Links

🧠 She Was Missing a Chunk of Her Brain. It Didn’t Matter. — Wired

Our brains are incredibly plastic, even well into adulthood, and we've only just started to learn how they work.

Case in point: A woman missing her left temporal lobe experiences no symptoms and discovered it was missing by happenstance. Neuroscience is very much still in its infancy:

For EG, who is in her fifties and grew up in Connecticut, missing a large chunk of her brain has had surprisingly little effect on her life. She has a graduate degree, has enjoyed an impressive career, and speaks Russian—a second language—so well that she has dreamed in it. She first learned her brain was atypical in the autumn of 1987, at George Washington University Hospital, when she had it scanned for an unrelated reason. The cause was likely a stroke that happened when she was a baby; today, there is only cerebro-spinal fluid in that brain area.

👩‍💻 I Was A Broadway Star. Now I'm A Software Engineer. — HuffPost

As someone who recently made the career transition from theatre to tech, I appreciated Carla Stickler's story about becoming a software engineer after becoming a Broadway performer. Success ≠ happiness, and Stickler is an inspiring reminder that you can always look for something new — even something radically different — in the pursuit of fulfillment.

In the summer of 2018, I was just so tired of going back in and out of the show. I was feeling like the whole theater industry was very toxic. I still can’t get away from the feeling of “I’m never enough” that I think all actors feel at times in their career. Feeling all-around like crap all the time, and then trying to teach college students to go into this business, was really hard. How do I inspire kids into an industry where I see how brutal it can be even when you achieve success?

🌖 Houston, we have a problem: Jeff Koons is sending sculptures to the moon

Jeff Koons is joining the exclusive group of artists whose work has left Earth:

Marking 50 years since America’s last crewed trip to the moon, the sculptures will lift off from pad 39A, Kennedy Space Centre later this year and make their landing on an Intuitive Machines Nova-C Lunar Lander in a fully autonomous mission. The 125 miniature moon sculptures, each depicting one of the 125 unique phases of the moon and named after an influential person from human history such as Plato and Warhol, will be displayed together in space in a sustainably built, fully transparent, compartmentalised cube.

See also: The Voyager Golden Record

🖼 DALL-E 2

And speaking of art and space, here's a painting created by DALL-E 2, "a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language."

This particular work was generated by giving DALL-E 2 the prompt "A person looking up into the heavens at night with the milky-way galaxy in view as a child's painting."

Computers learned to "see" over the past decade, and now that they can understand visual input, we can ask them to generate their own creations. As computers get better at drawing, writing, and composing music, the world of art will be forever changed.

And the question "What is art?" is only going to get harder to answer.

Check out DALL-E 2's Instagram page for more of its work.

🐦 Tweets of the Week

Dieter shares a neat video from Google exploring how digital notifications could be delivered in more analogue, ambient ways:

And if you're looking for a little extra side income, have you considered training a jungle myna bird to find cash and bring it back?

⛰ Work 2.0: The Obstacles You Don’t See — Hidden Brain

This podcast episode is well worth your time. It's a great reminder that one of the most powerful ways to market your ideas is to appeal to others' emotional desires:

Introducing new ideas is hard. Most of us think the best way to win people over is to push harder. But organizational psychologist Loran Nordgren says a more effective approach is to focus on the invisible obstacles to new ideas.

☢️ Megatons To Megawatts: Russian Warheads Fuel U.S. Power Plants — NPR

Yet another example of how globalized our world is: Until recently, 10% of the US' electricity came from Russian nuclear warheads.

It was all part of a deal struck at the end of the Cold War. That deal wraps up today, when the final shipment of fuel arrives at a U.S. facility.

The origins of the plan lie in the early 1990s. At the time, Philip Sewell was working for the U.S. Department of Energy. The Soviet Union had just disintegrated, and Sewell's job was to find ways to collaborate with the former adversaries.

📚 Charles Darwin's Lost Notebooks Returned With Mysterious Note — VICE

Two notebooks that belonged to Charles Darwin were mysteriously returned to Cambridge University Library in a pink gift bag with a cryptic note, more than 20 years after they went missing, and were presumed stolen, from the library’s collection.

