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– BBC NEWS | UK | Human species ‘may split in two’Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology.
Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.
Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.
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Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
– Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule -
[I]f you follow your bliss, you’ll have your bliss whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose the money, and then you don’t have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way.” — Joseph Campbell (An Open Life, 1990)
– Day 4 – “The Insecure Way is the Secure Way” | ArtSpirit7 -
Each day is given only 24 hours. Even with the bare minimum of coordination costs, cut down by your tools and your processes and your homegrown blend of agile, whole hours of that day are lost to meetings, status updates, course correction, revision, company chatter, building consensus, setting and measuring, iterating and reporting. Life decimates your team with unerring and unrelenting creativity. Pregnancy, paternity/maternity leave, illness, death, burnout, vacations, weddings, freakish seasonal variants of the flu. Then there are the inevitable bugs that would make shipping irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst. Urgent customer issues. Scope creep and intervening crisis. The combined weight and force of your team bleeds the blood of a thousand paper cuts:
– How the Productivity Myth is Killing Your Startup — about work — Medium -
If, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the internet.
– How Facebook (FB) is Altering Your Mind | David RainoshekDavid Rainoshek -
Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles” (by TEDtalksDirector)
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I think the digital world suffers from being just so literal, so deliberate and sober. As with digital photography, people have gotten used to applying simulated filters onto their pictures just to inject a bit of romance into the thing, because the raw pictures are so flat. But in the analog realm these beautiful things just happen by themselves without your conscious effort. You could say the wobbles and flutters in our music are equivalent to something like weeds overgrowing an old building. Nobody puts the weeds there, but nature comes along and makes the scene very tragic and beautiful.
– Brothers Who Make Electronica by Hand — www.nytimes.com — Readability -
I like putting my phone in my pocket and having to choose to take it out, keeping myself aware of the personal and social interruptions it creates. I use my phone often, but I’m just as happy not to use it at all if I’m doing something important, or spending time with important people, two activities I want as much of as possible before I die.
– the-meaninglessness-of-google-glass -
If you tripled the water pressure to my home or quadrupled the WiFi speed, as impressive as those leaps sound, it would have zero impact on my ability to drink water, or write and read posts. But technological progress is easier to measure than any other kind (spiritual, personal, social, metaphysical) so we measure it, and obsess about it, and allow it to distract us from more worthy improvements to modern life.
– the-meaninglessness-of-google-glass -
On headphones, you can explore the tracks one motif at a time, as if each were a small landscape. “Jacquard Causeway” has a series of metallic-sounding twinkles that seems to grow out of the chords that swell underneath, and they slip in and out of phase with the underlying drums in a manner that imparts an extra measure of uneasiness. “Split Your Infinities” has bird sounds and distant noises that sound like lasers, both of which are so subtle so as to function subliminally. “Nothing Is Real” is a swirl of deep bass, stop-start drums, and a continual surging synth line that sounds like a swarm of bugs, but it also has a distant, echoing keyboard line that haunts the track like a ghost. The layering of the various sounds on a given track offers a different way in each time, so they can take on an M.C. Escher-like quality, where the tone and emotional content varies according to what you choose to pay attention to. There are sounds behind sounds and sounds underneath sounds and you can find yourself sifting through the layers, turning the pieces inside-out.
–Boards of Canada: Tomorrow’s Harvest — pitchfork.com — Readability
thank you Scotland.
