Over on my personal blog Self Distract: how these little software apps became so important.
But as well as the Self Distract blathering, I did also do you a video that was fresh-baked this morning but took six years of filming. I’m like an iPhone version of Richard Linklater
It just made me happy. A guy by the name of Zack Danger Brown – you know what he says to everybody about his middle name – launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his making a potato salad. His stated goal was to raise $10 (£5.85) and as of this moment, with 22 days left to go, he has got 5,660 backers contributing a total of $46,052 (£26,873.46).
The page’s description just keeps tickling me:
We’re making a lot of great progress. I think it’s time for us to think about getting hats made. I added a new donor level for people who want hats.
And he made a stretch goal – long since beaten – where he says:
$1000: I’ll do a live stream of the potato salad making
Naturally, it’s remote control fertility for women. There’s no word of men looking for an app to control their – anyway, it’s a combination of an implanted device and activated by the woman.
There’s a story for you right there. Wait a second, I’m getting ahead of myself. What’s been reported is this:
The hunt for a perfect contraceptive has gone on for millennia. A new candidate is now on the horizon: a wireless implant that can be turned on and off with a remote control and that is designed to last up to 16 years. If it passes safety and efficacy tests, the device would be more convenient for many women because, unlike existing contraceptive implants, it can be deactivated without a trip to the clinic and an outpatient procedure, and it would last nearly half their reproductive life.
Developed by MicroCHIPS of Lexington, Massachusetts, the device will begin pre-clinical testing next year in the U.S. The goal is to have it on the market by 2018.
The device measures 20 x 20 x 7 millimeters, and it is designed to be implanted under the skin of the buttocks, upper arm, or abdomen. It dispenses 30 micrograms a day of levonorgestrel, a hormone already used in several kinds of contraceptives. Sixteen years’ worth of the hormone fits in tiny reservoirs on a microchip 1.5 centimeters wide inside the device. MicroCHIPS invented a hermetic titanium and platinum seal on the reservoirs containing the levonorgestrel. Passing an electric current through the seal from an internal battery melts it temporarily, allowing a small dose of the hormone to diffuse out each day.
This is being backed by Bill and Melinda Gates so my first thought was that at the moment of, well, um, you’d get something like this:
But now I can’t get the idea of that wireless code out of my head. What if you weren’t the only person to know it? What if it were in some way hackable?
Read more at Technology Review and hat tip to Time magazine for spotting it.
It used to be that if I wanted to tell you something, I’d wave my arms around a lot. Now I produced videos. So this week’s email newsletter includes one brand new, fresh baked this morning, video about a particularly good habit to get into with your own emails. If you don’t know this, you will now and you’ll use it every time.
And then there’s the equally freshly baked but made from six years of ingredients: how my own beloved iPhone home screen has changed over the years and as apps have become more ingrained in my life.
Plus remote control fertility – I don’t comment, I merely report – plus how exactly we writers should invoice for our work and I finally did some work this week.
Read this week’s free newsletter now – and then go get it sent to you automatically every week.
For once I can’t give you a bit of this and then suggest you read the full piece on The Onion because this really is the full piece. An excerpt just doesn’t seem to work. So may I ask you a favour? Have a click on through to The Onion for more so that I am not blindly stealing their work for no benefit of theirs. Thanks.
Now, the story.
Coworker With Two Computer Screens Not Fucking Around
FORT WORTH, TX—Credible sources within your office reported Monday that the guy on the third floor with two computer screens on his desk is not fucking around. “Amazing—he comes in here, sits down next to me and my one sorry-ass screen, turns on his two screens, and starts tearing it up,” marketing assistant Todd Piotrowski said as the guy dragged a window from one screen to the other, which sources confirmed was like watching fucking Minority Report or something.
“He’s got three, maybe four programs open on each screen, plus some sort of group video chat running nonstop—he’s going balls to the wall over there. How is he doing all this with only one keyboard?” Piotrowski also speculated that if there’s a limit to how many tabs you can have open in your web browser at once, this guy’s gonna hit it.
By far, by very far, the most popular post on this Blank Screen site is one from April called Negotiate like the FBI. Don’t ask me why, but I get hundreds of spam comments through that one story, far more than through anything else. What does it tell us that spammers are attracted to tales of the FBI?
Its real point was how we can all in our pitch meetings use the same strategies that have meant the FBI saves lives. Not all the time, mind, but more than I would’ve pulled off. So there’s that.
Now there is the altogether less analogy-heavy advice from Ambassador Tommy Koh of Singapore. Not to knock the guy but if you want to be bored, go read the top of the Harvard Business Review article that reprints his advice. It begins with a CV that impresses as much as it dominates as much as you start quickly scrolling down to see what he’s got to say.