🐦 Tweets

Be sure to click through to the video on this one:

It's true:

"It was actually used to cover up the ice that was used on the salad bar to keep everything cold. It was a common practice back then," the [Pizza Hut] spokesperson noted, adding that the chain had not yet begun to use refrigerators to keep its salad bar offerings crisp.

🧬 Complete Human Genome Sequenced for First Time In Major Breakthrough — VICE

An amazing scientific milestone:

Scientists have mapped an entire unbroken human genome for the first time, a milestone that completes the groundbreaking work started by the Human Genome Project decades ago, according to a motherlode of new studies published in Science and other journals on Thursday. 

🪐 5,000 Exoplanets: Listen to the Sounds of Discovery — NASA [Video]

Speaking of Cosmic Songs:

On March 21, 2022, the number of known exoplanets passed 5,000 according to the NASA Exoplanet Archive. This animation and sonification tracks humanity's discovery of the planets beyond our solar system over time. Turning NASA data into sounds allows users to hear the pace of discovery, with additional information conveyed by the notes themselves.

🎨 New Tab with MoMA

MoMA recently released a new browser extension that's a lot of fun:

Explore MoMA’s collection of modern and contemporary art right from your browser.Discover new and iconic works of art from The Museum of Modern Art each time you open a new tab in Chrome. While using this extension, in each new Chrome tab, you’ll see a different artwork from our collection, ranging from Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “‘Untitled’ (Perfect Lovers).”

🐦 A Fascinating Tweet

"The factory is the product."

🚚 $87.50 for 3 Minutes: Inside the Hot Market for Videos of Idling Trucks — NY Times

When trying to nudge behavior in a more environmentally-friendly direction, is a carrot or a stick better? As it turns out, you can use both: NYC is rewarding citizens for reporting idling trucks, to cut down on air pollution. One man has made $64,000 from the program:

This is a scene from the city’s benign-sounding but often raucous Citizens Air Complaint Program, a public health campaign that invites — and pays — people to report trucks that are parked and idling for more than three minutes, or one minute if outside a school. Those who report collect 25 percent of any fine against a truck by submitting a video just over 3 minutes in length that shows the engine is running and the name of the company on the door.

💎 Ceramic Mosaics Mend Cracked Sidewalks, Potholes, and Buildings in Vibrant Interventions by Ememem — Colossal

Throughout his home city of Lyon, Ememem is known as “the pavement surgeon.” The artist repairs gouged sidewalks and splintered facades with colorful mosaics that he describes as “a poem that everybody can read.” Intricate geometric motifs laid with pristine tiles hug the cracks and create “a memory notebook of the city. It reveals what happened, the life in these public places,” he tells Colossal. “Here cobblestones have been picked up and thrown. There a truck from the vegetable market tore off a piece of asphalt…”

The rest of Ememem's work is worth viewing, and a great reminder of the Japanese concept of Kintsugi.

🐦 An Interesting Tweet

♻️ Forget ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — The Atlantic

Derek Thompson has a thought-provoking interview with Saul Griffith, an entrepreneur and MacArthur Grant recipient. He recently published a book that tries to shift the conversation around climate change towards much bolder ideas.

Griffith is clearly someone who thinks about the world in a positive-sum way:

But it’s the details that make his book Electrify Everything one of the most quietly revolutionary policy books I’ve ever read. Griffith is allergic to thinking small. He condemns the “1970s mentality” of energy efficiency, which says we can save the planet with a bit more recycling and a few more stainless-steel water bottles. Rather than guilt Americans over their living standards, he proposes that we can keep our luxurious lifestyles without destroying the planet if we all—governments, companies, and individuals—get a small number of big decisions just right.

