Took me a bit to finish reading what I had bookmarked, some reasonably long reads in here this time out.
Here are this weeks bookmarks.
As always, all links on this newsletter can be found here.
History, Culture, and Religion
100 years of science fiction themes. OR. A time-lapse web of human dreams.
This doesn't necessarily fit into this category, but, it is a historical analysis.
An incredible human effort to understand how humans have perceived the future over time, do spend time on the dataset link as well, it's fun to play around with - great way to discover books too.
Followed by 2 related pieces.
The first one is a writer I came across on twitter talking about why she actively chose to do nothing instead of hustle over the course of week and what it achieved.
The second is by Vice, talking about how in the past, the rich and successful took pride in how much leisure time they had whereas now there is almost a cult that takes pride in how busy they are. It's a weird cultural shift that has happened and is worth looking into.
If you're interested, I wrote about this about 3 years ago too.
Tech, Science, and Math
The Outliers Podcast : The Importance of building lasting things - with @dhh
Self-explanatory if you know who DHH is, if you don't do listen to the podcast. DHH is an entrepreneur I've admired ever since I read his story in 'Founders at Work'
Has SARS-CoV-2 reached peak fitness?
I've been asking myself over the past week whether I've reached peak fitness on a personal level, a lot of scientists have been wondering the same about Covid apparently. A lot of evidence out there points in the direction of the Covid virus basically stabilizing to the point where there's not much that can happen to make it 'stronger' / 'fitter'
Bitcoin Is Protecting Human Rights Around the World
Watch/Read this, continuing my trend of plugging crypto in here every week, this time out it's a short read/watch on BTC and why its a force for good by simply being a means to promote freedom.
Can a $110 Million Helmet Unlock the Secrets of the Mind?
There's a $50K helmet out there that can 'read your mind' , this is a product by a company called Kernel , started by the founder of the payments company Braintree. Article is by Ashlee Vance, who usually does a fantastic job diving deep into hard tech topics.
Everything else
I've always thought of Peer Review as something that has existed ever since scientific papers started being published. Turns out I'm quite wrong on this, from the article: "the journal Nature, for many the pinnacle venue for publishing science, didn’t start peer review until 1973" which is super weird to think about.
Anyway, an interesting take on Peer Review, and mostly its Cons.
What Pandemic Puppies Can Tell Us About Supply Shortages
How the Pandemic triggered acute demand for puppies has led to a now cruel effect due to over-supply of puppies in the USA.
The Fed needs a psychological toolkit
An article on inflation that mentions 'distributed trust' and how most spending is dictated by 'cyber peers' and not on policies or authorities, not every day that you see that.
Thank you for reading
That's all I have for this week.
Do subscribe if interested and do reply with interesting stuff
Sainath