Stories, news, articles worth reading ...

A place to post links to articles, news, and other stories you think are worth reading. I recommend including a quote or summary of the article.

 

Still one of my favorites to share.

The Fermi Paradox:

Everyone feels something when they’re in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this:



Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something.

Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—”Where is everybody?”

 

Susie Pan, writing for Medium:

Was it productive? Debatable. Was it a waste of time? No. Did I sell a company? Nope. Will I sell a company (or create enough value in society to have monetary returns) in the next 2 years? I don’t know. But even if I don’t, that’s OK. As long as I have learned something, and that I’ve created some value in someone’s life, today was a good day.

I’m only 23. And yes, in 1.5 years, I will be ¼ of a century old. But that gives me ¾ of a century more to keep learning and creating value. That’s 657,000 more hours I have to do whatever else I want to do with my life.

Susie, you’re only 23. Stop rushing life.

I wish I had read this at 23.

 

While I like to poke fun at sites trying to copy BuzzFeed, I sincerely wish they actually were trying to copy them when they put out fantastic stuff like this.

The Tennis Racket:

Secret files exposing evidence of widespread match-fixing by players at the upper level of world tennis can today be revealed by BuzzFeed News and the BBC.

The sport’s governing bodies have been warned repeatedly about a core group of 16 players – all of whom have ranked in the top 50 – but none have faced any sanctions and more than half of them will begin playing at the Australian Open on Monday.

 

New Republic:

Each social media network creates a particular kind of teenage star: Those blessed with early-onset hotness are drawn to YouTube, the fashionable and seemingly wealthy post to Instagram, the most charismatic actors, dancers, and comedians thrive on Vine. On Facebook, every link you share and photo you post is a statement of your identity. Tumblr is the social network that, based on my reporting, is seen by teens as the most uncool.

Looks at the secret lives of "Tumblr Teens," the back alley monetization schemes, and the story of some of the most popular accounts being terminated. It's an in-depth profile on a faction of the internet, and youth culture, that I seemed to just miss. Grab some pizza, or if you're my age: a beer, and dive in.

 

Interesting - adding to my article list.

 

I think it'll be right up your alley; we like a lot of the same stuff.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/science/new-ways-into-the-brains-music-room.html

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response

 

This was a super interesting article. My girlfriend is really into watching Youtubers and we watched the documentary Please Subscribe awhile back. You may enjoy that one. I think it's so unique and sad how these types of Internet celebrities - whether Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube - often can kind of just fizzle out overtime and the sustainability of these as fame mediums. It will definitely be interesting to see how the next 5-10 years of Internet/social media go.

 

The Gospel of Consumption

Interesting look on the relation between work hours and how it affects our consumption habits, and the extent to which some corporations went to to build a certain mindset.

 

This made my stomach hurt to read.

 

Looking at your preferences my guess is you're following this thread with notifications:


You should be able to see for sure here:

http://forum.chorus.fm/followed/threads/all

If email is enabled for a thread you'll see this text on the thread:



And you can turn it off on a thread by thread basis.

Then if your preferences are set to not send an email on followed threads, you'll be good to go.

 

The Moment I Chose To See My Tumor Diagnosis As An Opportunity -- Not A Setback

I distinctly remember what it felt like to hear that my tumors had spread.

It was only a week into my second semester of my freshman year at Rutgers University. I had spent the past few months living the typical college kid life: enjoying my first internship at a local music venue called the Stone Pony, making a ton of new friends, eating chicken nuggets with my roommate at 3 a.m., and then dragging myself to my 8 a.m. Friday recitation the next day. I loved the change of scenery, and the opportunity to take classes in subjects I was actually interested in, like the ethics of food or the impacts of culture on music. My new school felt like home, and after the battles I’d experienced with my health throughout high school, I felt like life had finally settled down. It all seemed like a new chapter was about to start.

 

@Jason Tate @Ryan Gardner Thought you guys might like this article. I'm fascinated by everything involving the YouTube/YouTubers world. It's amazing to me to see a brand new form of media come to be. Especially since they're writing the rules for what it means to be a YouTuber as we speak and no two personalities are doing it the same. Some are branching out to tours, TV, books, music, film, clothes, make-up. They're all going everywhere. I'm also fascinated by how well it functions as a self-policing community. There are definitely still issues and people who aren't held accountable, but seeing what happened when that one Sam Pepper video came out was incredible. Anyways, this article is about the divide between viewership and monetary gain.