💡 Why Do Most Ideas Fail to Scale? — Freakonomics

Here's a great podcast episode exploring why so many promising ideas sputter when you try to scale them:

In a new book called The Voltage Effect, the economist John List — who has already revolutionized how his profession does research — is trying to start a scaling revolution. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, List teaches us how to avoid false positives, how to know whether a given success is due to the chef or the ingredients, and how to practice “optimal quitting.”

And More

This is old news by now, but I found it too wild not to share: The last documented widow of a Civil War veteran died as recently as 2020 🤯

On December 16, 2020, Helen Viola Jackson died in Marshfield, Missouri at the age of 101. She was the last known widow of a Civil War veteran, marrying 93-year-old James Bolin in 1936 at the age of 17.

And if you're interested in how individual people can bridge seemingly impossible spans of time, here's a video of someone who witnessed Abraham Lincoln's assasination. Mr. Samuel J. Seymour was 5 when he saw Lincoln assassinated, and lived long enough to share his experience on a game show:

Lastly, a couple quick updates on stories I previously linked to: Shackleton's ship has been found at the bottom of the Antarctic Ocean, and the patient who received a pig's heart transplant has died.

🐦 A Tweet Thread

And speaking of games, here's an important and inspiring thread on the importance of creating delight:

Tomorrow is the six month anniversary of the start of this blog, so I wanted to take the opportunity to briefly reflect, as well as announce some changes to my publishing format going forward.

Six Months of Writing

So far, I've published 173 posts, not including the weekly digests or more technical guides. That adds up to 37,081 words, or about half the length of a short book. (!)

Clive Thompson recently created a tool that lets you extract all the questions from a piece of text. I thought it'd be interesting to take a look back at the last six months through the lens of just the questions I asked or quoted, so I dumped all of my writing into it.

Here are a few questions that stood out:

What can I remove so that this needs no instruction?

Would I talk to someone else this way?

Are the ghosts real?

You can browse all the questions I asked or quoted here.

Changes Moving Forward

It's a privilege to be able to show up in your inbox on a regular basis. As such, I want to make sure I'm only sending you things I'm excited to share, and not just publishing for the sake of having something to say each day.

After tomorrow's post, I'll be taking a couple weeks off, then switching to a weekly format. This will give me chance to focus on longer posts that I don't have time to work on when maintaining a daily publishing cadence.

You can expect a similar range of topics, just diving deeper into each idea. I'll send these posts out weekly in the Sunday Digest, along with the usual links of interest.

On to this week's links:

Links

👷‍♀️ Why Your Boss Wants to Know Your Love Language — NY Times

The pandemic has fundamentally reshaped many people's relationship with work, and employers are starting to lean into showing appreciation more. One result of this? Love languages are starting to enter the workplace:

It’s a question that plagued Shakespeare, Hallmark, Sappho and Taylor Swift, and these days it has even reached the workplace with surprising urgency: How do you show someone you care?

There’s a mining company in South Dakota that has sought an answer with a bold approach. The miners of Pete Lien & Sons, in Rapid City, S.D., spend their days drilling, blasting and loading shot rock into trucks. Their hard hats protect them from flying debris. But they also serve a subtler purpose: Each hat has a colorful sticker whose icon symbolizes either quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service or gifts — what are broadly known as love languages.

🦻 Making Sense: How sound becomes hearing — Unexplainable

Vox's excellent podcast Unexplainable recently explored just how subjective our hearing can be. The episode features a couple auditory illusions that are 🤯:

In the same way optical illusions trick our eyes, audio illusions can trick our ears. This raises a fundamental question: What is hearing, and how much of it is made up by our brains?

🥔 How do they make potato chips? — NFB

In case this week's post "Working On Vs. In" made you wonder how potato chips are really made, here's an oddly calming video that shows the process:

🐦 An amazing image

I'll be back in your inbox on 3/20!

Have a great couple weeks,‌‌

John

😴 The Power of Sleep — The Knowledge Project [Podcast]

An interesting an actionable discussion on why sleep is so important, as well as what you can do to improve yours:

Renowned sleep scientist Matthew Walker discusses everything you need to know about what a better night’s sleep can do for your life, and how to prioritize and perfect the way you sleep. Walker breaks down how to identify when you need more sleep, how to deal with insomnia, the best devices to track your sleep, and some unconventional sleep hygiene tips, including why it’s never a good idea to count sheep.

🐝 Honeybees Social Distance to Prevent Disease, Too — Scientific American

Animals (even insects) are often smarter than we give them credit for:

Humans are not the only animals that practice social distancing to deal with a deadly pathogen: A new study shows honeybees change their behavior and use of space to avoid spreading Varroa destructor mites, which feed on bees’ organs and can harbor nasty viruses. Researchers observed these changes in wild and caged bees infected with the mites, which are one of the biggest global threats to honeybees.

❤️ Amid missile attacks, Russian soldiers send Tinder requests to Ukrainians — Mint

I'm not sure how credible this report is, but even if there are few occurrences of this happening, it further underscores just how connected we are:

Ukrainian women in second city Kharkiv — just 20 miles from tyrannical Vladimir Putin’s vast invasion force — have been stunned by a salvo of admirers in uniform.

📺 A Relevant Video

Here's a fun addition to this week's post "Innovation vs. Distribution":

In this short one-minute commercial, Xerox introduces its vision for the office of the future. Years ahead of its time, the 1972 Xerox Alto featured Ethernet networking, a full page display, a mouse, laser printing, e-mail, and a windows-based user interface.

🐦 A Couple Artistic Tweets

🏡 The Home Is the Future of Travel

AirBnB is seeing a rise in "workcations," or people traveling to work remotely from different homes. The lines between work, personal, and vacation are blurring for people with the privilege to work remotely:

Work and life are undergoing a “Great Convergence.” The once-solid boundaries between our jobs and our leisure are getting leakier.

Knowledge industries—including media, marketing, and law—have for decades collapsed the distinction between work skills and social skills. The same schmoozy behavior that can win friends and influence people can also win business and influence promotions. Computers, where Excel documents intermingle with shopping tabs, blend work tools and personal tools. And remote work—the ability to do a job not only from home but from anywhere—mashes up our work time and leisure time, erasing the spatial differences between many of our weekdays and weekends.

🏫 Turns out, Harvard students aren’t that smart after all

Among elite institutions, there is a competition to solicit as many applications as possible in order to keep acceptance rates low. These statistics in turn help make the schools look more desirable. The problem? At many schools, merit isn't the only factor for admission:

Ever wondered what it takes to get into Harvard? Stellar grades, impressive extracurriculars and based on a recently published study, having deep pockets and a parent who either works or went there. Those last two are pretty important for Harvard’s white students because only about 57% of them were admitted to the school based on merit.

🚽 45,000 places in the U.S. where you can go when nature calls

The internet enables access to information at scale, and that information can be enormously helpful for certain groups. A new app has been designed to help people experiencing homelessness and inflammatory bowel disease:

We Can’t Wait launched last week with more than 45,000 restroom locations listed around the country. It’s the leading initiative of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation’s Open Restrooms Movement, which seeks to raise public awareness about the lack of access to public restrooms. Approximately 1.6 million Americans currently suffer from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The app was built with them in mind, but it could also prove useful for people experiencing homelessness, who often end up being further marginalized—and humiliated—for being forced to urinate in public.

🐦 A Helpful Tweet

Your regular reminder that reframing is a powerful tool:

⛷ How Olympians Embraced Mental Health After Biles Showed the Way — NY Times

World-class athletes have to conduct their wellbeing just like everyone else. Biles has given more athletes space to share their challenges:

She gave voice to the feelings they have shared — the doubts, the worries, the pressures. In speaking openly about mental health, along with other star athletes like the tennis player Naomi Osaka, Biles gave tacit permission to be vulnerable. She reminded fans, friends and family that even the best athletes in the world have feelings and fears.

💰 A bold new experiment out of Florida: Guaranteed income for the formerly incarcerated — Vox

Florida is giving a group of formerly incarcerated people $7,600 each over the course of the year to see how it helps them reenter society.

Incarceration is expensive for the state, and it hurts people, families, and communities. In 2020, it cost taxpayers an average of over $35,000 to incarcerate someone in a federal facility; in Florida state prisons, the cost was about $28,000.

The toll of incarceration is considerable. The effects of prison don’t end when the incarcerated are released. Many employers are hesitant to hire formerly incarcerated people, who face homelessness at almost 10 times the average rate. People who are incarcerated are disproportionately low-income and Black, and they face additional fines and financial penalties after release, such as probation fees, lingering court fees, mandatory therapy, ankle monitoring, and drug testing. Inability to pay these can lead to reincarceration.

🏝 The Great Resignation has morphed into the Great Sabbatical — Fast Company

Mid-career sabbaticals are growing in popularity, which means a gap in your resume is starting to lose its stigma:

It turns out I wasn’t the only one. Somewhere, lost amidst shouty internet headlines about the Great Resignation and a growing anti-work movement—some workers who can afford it are quietly hitting pause. Instead of quitting one job to immediately embark on another, a growing number of American workers are choosing to take time off to do nothing at all—at least for a little while.

And more:

🌿 Conjuring Maine’s Clairvoyant Kush — New Yorker

A company in Portland has dispatched psychics across the state—where marijuana is legal but delivery isn’t—to find a wide selection of your lost weed and drop it off at your home.

🖼 This 365-Gigapixel Monster is the World's Largest Panorama — 500px

The statistics behind this photograph are staggering: 35 hours of shooting, 2 months of post-production, 14 Photoshop files, and a final image that would print out (at 300ppi) to the same size as a freaking football (soccer) field!

🐦 A Formerly Funny Tweet

As technology progresses, humorous (or "humorous") commentary can eventually just depict everyday life:

🧺 This startup is turning the laundromat into the doctor’s office — Fast Company

Fabric Health is reducing the friction to access public health programs. One can imagine to scaling this approach to help enroll voters, provide support to folks in danger of losing their housing, and more:

“You have to meet busy families where they are, in the time that they have,” says Fabric Health cofounder Allister Chang. A typical family that uses a laundromat might spend two hours each weekend in the space—sitting on plastic chairs with little to do as they wait for loads of laundry to finish washing and drying. The same customers are also less likely to have time to go to the doctor during the week.

⚓️ A Search Begins for the Wreck Behind an Epic Tale of Survival — NY Times

The early 20th century saw the rise of Antarctic exploration. As a kid, I loved the story of Shackleton's failed expedition to be the first to cross the continent. It's a story of heroic leadership and an inspiring example of starting before you're ready (is anyone ever truly ready to cross Antarctica with 1915 technology?).

A team of researchers is now trying to document the historic site:

“It’s the most unreachable wreck ever,” said Mensun Bound, a marine archaeologist and director of exploration of the expedition, Endurance22. “Which makes this the greatest wreck hunt of all time.”

👩‍💻 How an Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day — The Verge

Kat Norton is a great example of the long tail, which refers to the nearly infinite number of niche markets out there. Norton has found tremendous success creating bubbly, dance videos that provide short Excel tips.

By leveraging that audience to sell full online Excel courses, she found a way to make a full-time income in a matter of months.

It was April 2020 at that point — I didn’t create Miss Excel until June, two months later. This wasn’t even a thought in my mind. I didn’t even have a TikTok — I turned to my mother and said, “Mom, I’m going to be rich and famous soon so I need you to prepare your nervous system for that.” She was laughing.

And more:

💼 People don't work as much as you think — Overthinking Everything

There is a persistent idea that people work 40 hours a week. They don't, and if you try to do this it will break you. Here are some more reasonable guidelines.

🏬 This startup helps small businesses buy their buildings so they don’t get priced out — Fast Company

Many favorite local stores close when new landlords jack up their rent. Withco wants to help them become their own landlords, instead.

🎭 The Madness of Method Acting — The Atlantic

Does acting need to be grueling to be good?

🐦 Some Relevant Tweets

Speaking of growth:

And on finding out who you are: