24 July 2014
DARPA, the darpa robot challenge and Google
http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/meet-darpas-new-generation-of-humanoid-robots/
Living Off the Grid: The Mesa in Colorado
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/why-i-gave-up-living-in-an-off-grid-commune/
25 June 2014
Happiness in Business: a maid and a king
http://www.ted.com/talks/chip_conley_measuring_what_makes_life_worthwhile
"if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" -Maslow
"if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" -Maslow
20 June 2014
Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank.
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_why_good_leaders_make_you_feel_safe
The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is, is like being a parent. If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want? What makes a great parent? We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. Great leaders want exactly the same thing. They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves.
This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred, anger, at some of these banking CEOswith their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures. It's not the numbers. It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership. They have violated this deep-seated social contract. We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests. This is what so offends us, not the numbers. Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? Do we have an issue with that? None at all. None at all. Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people.
Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizationswho are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is.
I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater, and as is the Marine custom, the officer ate last, and he let his men eat first, and when they were done, there was no food left for him. And when they went back out in the field, his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat, because that's what happens. We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain, and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, "Why would you do that? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?" they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in?
The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is, is like being a parent. If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want? What makes a great parent? We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. Great leaders want exactly the same thing. They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves.
This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred, anger, at some of these banking CEOswith their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures. It's not the numbers. It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership. They have violated this deep-seated social contract. We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests. This is what so offends us, not the numbers. Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? Do we have an issue with that? None at all. None at all. Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people.
Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizationswho are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is.
I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater, and as is the Marine custom, the officer ate last, and he let his men eat first, and when they were done, there was no food left for him. And when they went back out in the field, his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat, because that's what happens. We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain, and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, "Why would you do that? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?" they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in?
19 June 2014
Life Without Sleep
http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/jessa-gamble-life-without-sleep/
Somneo Sleep Trainer
Should technologies such as tDCS prove safe and become widely available, they would represent an alternate route to human longevity, extending our conscious lifespan by as much as 50 per cent. Many of us cherish the time we spend in bed, but we don’t consciously experience most of our sleeping hours — if they were reduced without extra fatigue, we might scarcely notice a difference except for all those open, new hours in our night time existence. Lifespan statistics often adjust for time spent disabled by illness, but they rarely account for the ultimate debilitation: lack of consciousness. Now a life lived at 150 per cent might be within our grasp. Are we brave enough to choose it?
Somneo Sleep Trainer
Should technologies such as tDCS prove safe and become widely available, they would represent an alternate route to human longevity, extending our conscious lifespan by as much as 50 per cent. Many of us cherish the time we spend in bed, but we don’t consciously experience most of our sleeping hours — if they were reduced without extra fatigue, we might scarcely notice a difference except for all those open, new hours in our night time existence. Lifespan statistics often adjust for time spent disabled by illness, but they rarely account for the ultimate debilitation: lack of consciousness. Now a life lived at 150 per cent might be within our grasp. Are we brave enough to choose it?
28 May 2014
27 May 2014
20 May 2014
Fake it Until you Become it
http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?awesm=on.ted.com_ps3A&utm_medium=on.ted.com-facebook-share&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=&utm_content=awesm-publisher#t-475933
18 May 2014
17 May 2014
Models of Climate Change
http://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_schmidt_the_emergent_patterns_of_climate_change
Faster, Better, Stronger
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_getting_faster_better_stronger
11 May 2014
30 April 2014
Frank Underwood Ruthlessness
Frank Underwood Ruthlessness
- “A great man once said, everything is about sex. Except sex. Sex is about power.”
- “I’ve always loathed the necessity of sleep. Like death, it puts even the most powerful men on their backs.”
- “The best thing about human beings is that they stack so neatly.”
- "Every kitten grows up to be a cat. They seem so harmless at first–small, quiet, lapping up their saucer of milk. But once their claws get long enough, they draw blood, sometimes from the hand that feeds them. For those of us climbing to the top fo the food chain, there can be no mercy. There is but one rule: hunt or be hunted."
- "Cry 'Havoc!' said he who fought chaos with chaos, and let slip the dogs of war"
- “There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain. The sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things.”
- “There’s no better way to overpower a trickle of doubt than with a flood of naked truth.”
- “The road to power is paved with hypocrisy, and casualties. Never regret."
25 March 2014
There is a complex sort of joy in sadness
"
I wanted the happiness, but in a retrospective way (because then it’s done and dusted and safe); and I wanted the melancholy because it just seemed so grown-up and sophisticated and suave. I wanted, as an old joke has it, to skip the marriage and go straight to the divorce. After all – and I am hardly the first person to point this out – there is a complex sort of joy in sadness.
Sometimes we are sad because we have cause, and sometimes we are sad because – consciously or unconsciously – we want to be. Perhaps there’s a sense in which emotional variety is better than monotony, even if the monotone is a happy one. But there’s more to it than that, I think. We value sadness in ways that make happiness look a bit simple-minded.
Melancholy, Coleridge is arguing, is more dignified than happiness. I suspect this is a sense that most people have – that joy is, at root, a kind of idiot pleasure, the idiom of the lobotomy, a balloon just waiting to be popped. Sorrow is somehow more grown-up, because less illusioned. It feels more sincere, more authentic.
Why on earth should melancholy be elegant – or attractive in any other way? On the face of it, it ought to be precisely the sort of thing that evolution breeds out of the race, a prime target for sexual deselection. What female would want to mate with a miserable partner when she could have a happy, smiling one instead?
It’s the insight of Vergil’s Aeneas, as he looks back over his troubled life and forward to troubles yet to some: sunt lacrimae rerum; there are tears in everything, said not mournfully nor hopelessly but as a paradoxical statement about the beauty of the world (Aeneid 1:462).
Saying so invokes what evolutionary scientists call ‘the handicap principle’, a hypothesis first framed by the Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi in 1975. The idea is that extravagant traits such as the highland deer’s massive antlers or the peacock’s tail are useful because they are so ostentatiously expensive, manifestly inconveniencing the owner. They are a way of saying: I’m so strong, my genes are so desirable, that I can afford to schlep about with this manifest – and, by the way, beautiful – disadvantage attached to my body.
I wanted the happiness, but in a retrospective way (because then it’s done and dusted and safe); and I wanted the melancholy because it just seemed so grown-up and sophisticated and suave. I wanted, as an old joke has it, to skip the marriage and go straight to the divorce. After all – and I am hardly the first person to point this out – there is a complex sort of joy in sadness.
Sometimes we are sad because we have cause, and sometimes we are sad because – consciously or unconsciously – we want to be. Perhaps there’s a sense in which emotional variety is better than monotony, even if the monotone is a happy one. But there’s more to it than that, I think. We value sadness in ways that make happiness look a bit simple-minded.
Melancholy, Coleridge is arguing, is more dignified than happiness. I suspect this is a sense that most people have – that joy is, at root, a kind of idiot pleasure, the idiom of the lobotomy, a balloon just waiting to be popped. Sorrow is somehow more grown-up, because less illusioned. It feels more sincere, more authentic.
Why on earth should melancholy be elegant – or attractive in any other way? On the face of it, it ought to be precisely the sort of thing that evolution breeds out of the race, a prime target for sexual deselection. What female would want to mate with a miserable partner when she could have a happy, smiling one instead?
It’s the insight of Vergil’s Aeneas, as he looks back over his troubled life and forward to troubles yet to some: sunt lacrimae rerum; there are tears in everything, said not mournfully nor hopelessly but as a paradoxical statement about the beauty of the world (Aeneid 1:462).
Saying so invokes what evolutionary scientists call ‘the handicap principle’, a hypothesis first framed by the Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi in 1975. The idea is that extravagant traits such as the highland deer’s massive antlers or the peacock’s tail are useful because they are so ostentatiously expensive, manifestly inconveniencing the owner. They are a way of saying: I’m so strong, my genes are so desirable, that I can afford to schlep about with this manifest – and, by the way, beautiful – disadvantage attached to my body.
Sadness, according to this model, is a kind of conspicuous consumption. It takes more muscles to frown than smile, and maybe that’s the point. It signals ones capacity to squander a resource precisely by squandering it. Any fool can live and be happy. It takes greater strength to live and be sad.
All the same, this analysis loses the most important aspect of this emotion; not that it costs, but that it is beautiful. Happy can be pretty, but some species of sad have access to beauties that happy can never know.
"
http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/any-fool-can-be-happy-sadness-takes-strengt/
09 March 2014
A Life Well Lived
http://aeon.co/film/life-well-lived-a-short-film-about-the-first-american-to-summit-everest/
“It is in the wild places, from the damp clean air of an ancient forest, on a heaving ocean in unpredictable winds, on a snowy summit at the top of the world that I enter my own personal cathedral and know where I fit in the vastness of creation.”
“It is in the wild places, from the damp clean air of an ancient forest, on a heaving ocean in unpredictable winds, on a snowy summit at the top of the world that I enter my own personal cathedral and know where I fit in the vastness of creation.”
A Life Well Lived
Jim Whittaker was the first American to reach the summit of Everest. He made it to the top despite having run out of oxygen, a testament not only to his will but to his world view, epitomised in his simple but forceful observation that ‘risk is really important to life’. A Life Well Lived: Jim Whittaker and 50 Years of Everestincorporates remarkable archive footage from Whittaker’s Everest expeditions as he reflects on how
Jim Whittaker was the first American to reach the summit of Everest. He made it to the top despite having run out of oxygen, a testament not only to his will but to his world view, epitomised in his simple but forceful observation that ‘risk is really important to life’. A Life Well Lived: Jim Whittaker and 50 Years of Everestincorporates remarkable archive footage from Whittaker’s Everest expeditions as he reflects on how
climbing has shaped his life and how the sport has changed in the 50 years since his remarkable achievement.
05 March 2014
Do What You Love
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html
Lupita Nyong'o Speech on Beauty
"And my mother again would say to me, you can't eat beauty, it doesn't feed you. And these words played and bothered me, I didn't really understand them until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume. It was something that I just had to BE. And what my mother meant when she said you can't eat beauty was that you can't rely on how to look to sustain you. What actually sustains us, what is fundamentally beautiful, is compassion, for yourself and for those around you. That kind of beauty inflames the heart and enchants the soul..."
01 January 2014
How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon
Companies try to convince you that they are part of your family. They want to create a sense of connection or even intimacy between the viewer and the advertiser. An ad that says: “Yes, I know you know that I’m an ad, and I know that you know that I’m annoying you” is a statement of empathy, and thus a statement of connection. And as any salesperson will tell you, connection is key to the sales
So what would a deeper look tell us? Perhaps it is that the ‘cynical distance’ inherent in knowing, self-immolating, empathetic adverts not only perpetuates brands, but is at the foundation of advertising itself. By ‘factoring in’ dissent, the ad neutralises it in advance, like the stock market inoculating itself against future shocks by including their likelihood in share prices. The advertising industry anticipates and then absorbs its own opposition, like a politician cracking jokes at his own expense to disarm a hostile media.
Chipotle recently tried this through a brilliant animated short
These ads want to be our friends — to empathise with us against the tyranny of the corporate world they inhabit. Just when we thought we’d cottoned on to subliminal advertising, personalised sidebars on web pages, advertorials and infomercials, products started echoing our contempt for them. ‘Shut up!’ we shout at the TV, and the TV gets behind the sofa and shouts along with us.
So what would a deeper look tell us? Perhaps it is that the ‘cynical distance’ inherent in knowing, self-immolating, empathetic adverts not only perpetuates brands, but is at the foundation of advertising itself. By ‘factoring in’ dissent, the ad neutralises it in advance, like the stock market inoculating itself against future shocks by including their likelihood in share prices. The advertising industry anticipates and then absorbs its own opposition, like a politician cracking jokes at his own expense to disarm a hostile media.
And the industry’s seemingly endless capacity to perpetuate itself matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It systematically promotes and presents a specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the more that we’re encouraged to obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with society’s more pressing problems.
Satire has long been acknowledged as a paradoxical crutch for a society’s existing power structures: we laugh at political jibes, and that same laughter displaces the desire for change. As such as Chipotle's — which express our concerns about the failings of globalisation in a safe space before packing them away — are surely an equivalent safety valve for any subversive rumblings.
Full essay here:
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/how-advertising-turned-anti-consumerism-into-a-secret-weapon/
Polymaths
Specialize, specialize, specialize... From Adam Smith to today's socially-awkward PhDs
How about striving to be a polymath?
http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/anyone-can-learn-to-be-a-polymath/
Heinlein: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects".
How about striving to be a polymath?
http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/anyone-can-learn-to-be-a-polymath/
Heinlein: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects".
Best Mad Men Mottos
It means that a man is many things to many people, including himself.
He has a relationship with wife, children, parents, police, co-workers, fellow travellers on the road or other swimmers at the beach etc, and he acts appropriately according to the circumstances and association.
He also has of internalised relationships at every given moment of his life which are dependent not only on the other person but also on how he is emotionally and physically within himself.
Indeed, man continually makes and remakes himself according to the space he finds himself.
He has a relationship with wife, children, parents, police, co-workers, fellow travellers on the road or other swimmers at the beach etc, and he acts appropriately according to the circumstances and association.
He also has of internalised relationships at every given moment of his life which are dependent not only on the other person but also on how he is emotionally and physically within himself.
Indeed, man continually makes and remakes himself according to the space he finds himself.
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