The Sad Economics of Being Famous on the Internet

 

The Beginner’s Guide to Unschooling : zen habits

The beauty of unschooling is in the search for the answers. If anyone had all the answers, there would be no search. And so what I’d love to teach unschooling parents and kids is that the search is the joy of it all.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: what is unschooling? Why should you do it? How do you do it? What should you read? We’ll talk about all that today.

 

Wired:

The TSA is learning a basic lesson of physical security in the age of 3-D printing: If you have sensitive keys — say, a set of master keys that can open locks you’ve asked millions of Americans to use — don’t post pictures of them on the Internet.

A group of lock-picking and security enthusiasts drove that lesson home Wednesday by publishing a set of CAD files to Github that anyone can use to 3-D print a precisely measured set of the TSA’s master keys for its “approved” locks — the ones the agency can open with its own keys during airport inspections. Within hours, at least one 3-D printer owner had already downloaded the files, printed one of the master keys, and published a video proving that it opened his TSA-approved luggage lock.

 

Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again? — Backchannel

But that’s changing. Because of the endless chain of spectacular security failures and the Snowden news that the NSA is grabbing everything it can, the tech industry is finally ramping up its security. American companies are worried that foreign customers might regard their products as direct conduits to American authorities. So they have changed their practices for moving information between their data centers. Now, confirming government’s biggest nightmare, Apple has planted a flag in the ground for privacy — endeavoring to scramble data on its iPhones so only customers can access them.

Is it any wonder that the government is rebooting the crypto wars? For the first time, it’s really struggling with the results of the first war, as more information is now encrypted, increasingly in a manner the government finds really hard (or impossible) to decode.

 

Senica, letter 42:

Therefore, with regard to the objects which we pursue, and for which we strive with great effort, we should note this truth; either there is nothing desirable in them, or the undesirable is preponderant. Some objects are superfluous; others are not worth the price we pay for them. But we do not see this clearly, and we regard things as free gifts when they really cost us very dear. Our stupidity may be clearly proved by the fact that we hold that "buying" refers only to the objects for which we pay cash, and we regard as free gifts the things for which we spend our very selves. These we should refuse to buy, if we were compelled to give in payment for them our houses or some attractive and profitable estate; but we are eager to attain them at the cost of anxiety, of danger, and of lost honour, personal freedom, and time; so true it is that each man regards nothing as cheaper than himself.

 

Early praise for Amazon's Echo is great:

Many of the world’s largest technology companies have spent the last five years searching in vain for the holy grail, a machine to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget.

They have made digital watches and fitness trackers, all manner of computerized glasses and goggles, and more doodads to plug into your TV than there are shows to watch on it.

Yet at the moment, the most promising candidate for the Next Great Gadget isn’t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon — a company whose last big foray into consumer electronics, the Fire Phone, was a humiliating flop.

This time it may be different. A bit more than a year after its release, the Echo has morphed from a gimmicky experiment into a device that brims with profound possibility. The longer I use it, the more regularly it inspires the same sense of promise I felt when I used the first iPhone — a sense this machine is opening up a vast new realm in personal computing, and gently expanding the role that computers will play in our future.

 

A Plagiarism Scandal Is Unfolding In The Crossword World

A group of eagle-eyed puzzlers, using digital tools, has uncovered a pattern of copying in the professional crossword-puzzle world that has led to accusations of plagiarism and false identity.

Since 1999, Timothy Parker, editor of one of the nation’s most widely syndicated crosswords, has edited more than 60 individual puzzles that copy elements from New York Times puzzles, often with pseudonyms for bylines, a new database has helped reveal. The puzzles in question repeated themes, answers, grids and clues from Times puzzles published years earlier. Hundreds more of the puzzles edited by Parker are nearly verbatim copies of previous puzzles that Parker also edited. Most of those have been republished under fake author names.

Nearly all this replication was found in two crosswords series edited by Parker: the USA Today Crossword and the syndicated Universal Crossword. (The copyright to both puzzles is held by Universal Uclick, which grew out of the former Universal Press Syndicate and calls itself “the leading distributor of daily puzzle and word games.”) USA Today is one of the country’s highest-circulation newspapers, and the Universal Crossword is syndicated to hundreds of newspapers and websites.

OK, that's what I got after some weekend reading.

 

Ah I've read this one before. It was particularly shocking to me regarding all of the money vs. subscribers and such because prior to reading, I didn't realize how all of that worked.

Love Zen Habits.

The Tim Ferriss Seneca series he's been doing on his podcast has been really cool. Gonna mark this one to read.

I've been trying to decide what I would use this for since it was announced, as my girlfriend is really excited about it. I'll have to read this and some other pieces to dive into that.