Shimpei Takahashi: Play this game to come up with original ideas. Hans Rosling, population prophet: Five final thoughts. The 30 Happiest Facts Of All Time. Uruguay's president José Mujica: no palace, no motorcade, no frills. Four hours of concentration. As I’ve blogged about before, and mentioned again in my previous post, the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré put in two hours of work in the morning and two in the evening.
Apparently this is a common pattern. Cal Newport mentions this in his interview with Todd Henry. How to do the most work in the shortest time. How to be mediocre and be happy with yourself. Image copyright Thinkstock In the novel Catch-22, the author Joseph Heller famously wrote: "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
" News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier. In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets.
But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.
News misleads. The Bed of Procrustes — 20 Aphorisms from Nassim Taleb. 10 Virtues for the Modern Age... The Inventory: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. ‘Who is my mentor?
I have inverse mentors: people I learnt to not imitate,’ says the scholar and philosopher ©Camera Press Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 53, is distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. Nassim Taleb: my rules for life. Risk Expert: GMOs Could Destroy the Planet. Related: Risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb predicted the 2008 financial crisis, by pointing out that commonly-used risk models were wrong.
Distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University, author of best-sellers The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, Taleb became financially independent after the crash of 1987, and wealthy during the 2008 financial crisis. Now, Taleb is using his statistical risk acumen to take on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Taleb’s conclusion: GMOs could cause “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be the planet.” Sound crazy? The “Touristification” of Education. I’m currently reading Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb (probably the most relevant book of the year), and there was a particular concept that caught my attention: the idea of “touristification”.
Notes from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. Antifragile by Nassim Taleb has to be one of the most interesting books I have read this year.
It presents a plethora of concepts that are worth discussing, and carry meaning for one’s personal life, as well as for business, society, and science. From this standpoint I paraphrased and extracted some of the topics that resonated with me the most when reading the book, and put them in a presentation. Originally I did this to start a discussion about these concepts with my colleagues, but I have now also uploaded the presentation to SlideShare. I recommend reading the entire book, but if you are uncertain about whether or not you should, this should serve as something of an overview. If you like what you’re reading, how about subscribing to blog updates? How I Became a Prolific Writer and Learned to Get Beyond School Essays.
Economics of Blogging and Huffington Post. When The Huffington Post announced earlier this week that it was being acquired by AOL for $315 million in cash and stock, one group felt slighted: a set of unpaid bloggers for the site, identifying by the Twitter hashtag #huffpuff, which claims that The Huffington Post has “built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists.”
Some analyses in the mainstream media have echoed these sentiments. “To grasp The Huffington Post’s business model,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten, “picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.” I have enormous sympathy for anyone writing about public affairs, whether as a hobby or as a career. And I’d encourage people to think very carefully about where they are doing their writing, and what they are getting paid for it. The fact is, however, that sentiments like Mr. The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast.
What I’ve Learned as a Writer. By Leo Babauta I’ve been a professional writer since I was 17: so nearly 24 years now.
Book Reviewers for Hire Meet a Demand for Online Raves. Some thoughts on the movie ‘Babel’ These are some of the ideas which I collected after some thinking and looking around, about the movie Babel.
Bruce Lee - Remember The Dragon. Remembering the Dragon as we honor what would have been his 72nd birthday on November 27... Bruce Lee Despite the countless number of people around the world that idolize Bruce Lee, it goes without saying that his biggest fan is still his daughter, Shannon. You could hear it in her voice the second she begins talking about the legendary martial artist and film star. “Somebody said to me one time, ‘what’s it like being Bruce Lee’s daughter; is that just so crazy?’” She told me in a 2009 interview. The Storm Before the Storm: An Interview With Historian and Podcast Superstar Mike Duncan. A beginner’s guide to Getting Things Done.
77 Important Truths I’ve Learned About Life. Rafael Nadal: The 'tough love' that shaped a 20-time Grand Slam champion. Jonathan Pie - A Nation of Wa**ers. Top 10 Life Hacks That Actually Work Wonders. 40 Life Hacks That Will Change Your Life. 50 Life Hacks to Simplify your World. Life hacks are little ways to make our lives easier. These low-budget tips and trick can help you organize and de-clutter space; prolong and preserve your products; or teach you something (e.g., tie a full Windsor) that you simply did not know before.
No siblings: A side-effect of China's one-child policy. 21 November 2013Last updated at 19:48 ET By Celia Hatton BBC News, Beijing. China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness. 13 February 2014Last updated at 21:17 GMT A woman holds up an anti-Japanese sign during a protest in September 2012. China’s Nightmarish Citizen Scores Are a Warning For Americans. The Thoughts of Chairman Xi. ShaoLan: Learn to read Chinese ... with ease! The three-degree world: cities that will be drowned by global warming.
When UN climate negotiators meet for summit talks this month, there will be a new figure on the table: 3C. Until now, global efforts such as the Paris climate agreement have tried to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels. Here’s How Far the World Is From Meeting Its Climate Goals. Two years after countries signed a landmark climate agreement in Paris, the world remains far off course from preventing drastic global warming in the decades ahead.
On Monday, the latest round of post-Paris international climate talks begin in Bonn, Germany, to discuss how to step up efforts. Under the Paris deal, each country put forward a proposal to curtail its greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2030. But no major industrialized country is currently on track to fulfill its pledge, according to new data from the Climate Action Tracker. Not the European Union. Behind the scenes at a Glasgow recycling centre: What it really means to go green. Meat or two veg? Find out your food's climate footprint.