Age: It’s All About Reputation Now
9. Why co-operative education needs a rethink
10. A Modest Guide to Productivity

May

1. Alfie’s Army, misinformation and propaganda: The need for critical media literacy in a mediated world
2. Hot Prospect: Designer Richard Holbrook’s Three-Year Quest to Understand the World’s Most Creative Companies
3. Chromebooks are ready for your next coding project
4. Tech firms can't keep our data forever: we need a Digital Expiry Date
5. How to achieve happiness and balance as a remote worker
6. Create Kid Skills for Alexa
7. Should Africa let Silicon Valley in?
8. Autocrypt: convenient end-to-end encryption for email
9. Scouts' new visual identity designed to diversify membership
10. A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS

June

1. Do platforms work?
2. Why read Aristotle today?
3. The Uncertain Future of OER
4. Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?
5. The Theology of Consensus
6. Building a Cooperative Economy
7. What’s right for your company? Decision making in 3 different organizational structures
8. The ethics of ceding more power to machines
9. UTC is Enough for Everyone... Right?
10. It’s impossible to lead a totally ethical life—but it’s fun to try

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“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”

(Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

We tend to use words to denote something right up to the time that term becomes untenable. Someone has to invent a better one. Take mobile phones, for example. They’re literally named after the least-used app on there, so we’re crying out for a different way to refer to them. Perhaps a better name would be ‘trackers’.

These days, most people use mobile devices for social networking. These are available free at the point of access, funded by what we’re currently calling ‘advertising’. However, as this author notes, it’s nothing of the sort:

What we have today is not advertising. The amount of personally identifiable information companies have about their customers is absolutely perverse. Some of the world’s largest companies are in the business of selling your personal information for use in advertising. This might sound innocuous but the tracking efforts of these companies are so accurate that many people believe that Facebook listens to their conversations to serve them relevant ads. Even if it’s true that the microphone is not used, the sum of all other data collected is still enough to show creepily relevant advertising.

Unfortunately, the author doesn’t seem to have come to the conclusion yet that it’s the logic of capitalism that go us here. Instead, he just points out that people’s privacy is being abused.

[P]eople now get most of their information from social networks yet these networks dictate the order in which content is served to the user. Google makes the worlds most popular mobile operating system and it’s purpose is drive the company’s bottom line (ad blocking is forbidden). “Smart” devices are everywhere and companies are jumping over each other to put more shit in your house so they can record your movements and sell the information to advertisers. This is all a blatant abuse of privacy that is completely toxic to society.

Agreed, and it's easy to feel a little helpless against this onslaught. While it's great to have a list of things that users can do, if those things are difficult to implement and/or hard to understand, then it's an uphill battle.

That being said, the three suggestions he makes are use

To combat this trend, I have taken the following steps and I think others should join the movement:

• Aggressively block all online advertisements
• Don’t succumb to the “curated” feeds
• Not every device needs to be “smart”

I feel I'm already way ahead of the author in this regard:

• Aggressively block all online advertisements
  • I use the Disconnect.me, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger desktop browser extensions, and Blokada on my Android device. DuckDuckGo is my default search engine on both.
• Don’t succumb to the “curated” feeds
  • I quit Facebook years ago, haven't got an Instagram account, and pretty much only post links to my own spaces on Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Not every device needs to be “smart”
  • I don't really use my Philips Hue lights, and don't have an Amazon Alexa — or even the Google Assistant on my phone).

It's not easy to stand up to Big Tech. The amount of money they pour into things make their 'innovations' seem inevitable. They can afford to make things cheap and frictionless so you get hooked.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that those that previously defended Apple as somehow ‘different’ on privacy, despite being the world’s most profitable company, are starting to backtrack.

Source: Nicholas Rempel

One of the things I like about Hacker News is that, as well as providing useful links to technically-minded stuff, there are also ‘Ask HN’ threads where a user asks a question of the rest of the community.

Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read?

When I browse HN, I usually pick out a few articles I want to read from the front page, then email the links to myself to read later.

