Does it feel like every week is a mini-marathon? I’m feeling mental whiplash from the speed of the news cycle and the rapidity with which stories break, generate a strong public reaction, and then jarringly disappear with the onset of the next new thing. The antidote, of course, is to ignore the noise: power down your device, take nice long walks outside, or just spend time paying attention to other things. I plan to brew hot pot of coffee and stare out my window for a bit once I hit the send button on this post.
Now onto the updates...
What’s New on the Blog:
1. Book Notes: “The Elephant in the Brain” by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
This was an interesting read about the real motives that drive our behaviors and social interactions. The core thesis is that we hide our motives from others and, more importantly, from ourselves so that we can “act badly while looking good.”
If you want to get a taste for the book, here’s a pair of videos on the topic:
TEDx Talk: The Elephant in the Brain: Author Robin Hanson gives a 12-minute presentation.
Video: What Really Motivates Us?: Ali Abdaal, former physician and popular YouTube personality, discusses key ideas from the book.
For my next installment of Book Notes, I’ll be reading Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer.
2. Articles and Podcasts of Note (Week of 10/05/2020)
This is my weekly roundup of interesting links and internet finds. You can read the complete post on the blog, but here are the highlights:
The Decline in Pandemic Sports Viewership: Speculation about contributing factors.
The Economics of Vending Machines: Interesting piece on easy-to-overlook but ubiquitous business.
The End of the American Internet: Technological innovation and cultural influence are shifting as represented in the ascendance of Tiktok. Benedict Evans always illustrates his points with ample data and charts.
GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week: Yikes. The powerful natural language model appears to have passed the Turing Test and fooled a number of people.
Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet: The name makes no sense, old people love it, it’s been the center of dietary fads and it wreaks havoc when it comes to drug interactions.
The Island that Humans Can’t Conquer: A writer takes a rare trip to St. Matthew Island, one of the most remote and rugged places in Alaska.
Thoughts on Meaning and Writing: “It’s not just a method of creating memories, but a method of creating myself.”
Podcast: Byzantium—Last of the Romans: Move over Dan Carlin and Hardcore History, this 3.5 hour episode from The Fall of Civilizations podcast had me a the edge of my seat as I traversed 1000 years of politics, grandiose ambitions, crusades, and cultural upheaval. Now I need to listen to the podcast’s back catalog.
Podcast: Rough Translation—How to Be an Anti-Casteist: What is "caste privilege," and what does it mean for South Asians in the United States?
The rest of this week’s link roundup can be read here.
Odds & Ends:
Reading
Wired magazine writes about how digital book borrowing is driving book publishers crazy as library services like Overdrive are seeing increased adoption during the pandemic.
By the way, if your library system doesn’t offer Overdrive or similar digital lending services, consider a paid library card. There are several options that are cost-effective and offer excellent digital collections. I detail the best ones in an article titled “Paid Library Card Memberships.”
Enjoyed this thread on Reddit: “What book would you recommend to people who haven’t finished a book since high-school?” Even voracious readers are likely to find some interesting recommendations for their reading list from the may suggestions.
If you love learning about story structure in fiction and film, Michael Arndt’s 90-minute video is instructive: Endings: The Good, Bad, and Insanely Great. Arndt is best known as the screenwriter for Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Serial Literature is a free service that delivers classic literature, in bite-sized installments, directly to your email inbox. For instance, you can have Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers delivered in 67 installments (customize the frequency and deliver time too).
Writing
Gen Z Hates the Full Stop: Linguists consider the current disdain for the punctuation mark known as the period. As you can see from the punctuation in my newsletter, I bear no grudge.
Here’s a clever (and free) tool for learning and practicing your typing skills: TypeLit.io. The hook is that you practice typing classic novels like Alice in Wonderland, The Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstein, and more.
Ogden’s Basic English is a publication from 1930 with a really interesting premise: simplify the English language down to 850 essential words and then use that simplified vocabulary along with a correspondingly simplified grammar to achieve a more efficient form of communication.
Fans of Randall Munroe (creator of the XKCD comic strip) might already be familiar with the idea behind Ogden’s Basic English. Munroe wrote a provocative coffee-table book in 2015 called the “Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words” Using a combination of illustrations and laughably simple prose (restricted to a vocabulary of 1000 most-used English words), Munroe offers some astonishingly clever descriptions of complex topics like the International Space Station and organ systems of the human body. Highly recommended.
Thinking:
Anne-Laure Le Cunff offers some ideas about practicing nuanced thinking. Hint: minimizing binary opposition and reliance on absolutes are a good start.
The Monty Hall problem is a non-intuitive statistics problem that draws inspiration from the classic game show Let’s Make a Deal. I ran across a recent blog post on the topic, but I find this article’s explanation more satisfying (it even includes an interactive simulator so you can test the probabilities firsthand).
Vasili Shynkarenka describes his meticulous system for learning and retention in his article How to Remember What You Learn.
Tech
The Apple Watch is (quietly) building momentum. I was surprised to learn that the installed base will soon be approaching 100 million in this piece from Above Avalon. I still consider it a niche product, but at its current growth rate it might not be for long.
Killed by Google is a virtual graveyard commemorating over 200 services and tools that Google has terminated over the past decades. I paid tribute to my favorites: RIP Google Blog Search API, Google Reader, and Picasa.
Since I posted about the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma,” it’s worth noting that Facebook offered an official response to the film: “What the Social Dilemma Gets Wrong.”
In Memorium
Eddie Van Halen, guitar icon, passed away this week. In honor of his passing here’s a clip from a 1986 concert in which his virtuosity is on full display in a 12-minute long solo.
By the way, businesspeople and entrepreneurs would do well to take note of the famous Van Halen “no brown M&M rider” in which the band famously stipulated, with exacting detail, that concert promoters provide M&Ms backstage with all the brown M&Ms removed. The rationale wasn’t that the band were divas, it was that stage productions are complicated affairs and that attention to detail was important. Whether or not the promoter had followed the instructions on the M&M directive was used as a proxy for whether similar attention to detail had been provided in the rest of the concert preparations (e.g. had the promoter cut corners or overlooked more serious matters in the construction of the stage? the lighting? the electrical systems?). Brilliant.
Fun Stuff
The sci-fi nerd in me thoroughly enjoyed this video demonstrating the different sizes of fictional starships using 3D digital models. Check it out.
Marble Rally 2020: 20 marbles race down an elaborate sand course accompanied by exciting color commentary. Could this be the spectator sport of the future and, more importantly, why am I so entertained?
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This was my first post and really mind pivoting.
Thanks team for sharing amazing links, especially the Anti casteism podcast