Find a half-remembered link or follow a subject through years of Sunday notes.
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We may know this intuitively: adding in a spot of good news makes bad news easier to take. Researchers have studied this Silver Lining Effect over the years, helping us understand when that’s true and when it’s not. | learn more
A study by researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research set out to answer the question, “Are states led by women less prone to conflict than states led by men?” What they found was that between 1480 and 1913, Europe’s queens were 27% more likely than its kings to…
Chicago is finally making strides to pull its emergency response system into the digital age, with the hopes of enabling texts, photos, and videos. The city is expected to go out to bid for a new system in the next few weeks. | learn more
Richard C Cooke funded his own election campaign ($660k) to win an uncontested Cook County judgeship last year. Since then, he’s refused to work in traffic court where judges usually start (even those with hugely successful legal careers). Instead Cook County is paying him his regular $200k salary…
Larry Page, one of the cofounders of Google, has been investing (over $100mm by some reports) in creating a flying car since 2010. This week the company Kitty Hawk unveiled an early prototype called The Flyer, which can take off vertically and looks like a lot of fun to…
While not the most recent news (Summer 2016), it’s worth highlighting that we’re already living in the world of AI. Google tasked it’s DeepMind AI unit to address the challenge of lowering energy usage in its data centers. Rising to the challenge, the machine learning controller achieved a…
On the topic of things that last a very long time, polyethylene (the most common plastic) takes hundreds of years to decay. That’s a problem because we produce about 80 million tons of it annually, and much ends up in landfills and oceans. Federica Bertocchini, a scientist in…
Nuclear power is a great source of renewable energy, and while many place it in the category of clean energy, it carries a serious downside - radioactive nuclear waste. This stuff is not only dangerous, but also has a crazy long half-life (5,730 years), which makes it dangerous for very…
You probably already know how correlated success and reading tend to be. This post offers some concrete tips on how to fit more books into your already busy life. First and foremost is a tip that hits home for me - it’s okay to quit reading a book…
Humans are genetically wired to be story tellers and story listeners. Our ability to tell stories actually sets us apart from other species and allows us to form larger groups that get more accomplished together. This strength is, unfortunately, one of our big weaknesses too. The narrative fallacy is about…
Last week we learned about 3D knitting enabling real-time creation of clothing. This week Amazon makes the news with its patent around on-demand clothing manufacturing. From the patent: “By aggregating orders from various geographic locations and coordinating apparel assembly processes on a large scale, the networked environment provides…
Someone made a Chrome browser extension that replaces every instance of the word millennial with snack people, and it’s pretty damn funny. | learn more
A historian found that people used to divide their sleep into two separate periods, waking up in the middle of the night to take care of stuff - chores, reading, praying, etc. Electric lights might have caused our schedules to change, inadvertently causing a third of Americans to…
Chicago’s 50 wards each have an alderman. How does the city distribute funds for residential infrastructure? It splits it up evenly across each alderman, creating a “cherished perk” of the job. But it’s probably not the best way to spend the money wisely across the city. | learn more
At the turn of the last century, the city had a hygiene problem. The lack of indoor plumbing in most residences meant that most people didn’t have a place to wash up. So, the city built 21 public bath houses. Forgotten Chicago brings you back to this world with photos…
Scientists just keep pumping out anti-aging scientific discoveries. This time, they injected plasma from human umbilical cord blood directly into older mice every four days for two weeks. The mice who received this treatment fared the best on a treacherous maze. | learn more
Elon Musks’ new company will build interfaces that connect computers directly to your brain. If you’ve never read posts on Wait but Why, now is the time to start. Tim Urban uses his uniquely awesome writing (and drawing) style to give an in-depth overview of what Elon’s trying to…
“Until now, bot experiences were just you and the bot. But that puts a ton of pressure on the bot to seem human. Chat Extensions pose them more as assistants or tickers rather than conversation partners, better matching what’s feasible with today’s technology.” | learn more
Steve Blank, who teaches at Stanford, Berkeley and Columbia, writes about why some startups win - clearly defined missions. He writes about his experience creating a departmental mission statement to guide his team so they knew, “why they came to work, what they needed to do while they…
Imagine if you and your brother worked together. Then imagine if you worked together in the government. Keep going - one of you is Secretary of State and the other is Director of the CIA. That’s the Dulles brothers. Together, they overthrew governments, ran secret paramilitary campaigns, and…
“Some of history’s most famous people from Charles Darwin and Bill Gates to Winston Churchill, took rest very seriously. Rather than prevent them from accomplishing things this was the very thing that enabled them.” | learn more
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner writes about his practice of scheduling 90 minutes to 2 hours of empty space in his calendar daily. “Use that buffer time to think big, catch up on the latest industry news, get out from under that pile of unread emails, or just take…
Many of us struggle to balance a significant number of priorities. President Eisenhower used this approach to figure out what to work on first. | lean more
What do brands like Adidas, Uniqlo, and Ministry of Supply see in their crystal balls? While 3D printing is still stuck making products that feel like plastic, 3D knitting can create custom textiles on-demand. Uniqlo has a line of 3D knitted clothing already available. Ministry of Supply has…