He has a lot. So much that Harvard doesn’t quote him all that much, they chiefly paraphrase in a list of key points that are all worth reading. Then they also have links out to videos of him. But here’s the one main direct quote from Koh:
The beginning of wisdom is to understand that we all live in our own cultural box. We should therefore make an attempt to understand the content of the cultural box of our negotiating counterparts. This will help us to avoid violating cultural taboos such as serving pork to American Jews or food that is not halal to our Malaysian or Arab friends. At a deeper level, it will help us to understand how our American, Chinese, and Malaysian friends think and how they negotiate. Armed with this understanding, we will able we will be able to customize our negotiating strategy and tactics to suit each negotiating partner.
Do read the full piece. Just scroll down a bit first.
A friend used to write for Z Cars, back when it was done live, and he told me once that they used to place buckets in between the sets. For the actors to throw up in as they ran between scenes. I once had a pitch meeting where I was so scared I arrived early, opened the car door in the carpark and vomited.
I then went into the pitch meeting and did it again, more metaphorically.
So clearly vomit is key. But if you go through this, you also go through the circle of worrying why you worry, you wonder if you’re inadequate. And then if you’re ever a little bit okay about something, you worry why you aren’t worrying. You worry if you’re now less adequate still. And of course you wonder why you went into this stupid career or how you ever thought you could this stupid thing.
But that might be okay.
New research from East Asia provides a solution for this apparent paradox. It finds that, for certain people, worry can actually enhance creativity.
Call it the Woody Allen effect.
“The emotions that benefit creativity may not be the same for all individuals,” concludes a research team led by psychologist Angela Leung of Singapore Management University.
If worry is your default state, intensifying it slightly may actually prompt more flexible thinking.
Its study finds that, when the pressure is on, worry appears to be a motivating force for neurotic people. “Higher levels of intrinsic motivation in turn predict greater flexibility in idea generation,” the researchers add in the journal Emotion.Leung and her colleagues describe three experiments that provide evidence for their thesis. One of them featured 274 Taiwanese university students, who began by filling out a questionnaire designed to measure intrinsic neuroticism. They were then asked to recall a happy, worrisome, or neutral experience.
Half were then instructed to memorize an eight-digit number, which they would later be asked to recall. This placed them in a stressful, high-cognitive-load state. The others memorized a two-digit number, a far easier task.
At that point, all were instructed to come up with “as many uses for a brick as possible.” After doing so, they recorded whether they found the experience interesting and fun.
The result: Under the heavy cognitive load, neurotic people displayed more flexible thinking after recalling worrisome events. This was in contrast to people low on the neuroticism scale, who displayed the most mental flexibility after recalling neutral events.
I don’t like the Woody Allen peg, that feels like an excuse for a stock photo when they’ve got nothing else to use. But at least it gives me an excuse for an apposite quote from him:
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
My Speech to the Graduates – Woody Allen, included in Complete Prose (Amazon UK, Amazon US (originally written 1979)
via 99u
I’m British and I’ve been a journalist: I don’t know from positive thinking. And the moment you tell me to smile and how this means the population of the planet will grin inanely back at me, I’m looking to see what you’re selling or how I can get away from you.
You know there’s a but coming.
I’m not sure there is, though. I would like this to be a but. I think for me it might just be peeking out above an “Ye-ess?”
From TED.com:
We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity. (Filmed at TEDxBloomington.)
And here is that video. See what you think, would you?
This has just started raising money on IndieGoGo – Uiee is a small battery charger for topping up phones. It looks like a roll of tape but I think its biggest advantage is that distinctive shape and unmissable bright colour. I have a small slate-gray Mophie Juice Pack which I’ve actually forgotten to pack because a) it blended in with my desk and 2) I’m stupid. I don’t see Uiee fixing the latter, but it could help a lot with the former.
Mophie’s Juice Packs do charge you more in both senses: they has more power in it for topping up your phone and they do cost more. Uiee looks like it will retail for $50 US (no UK pricing yet that I know) where I spent around $80 on the particular Mophie I bought. (Have a look at the range of Mophie battery chargers on Amazon UK, Amazon US). When I got my Mophie, it was able to recharge my iPhone twice over; now, about two years later, it’s down to doing a little under once. Uiee claims to top up your iPhone by 55% so that’s a lot less than a full charge but it’ll add hours to your working day.
I wish we didn’t need these things but we do and nobody’s expecting the next iPhone to be any better with its battery power. Have a look at the Uiee video and then go its IndieGoGo page to lay down some Kickstarter-style cash.
And it was news to me. This is what you get for basing your site on a WordPress template: it can make major changes in the next update. But fortunately I like this one a lot.
If you’re already reading this on an iPhone or I presume Android too, you are hopefully seeing a much slicker Blank Screen than before. If you’re not seeing that, maybe it’s taking a time to roll out everywhere. But as of just now, this is what you see if you read the site mobily:
