Wearable gadgets portend vast health, research and privacy consequences, the Washington Post takes on the quantified self. I’m in the medium end of this, I track pretty much everything that’s easy, but no blood / hormone tests yet.
Category Archives: Asides
Beginning with the 2015 academic year, the Center for Advanced Hindsight (CAH) at Duke University will invite promising startups to join its behavioral lab and leverage academic research in their business models. The Center is housed within the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University and is led by Professor Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University.
This is a pretty awesome opportunity for entrepreneurs, I hope a reader of this blog pursues it.
Tad Friend has a great New Yorker profile of Marc Andreessen, one of my favorite people to debate and talk to (though it happens all too rarely). Check out Pmarca Says if you want to catch up on some of his recent thinking from tweetstorms.
Undercity
When Kara Goldin started putting fruit in her water 10 years ago, she had no idea that she had stumbled upon a business idea that would eventually lead to the creation of a new category in the beverage industry, grow to a 40 million dollar company, and help her lose over 25 pounds in the process.
Cool interview with Kara Goldin, the founder of Hint Water, which I drink 3-4 of a day and is also an Audrey company.
When You Lose Weight, Where Does it Go? I’ll be honest that I had no idea.
The Verge: Slot machines perfected addictive gaming. Now, tech wants their tricks. Includes information from one of my favorite authors Nir Eyal, who also spoke at WordCamp San Francisco a few years ago.
Sam Altman of YCombinator wrote a great post on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday, The days are long but the decades are short. There’s a lot of subtlety and nuance in each point, so even if you’ve read it already it’s worth another pass.
This Untold Story of Silk Road is pretty amazing writing, a gripping story regardless of the genre (non-fiction, in this case). I can’t wait for the next chapter to come out on May 14. Also when reading about Ross, it’s interesting to keep in mind Vanity Jones who was in many ways the brains behind the operation, and also undiscovered.
Via Om, I wanted to share this poem Away by James Whitcomb Riley:
I cannot say, and I will not say
That he is dead. He is just away.
With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand,
He has wandered into an unknown land
And left us dreaming how very fair
It needs must be, since he lingers there.
And you—oh you, who the wildest yearn
For an old-time step, and the glad return,
Think of him faring on, as dear
In the love of There as the love of Here.
Think of him still as the same. I say,
He is not dead—he is just away.
We’ve lost two incredible souls this week: first Dan Fredinburg in Nepal and now Dave Goldberg has unexpectedly passed. I encourage you to Google articles about their lives, like this one about Dave Goldberg or this on Dan, because both were unique and incredible individuals. In an example of how software can have unintended effect on emotions, I just realized I had a pending friend request on Facebook from Dan, probably years old. 🙁 Going through a lot of emotions, but a good reminder that life can be fleeting and to make time for friends and those who you love, something both of these men were great at. May they both rest in peace.
After writing two books on the science of climate change, I decided I could no longer continue taking a pro-science position on global warming and an anti-science position on G.M.O.s.
Mark Lynas writes How I Got Converted to G.M.O. Food, particularly how GMOs impact the places where crops are needed the most. If you’re looking for a catch-up check out this link collection on ma.tt last year.
Changing America’s Mind
Bloomberg has a cool look at societal changes, called This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind.
I want to take a step backward. Who remembers the last email they sent yesterday? No one. Or the last text message. Emperor Hadrian used to say, “The daily business, the daily life, the daily chores, kills the human being.“ I’m not interested in daily chores. We have now swapped information for knowledge, which is not the same thing. I do not want to know. I’m not online. I don’t even have a computer.
Om has an incredible interview with Brunello Cucinelli on Pi.co, which I’d recommend for everyone but especially people interested in design or entrepreneurship.
The ability of radiation to cause cancer is dependent on whether or not the radiation is able to alter chemical bonds. This occurs when electrons involved in bonding in a molecule absorb radiation with enough energy to allow them to escape – this is called ionization. The thing is, whether or not radiation is ionizing is based solely on its energy, not on its number, and as we saw above, its energy is determined entirely from its frequency.
Cool article on WordPress.com about Why Cell Phones Can’t Cause Cancer, But Bananas Can, which I read while eating (and finishing) a banana. It covers dielectric heating too.
If you’re curious about quantum entanglement (and a type of synesthesia) at all, check out this week’s Invisibilia show on NPR called Entanglement.
You can’t go wrong with Amazon’s 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime. I’ve only read a bit over a dozen of them, and some of those in school when I probably didn’t appreciate them. I’ve never had a time in my life when I thought, “You know, I’m reading too much.” It’s a weekend — read!
The Atlantic has a set of 45 pictures that are both beautiful and shocking to commemorate Earth Day.
Two big releases today: WordPress 4.2 with lots of interface improvements and emoji support, and the 3.5 release of Jetpack with a new menu editor.
I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure was creaky and basic services such as ground transportation were chaotic and unreliable.
Roland Kelts on What the west can learn from Japan’s “lost decades.” This echoes a lot of my experience there recently, and I had the good fortune of meeting Roland as well.