This method works out pretty well for me. I’m wondering if people have other strategies that work better?

I don’t like the ‘inbox as to-do list’ method. Other HN users suggested alternatives, with the top-voted comment at the time of writing this being:

I used Instapaper (https://www.instapaper.com/), then moved to Pocket (https://getpocket.com/) to take advantage of the social features, then moved back to Instapaper for no really good reason. Pocket still looks nicer and the apps are more reliable, in my experience.

They both allow you to save the full text of an article to read later, as well as archiving and organizing articles you’ve already read. They sync to phones, so most of my reading actually happens on public transit. Pocket can also sync to a Kobo ebook reader; not sure about Kindle, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked with them, too.

Pocket is great, but I used IFTTT to automatically send RSS feeds there at one point, and now it seems to be in an endless sync loop.

Other HN users said that they pin bookmarks, and so have many, many tabs open at one time. I think that’s a hugely inefficient and resource-intensive approach.

Some kept it super-simple:

I use Org Mode so I have a plain text file called todo-bookmarks.org with a list of links to the articles I want to read.

This caused me to think about what I do. If I want to read something, I actually add the link as a draft post here, on Thought Shrapnel. The best way to ensure I gain value from a potentially-interesting article is to write about it.

I’d rather write about a few links rather than bookmark lots. I’ve all but given up on bookmarking, as it’s almost as quick to search the web for something I’m looking for as it is to search my bookmarks…

Source: Hacker News

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I work, for the most part, in my home office. Physically-speaking it’s a solitary existence as my office is separate to my house. However, I’m constantly talking to people via Telegram, Slack, and Mastodon. It doesn’t feel lonely at all.

So this article about collaboration, which I discovered via Stowe Boyd, is an interesting one:

If you’re looking to be brave and do something entirely new, involving more people at the wrong time could kill your idea.

Work at MIT found that collaboration—where a bunch of people put their heads together to try to come up with innovative solutions—generally “reduced creativity due to the tendency to incrementally modify known successful designs rather than explore radically different and potentially superior ones.”

I’m leading a project at the moment which is scheduled to launch in January 2019. It’s potentially going to be used by hundreds of people in the MVP, and then thousands (and maybe hundreds of thousands) after that.

Yet, when I was asked recently whether I’d like more resources, I said “after the summer”. Why? Because every time you add someone new, it temporarily slows down your project. The same can be true when you’re coming up with ideas. You can go faster alone, but further together.

Many people are at their most creative during solitary activities like walking, relaxing or bathing, not when stuck in a room with people shouting at them from a whiteboard.

Indeed a study found that “solitude can facilitate creativity–first, by stimulating imaginative involvement in multiple realities and, second, by ‘trying on’ alternative identities, leading, perhaps, to self-transformation.”

Essentially just being around other people can keep creative people from thinking new thoughts.

I think this article goes a little too far in discounting the value of collaboration. For example, here’s three types of facilitated thinking that I have experience with that work well for both introverts and extroverts:

1. Thinkathons
2. Note and vote
3. Crazy eights

That being said, I do agree with the author when he says:

Once you’ve unearthed radical ideas from people, they need nurturing. They need protecting from group-think meetings and committees who largely express speculated unevidenced opinions based on current preferences from past experiences.

Design thinking has a bias towards action: it resists talking yourself out of trying something radical. Creating prototypes helps you to think about your idea in a concrete manner, and get it to test before it gets dumbed down.

Chances are, that crazy idea you had will get toned down if you let too many people look at it. Protect the radical and push it hard!

Source: Paul Taylor (via Stowe Boyd)

I subscribe to both Seth Godin’s blog and his podcast, Akimbo. The man’s a genius as far as I’m concerned.

One of his most recent posts is about productivity:

Now, more than ever, you’re likely to be running a team, managing a project or deciding on your own agenda as a free agent. Time is just about all you’ve got to spend.

And yet, we hardly talk about productivity.

