Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the three I found most interesting:

Thinking Outside Pandora’s Box, via Startups and Shit—Startup L. Jackson is an anonymous Twitter user who has a biting and insightful take on Silicon Valley. Check out his most popular tweets for some hilarious tech wisdom.

He also has a blog for the thoughts that don’t fit snugly into Twitter’s 140 character limit. His analysis of the music industry was particularly interesting to me, and just as interesting are the hyperlinks used to support his point, that streaming music is not a profitable business, and why should it be? The only reason music was profitable in the past was because it was wildly inefficient.

Mobile: It Changes Everything, via ben-evans.com—In keeping with the theme of insights from a technologist, below is a 25 minute presentation from Benedict Evans about the mammoth potential of mobile devices compared to the PC, and people’s online consumption preferences. The presentation presents numerical data in a pleasing visual manner, and makes sense of trends in technology and commerce. The implications he presents are staggering:

Why the Dodo Deserves a New Reputation, via Audubon: Moving on from tech and into the world of paleontology and the dodo bird. For starters, I hadn’t realized the dodo had been extinct for almost 400 years (last seen in 1662)! Here is an attempt to correct the misunderstandings in the dodo legend, namely that it wasn’t such a dumb, maladapted bird. Our impression of it has been misinformed by bad science and inaccurate drawings of its body (only two drawings that exist were done by people who had actually seen a dodo bird!). Rather, this creature was the product of the locale it evolved in, and its evolutionary eccentricities are explained by this quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease:

“Strange evolutionary events often happen on islands. Large animals on small, remote islands often confront energy crisis because there are typically fewer plants and less food than on larger landmasses. In these settings, very large animals struggle because they need more food than the island can provide. In contrast, small animals frequently do better than their mainland relatives because they have enough food, they face less competition from other small species, and because islands often lack predators, releasing them from the need to hide. On many islands small species become larger (gigantism) and large species become smaller (dwarfism). Islands such as Madagascar, Mauritius, or Sardinia were thus hosts to giant rats and lizards (Komodo dragons) along with miniature hippos, elephants, and goats (SEE: Homo floresiensis, the Hobbit of Flores).

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the three I found most interesting:

The Lonely Death of George Bell, via The New York Times—Some people die alone. This article is both a riveting investigation into who George Bell was, as well as a meditation on what it means to grow old and how to do so with dignity:

The solitude of so many deaths wears on Mr. Plaza, the fear that someday it will be him splayed on the floor in one of these silent apartments. “This job teaches you a lot,” he said. “You learn whatever material stuff you have you should use it and share it. Share yourself. People die with nobody to talk to. They die and relatives come out of the woodwork. ‘He was my uncle. He was my cousin. Give me what he had.’ Gimme, gimme. Yet when he was alive they never visited, never knew the person. From working in this office, my life changed.”

How Your Junk Mail Shows If You’re Rich Or Poor, via The Washington Post—Those junk mail credit card offers aren’t random. If it’s in your mailbox, it’s for you.

Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill, via MIT Technology Review—As discussed in The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us, the more we ask from automation, the more necessary an electronic ethical code becomes:

Here is the nature of the dilemma. Imagine that in the not-too-distant future, you own a self-driving car. One day, while you are driving along, an unfortunate set of events causes the car to head toward a crowd of 10 people crossing the road. It cannot stop in time but it can avoid killing 10 people by steering into a wall. However, this collision would kill you, the owner and occupant. What should it do?

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. The most interesting one I read this week was a long one, and deserves your full attention:

Why the Best War Reporter in a Generation Had to Suddenly Stop—via Esquire: A profile on C.J. Chivers, a war correspondent who’s seen it all in the past fifteen years, from Ground Zero on 9/11 to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya:

By that April 2011, when Libya was collapsing into civil war, Chivers himself had been at war for ten years. He’d been in Afghanistan in November 2001, just after the bombing began, as he’d been in Iraq in March 2003, when the bombing began there—as he’d also been in lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, and as he had been in every theater since, too many deployments for him to even remember, amounting to years away from his home, his wife, and his five small children, four boys and a girl.

The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What theTimes could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other things, its study of the weapons we use to kill one another. After reporting on a firefight—whether he was in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Ossetia, Libya, or Syria—he’d look for shell casings and ordnance fragments. If he was embedded with American soldiers or Marines, he’d ask them if he could look through what they had found for an hour or so—”finger fucking,” he’d call it—and ask his photographer to take pictures of ammunition stamps and serial numbers. Over time and in this way he would reveal a vast world of small-arms trade and secret trafficking that no other journalist had known existed before.

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the three I found most interesting:

Why Singapore has the smartest kids in the world, via cnn.com—I’ve heard many vague statements bemoaning how bad the American education system is, but this quote clearly distills what’s lacking:

“One thing that’s been clear to them is that the world economy no longer rewards people just for what they know. Google knows everything. The world economy rewards people for what they can do with what they know.”

How Did Picasso Create 50,000 Works of Art? via Altucher Confidential—There’s a lot of wisdom in James Altucher’s writing. He’s prolific and repeats himself a lot but I found some enlightening new ideas in these reflections on quotes from Picasso:

“Action is the foundational key to all success.”

I know too many people who have an idea for a book, or a show, or a business. But “when I have time” or “it’s too late for me”, ignoring that Barbara Cortland wrote 23 books in her 82nd year.

The one thing in common from anyone above is that they wrote every single day. It’s hard to sit down every day and…sit. Blank paper. Blank canvas. Blankness.

And then…if you do something…it might suck. It might be the worst thing you ever do.

Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, has an incredible world record: he’s missed more shots in professional basketball than any other player. He’s missed over 13,000 shots.

So taking action is more important than anything else.

Nothing => Thinking => Doing => Finishing => Repeat is a daily practice for…I don’t know.

But I hope I can do it every day.

Is The World Looking Progressively Weirder? via Marginal Revolution—As the glut of information being generated expands on top of what is already available, our attention spans can’t hope to keep up:

As the world is more connected, with the global dominating over the local, the number of sources of news is multiplying. But your consciousness remains limited. So we are experiencing a winner-take-all effect in information: like a large movie theatre with a small door. 

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the two I found most interesting: