background preloader

Journal Prompts

Facebook Twitter

The TikTok star behind Canada's new—and less floppy—moose crossing sign. How to retrain your frazzled brain and find your focus again. Picture your day before you started to read this article.

How to retrain your frazzled brain and find your focus again

What did you do? In every single moment – getting out of bed, turning on a tap, flicking the kettle switch – your brain was blasted with information. Each second, the eyes will give the brain the equivalent of 10m bits (binary digits) of data. How the Balloon World Cup blew up to become your new favourite sport. Who hasn’t been at a children’s party and started an impromptu game of keep-ups with a balloon?

How the Balloon World Cup blew up to become your new favourite sport

It’s fun, addictive and can get fiercely competitive. Well, that same game has just had its own World Cup, won by Peru, after a thrilling final watched by a sellout crowd in Spain and around eight million Twitch viewers online. If you’re wondering how a seemingly childish activity could become a legitimate source of sporting entertainment, we need to go back to Covid lockdowns and how those experiencing cabin fever became creative to stay active at home. Alain de Botton on the Myth of Normalcy and the Importance of Breakdowns. The moment we begin to see that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, we cease being captive to the myth of normalcy — the cultural tyranny that tells us there are a handful of valid ways to be human and demands of us to contort into these accepted forms of being.

Alain de Botton on the Myth of Normalcy and the Importance of Breakdowns

Forest Green Rovers flash up climate emergency warnings during match. Forest Green Rovers brought the climate and ecological crisis into sharp focus by taking the unprecedented step of using their pitchside advertising hoardings to display real-time facts and figures about fossil fuels, plastic waste, and other critical issues during their League Two game at home to Swindon.

Forest Green Rovers flash up climate emergency warnings during match

The 2-0 defeat, televised by Sky Sports, was broadcast across 120 countries. Forest Green’s “pitchside intervention” was planned by their artistic director, Massive Attack’s Robert del Naja, also known as 3D, in collaboration with the chairman of the club, Dale Vince, who acknowledged the bold move was controversial and could create a backlash. The messages were shown on the LED advertising four minutes into the game at the New Lawn, raising awareness of key world issues in a thought-provoking manner.

The move is a typically bold one by Forest Green, a club which have taken a number of significant eco-friendly steps in recent years. China’s noisy ‘dancing grannies’ silenced by device that disables speakers. Across China’s public parks and squares, in the early hours of the morning or late in the afternoon, the grannies gather.

China’s noisy ‘dancing grannies’ silenced by device that disables speakers

The gangs, made up mostly of middle-aged and older women who went through the Cultural Revolution, take to a corner of a local park or sporting ground and dance in unison to Chinese music. Loud music. Coca-Cola tweaks brand with magical new logo - and it's genius. It isn't every day that we see a company as big as Coca-Cola tweak its brand, but the soft drink giant has just revealed its magical new logo.

Coca-Cola tweaks brand with magical new logo - and it's genius

Featuring a fresh wrap-around logo called the 'Hug' and a new tagline, this design is genius. Coca-Cola has been running the fizzy drink game for decades now, and its logo has become an icon of modern culture. But the famous logo that we all know and love has just had an ingenious makeover – and we love it. If you are hoping to design your own clever logo, make sure you check out our 15 golden rules on logo design.

The new logo features the traditional Coca-Cola logo but is slightly wrapped around what we can only presume is an invisible Coke bottle. 11 Self-Sabotaging Phrases to Drop From Your Vocabulary. ‘Our humour gets very dark, very fast’: The Last Leg presenters on busting disability taboos. Wave of delayed grief likely as pandemic ebbs, says expert. As pandemic restrictions have eased in the past few months, many of those who have lost a loved one to COVID-19 are experiencing the pain all over again, University of Alberta researcher Donna Wilson believes.

Wave of delayed grief likely as pandemic ebbs, says expert

“We are seeing delayed grieving a great deal more because of COVID,” said Wilson, a professor with the U of A's Faculty of Nursing who studies aging, death and grief. With the pandemic’s many deaths reduced to lists of anonymous statistics and people unable to visit their loved ones’ deathbeds or hold funerals, Wilson said, grief will be freshly triggered now that people return to more normal lives and start to grapple with their experiences. ‘It could feed the world’: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization. Just over 10 years ago, a small group of Indigenous Guatemalan farmers visited Beata Tsosie-Peña’s stucco home in northern New Mexico.

‘It could feed the world’: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization

In the arid heat, the visitors, mostly Maya Achì women from the forested Guatemalan town of Rabinal, showed Tsosie-Peña how to plant the offering they had brought with them: amaranth seeds. Back then, Tsosie-Peña had just recently come interested in environmental justice amid frustration at the ecological challenges facing her native Santa Clara Pueblo – an Indigenous North American community just outside the New Mexico town of Española, which is downwind from the nuclear facilities that built the atomic bomb. Tsosie-Peña had begun studying permaculture and other Indigenous agricultural techniques. Today, she coordinates the environmental health and justice program at Tewa Women United, where she maintains a hillside public garden that’s home to the descendants of those first amaranth seeds she was given more than a decade ago.

Job ready university degrees may not be the tertiary education solution we are hoping for. In 2005 I graduated from university with a combined degree in engineering and arts, majoring in philosophy. Now, with 15 years of experience as a professional engineer specialising in wind turbine technology, I can look back and compare the practicality and "job relevance" of my two tertiary qualifications. My grade average was almost exactly the same in both courses, and while I would not say that one was easier than the other, they were certainly very different. Engineering grades seemed to be almost directly related to the number of hours spent studying and doing assignments: 10 hours' study might get you a pass, 20 a credit, 30 a distinction, for example. Yes, there was some variation between courses depending on how naturally the content came to me. The Lost Mariner: A Beautiful Animated Short Film About Memory, Inspired by Oliver Sacks.

By Maria Popova “My work, my life, is all with the sick — but the sick and their sickness drives me to thoughts which, perhaps, I might otherwise not have,” Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 10, 2015) wrote in his 1985 classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (public library) — perhaps the most influential treatise on the perplexities of memory, which solidified Dr.

The Lost Mariner: A Beautiful Animated Short Film About Memory, Inspired by Oliver Sacks

Sacks as the Dante of medicine and the clinical case study as his high poetic form. “Constantly my patients drive me to question, and constantly my questions drive me to patients,” he wrote. One of those patients was Jimmie G. — a “charming, intelligent, memoryless” man admitted into New York City’s Home for the Aged with only an unfeeling transfer note stating, “Helpless, demented, confused and disoriented.”

"I never said she ate my sandwich" has seven meanings depending on which word you stress. I walked the perimeter of Britain – in pictures. I set off from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral on 17 April 2015, walking east towards Kent before heading west along the south coast.

I walked the perimeter of Britain – in pictures

My mission was to walk the perimeter of Britain in order to get under the skin of our island nation – and find photographic inspiration. I’d previously only found interesting photo opportunities abroad but that all changed in 2012, when I walked from the source of the Thames to the sea with my tent and a camera. On that trip, I slowed down enough to see Britain with fresh eyes, especially where the estuary met the sea. I was hooked and wanted to commit to the coast for a prolonged period. My walk around mainland Britain totalled 6,835 miles and took 454 days over five years. I walked an average of 15 miles a day, in which I allowed for three hours of photography. Cartoons in the time of COVID. Full. Coming of Age: Teens on Coping With a Pandemic Year.

As an immigrant, I wanted to understand Canada's fascination with the Tragically Hip. This is what I found. How to Help a Teen Out of a Homework Hole. As you talk with a teenager about where things have gone off the rails, be kind, curious and collaborative. “This isn’t about you being in trouble or getting off the hook,” you might say. “It’s simply about figuring out what’s going wrong so we can solve the right problem.” Students who are struggling to keep track of what’s expected of them may need to reach out to their teachers, either for clarification about specific assignments or for general guidance on where and when they should be looking for information about homework.

Helen Keller: why is a TikTok conspiracy theory undermining her story? Why your most important relationship is with your inner voice. As Ethan Kross, an American experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, will cheerfully testify, the person who doesn’t sometimes find themselves listening to an unhelpful voice in their head probably doesn’t exist. Teens Are Obliterated by Pandemic Virtual School. Here’s How to Help. The Cancel Culture is Just Adult Accountability. Scientists develop transparent wood that is stronger and lighter than glass.

Researchers at the University of Maryland have turned ordinary sheets of wood into transparent material that is nearly as clear as glass, but stronger and with better insulating properties. It could become an energy efficient building material in the future. The Painter Subverting Art-World Economics, $100 at a Time. I have always collected art, but I’ve never been an art collector — which I define broadly to mean someone who can buy original pieces without profound financial discomfort. I raised my kids on Pixar – and it has ruined classic cinema for them. Untitled. Police in Canada have charged a man with speeding and dangerous driving after he was found asleep at the wheel of his self-driving car as it travelled at 150km/h down a highway in the province of Alberta. Announcing the charges on Thursday, the Royal Canadian Mounted police said that on 9 July they received a complaint that a Model S Tesla vehicle was speeding on the highway near the town of Ponoka.

The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It. Untitled. Untitled. The Movement Against Sexist and Discriminatory School Dress Codes. Untitled. Untitled. Why plastic waste is an ideal building material - BBC Future. Untitled. Our Brains Struggle to Process This Much Stress. Why 'Ditch the algorithm' is the future of political protest. Untitled. Untitled. Untitled. Untitled. Untitled. The man in the iron lung. Untitled. Untitled. Canada makes history with its inclusion in the new North American League for Rainbow Six. Untitled. Listen: You Are Worthy of Sleep. No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime. Photographers From Around the World During COVID-19. Eight marvelous and melancholy things I've learned about creativity. Why You Aren’t ‘Lazy’ If You’re Exhausted in Trauma Recovery.

The war between hostile architecture and homelessness - Michael's essay. 'Lockdown made me realise what’s important’: meet the families reconnecting remotely. What you need to know about the coronavirus. Important Tips For Preventing The Spread of Germs. I found an SOS note from China in a box of decorations—and it changed how I live. How To Stop Checking Your Phone: 4 Secrets From Research. Four failed inventions that changed the world - BBC Ideas. What to Say to Little Kids Instead of "Say Sorry" 5 irrational thinking patterns — and how to start challenging them. Best of craigslist: 1999 Toyota Corolla - Fine AF.