Productivity is the amount of useful output created for every hour of work we do.

You can measure that output in money if you want to (it makes the math easier) but in fact, it’s everything from lives changed to knowledge shared. What matters is the answer to a simple question: did I spend my day producing enough benefit for all the time invested?

So far, standard stuff. What I like is the way he applies it to our current situation in 2018:

The internet has opened the door for more people to organize and plan their day than ever before. And we’re bad at it.

Because we associate busyness with business with productivity.

In my twenties, when I worked in schools, I worked 12+ hours every day. Now I work half that. Why? Because I work from home and can manage my own time. I’m rarely just waiting around or kicking my heels:

Imagine two buildings under construction. Both have 25 well-trained, well-paid, hard-working construction workers. One building, though, was built in half the time of the other. What happened? It turns out that construction almost always slows down because people are waiting. Waiting for the waterproofing to get done (while they wait for the specialist) or waiting for parts or waiting for another part of the project. The internet is the home of the connection economy, which means that this challenge is multiplied by 100. What are you waiting for? When you’re waiting, what are you doing to create value?

It's a useful read, particularly if you feel that you're at a crossroads in your career. You should always go towards that which gives you more agency. That way, you get more of a say in how productive you can be in any given day.

Busy is not your job. Busy doesn’t get you what you seek. Busy isn’t the point. Value creation is.

Source: Seth Godin

“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”

(Marc Andreessen)

I first mentioned so-called ‘assassination markets’ in one of my weeknotes back in 2015 when reporting back on a dinner party conversation. For those unfamiliar, the idea has been around for at least the last twenty years.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines them:

An assassination market is a prediction market where any party can place a bet (using anonymous electronic money and pseudonymous remailers) on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately. This would incentivise assassination of individuals because the assassin, knowing when the action would take place, could profit by making an accurate bet on the time of the subject's death. Because the payoff is for accurately picking the date rather than performing the action of the assassin, it is substantially more difficult to assign criminal liability for the assassination.

Of course, the blockchain is a trustless system, so perfect for this kind of thing. A new platform called Augur is a prediction market and so, of course, one of the first things that appears on there are 'predictions' about the death of Donald Trump in 2018:

Everyone knew that it was inevitable that assassination markets would quickly pop up on decentralized prediction market platform Augur, but that doesn’t make the fact that users are now betting on whether U.S. President Donald Trump will be assassinated by the end of the year any less jarring.

Yet this market exists, and, though not the most popular bet on Augur, more than 50 shares have been traded on it as of the time of writing. Similar markets, moreover, exist for a number of other public figures, allowing users to gamble on whether 96-year-old actress Betty White and U.S. Senator John McCain — who has been diagnosed with brain cancer — will survive until Jan. 1, 2019.

This is why ethics in technology are important. There is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ technology:

Now that assassination markets are here, a fierce debate has emerged in cryptocurrency circles over what — if anything — should be done about them, as well as who should be held responsible for these clearly-illegal death markets.

The core issue stems from the fact that, in addition to the pure revulsion that these markets should engender in any decent human being, they also create a financial incentive for someone to place a large bet that a public figure will be assassinated and then murder that person for profit. Consequently, the mere presence of these markets makes it more likely that these events will occur, however slim that increase may be.

Interesting times, indeed.

Source: CCN

“Not my circus. Not my monkeys.”

(Polish proverb)

As I get older, I’m more aware that some things I do are very affected by the world around me. For example, since finding out that the intensity of light you experience during the day is correlated with the amount of sleep you get, I don’t feel so bad about ‘sleeping in’ during the summer months.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that this article in The New York Times suggests that there’s a good and a bad time to eat:

A growing body of research suggests that our bodies function optimally when we align our eating patterns with our circadian rhythms, the innate 24-hour cycles that tell our bodies when to wake up, when to eat and when to fall asleep. Studies show that chronically disrupting this rhythm — by eating late meals or nibbling on midnight snacks, for example — could be a recipe for weight gain and metabolic trouble.

A more promising approach is what some call 'intermittent fasting' where you restrict your calorific intake to eight hours of the day, and don't consume anything other than water for the other 16 hours.

This approach, known as early time-restricted feeding, stems from the idea that human metabolism follows a daily rhythm, with our hormones, enzymes and digestive systems primed for food intake in the morning and afternoon. Many people, however, snack and graze from roughly the time they wake up until shortly before they go to bed. Dr. Panda has found in his research that the average person eats over a 15-hour or longer period each day, starting with something like milk and coffee shortly after rising and ending with a glass of wine, a late night meal or a handful of chips, nuts or some other snack shortly before bed.

That pattern of eating, he says, conflicts with our biological rhythms.

So when should we eat? As early as possible in the day, it would seem:

Most of the evidence in humans suggests that consuming the bulk of your food earlier in the day is better for your health, said Dr. Courtney Peterson, an assistant professor in the department of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dozens of studies demonstrate that blood sugar control is best in the morning and at its worst in the evening. We burn more calories and digest food more efficiently in the morning as well.

That's not great news for me. After a protein smoothie in the morning and eggs for lunch, I end up eating most of my calories in the evening. I'm going to have to rethink my regime...

Source: The New York Times

Just like Facebook, I’ve deleted my LinkedIn account a couple of times. The difference is that I keep coming back to LinkedIn for some reason, while I’m a very happy non-user of Facebook.

This article imagines LinkedIn as a ‘game’ that you can win or lose. The framing is both hilarious and insightful, with the subtitle reading, “A strategy guide for using a semi-pointless social network in all the wrong ways.”

For those unfamiliar, LinkedIn is a 2D, turn-based MMORPG that sets itself apart from its competitors by placing players not in a fantasy world of orcs and goblins, but in the treacherous world of business. Players can choose from dozens of character classes (e.g., Entrepreneurs, Social Media Mavens, Finance Wizards) each with their own skill sets and special moves (Power Lunch; Signal Boost; Invoice Dodge). They gain “experience” by networking, obtaining endorsements from other users, and posting inspirational quotes from Elon Musk.

The general goal of LinkedIn (the game) is to find and connect with as many people on LinkedIn (the website) as possible, in order to secure vaguely defined social capital and potentially further one’s career, which allows the player to purchase consumer goods of gradually increasing quality. Like many games, it has dubious real-life utility. The site’s popularity and success, like that of many social networks, depends heavily on obfuscating this fact. This illusion of importance creates a sense of naive trust among its users. This makes it easy to exploit.

Yep, LinkedIn makes its money in a similar way to Facebook: allow users to create contacts on a platform completely owned by one company (which is now Microsoft). Then, charge them to beat the algorithm you created.

Some people I know pay for LinkedIn Premium. I’ve never understood why when it’s effectively the front end for an address book. Instead, I pay for FullContact, which is a much better deal, long-term.

Nevertheless, if you’re playing the LinkedIn game, here’s what to do:

Spend a few hours each day connecting with people. Start by searching for employees at powerful corporations like Google and Facebook. As users within various spheres of influence accept your connection requests, you will begin to gain legitimacy. At first a few people might decline your request, but eventually, once your network grows, important people will see that others they know are already connected with you, and accept your invitation without suspicion. Work your way through the corporate food chain like an intestinal parasite at a gratis conference buffet.

As the author notes with a wink and a nod, there are multiple ways of gaming the system, including:

Because there’s no limit to the number of jobs one can have simultaneously, it’s incredibly easy to spam people with superfluous work anniversaries. All you have to do is create 12 active jobs, each with a different starting month. (As far as I can tell, LinkedIn only sends one work anniversary email per user per month, so it’s not worth the trouble to input more than 12.)

I honestly don't know why I continue to use LinkedIn. People message me on their occasionally, and I send (some of) my blog posts there. Other than that, it seems like people farming, just like a business version of Facebook.

Source: The Outline