This is either a very slow news day or a sign that some people keep checking the twitter follows list of – who? Celebrities? Industry figures?
Nonetheless, it's a slow news day and I didn't do the constant monitoring of lists so let me take you live to the scene:
BREAKING NEWS – TWITTER – Apple's Phil Schiller unfollowed Nest's Tony Fadell after the latter sold his firm to Google. DETAILS AND ANALYSIS FOLLOWS
But not here.
Sometimes you have to look at the data and just say no. That's not right. Spotify has released what it calls the ultimate workout playlist which has 20 songs scientifically proven to be the best ones to get you going and keep you exercising. There's a real scientist involved – Dr Costas Karageorghis, read his Brunel University bio – and the claim is that 6.7 million tracks were analysed.
You're unthinkingly assuming that there aren't 6.7m songs in the world, though you're not sure, and you're also unthinkingly presuming that it isn't that they listened to one song 6.7m times. There is no doubt in your mind that it'll be something in the middle of those two extremes and you're right. But possibly it's just a wee bit slanted toward the one song 6.7m times.
Easily the most respected and revered peer-reviewed science journal in the world, Britain's Daily Mail explains:
The team analysed 6.7 million Spotify playlists containing the word ‘workout’ in the title and compared the different beats per minute (bpm) to those used in certain workouts. For example, a person’s typical stride rate while jogging or running is 150 to 190 strides per minute. If these figures are halved it gives a range of 75 to 95 bpm – the beat range found most commonly in urban music, particularly rap.
There's your skew right there. They looked at the music of people who already go to the gym enough to make playlists and to give them names with the word 'workout' in them. It's not fair or statistically proven that the age of these people will tend toward the younger end of the scale but you know it's true and at least I used the word statisically instead of SCIENTISTS PROVE YOUNG PEOPLE USE GYMS.
And still I can't quite accept the findings of this research because Spotify has published the playlist. I'm 48 and I haven't heard any track on the list. I haven't even heard of any of the tracks on the list.
Tell me Spotify wants a playlist of current tracks, I'll believe you. But tell me that it is scientifically proven that no piece of music of any kind ever beats these twenty released since last Wednesday and I have my doubts.
I'm just not willing to go to a gym to prove it to you or to affect the statistics. Or listen to the music.
But other than that, we're good, right?
I'm not alone in thinking and saying that the annual Consumer Electronics Show is always hot air and lately not a lot of that. (See We're Done with CES – in both senses.)
But Time magazine's Harry McCracken says no, it definitely probably isn't true because there is this other CES he calls the secret one. It's the CES behind the CES where companies and people go to show off their brilliant technologies while everyone else is looking at their not so brilliant technologies:
Every CES participant attends his or her own distinct Shadow CES: Nobody gets to see anywhere near all of it, and I’m afraid that some of the juiciest parts are off-limits to journalists like me. (They involve hush-hush products we won’t learn about for months to come — in some cases, not until CES 2015 or beyond.) So it doesn’t make sense to declare that this year’s Shadow CES was better or worse than last year’s Shadow CES. But I do know that it remains an essential ritual — and that any assessment of CES’s relevance that doesn’t acknowledge its importance is too incomplete to take seriously.
We could wait for two years to see if he's right – or we could just look back two years. CES 2012 featured laptops and TV sets. Okay. There was a thing that let you control Windows with your eyes. Haven't seen a lot of that around though, to be fair, each time I use a Windows I tend to roll my eyes and that's the kind of edge case that delays a product launch.
Verizon had a Borg-like eyepiece for you to see your mobile phone without lifting it up. HP unveiled a laptop that was apparently just as good as a MacBook Air so that was definitely innovation, so there, QED.
And Audi showed a car that did something. This year's CES featured a lot of cars doing a lot of things with your smartphone but we are still waiting for KITT.
I am a fan of technology that can help me and I love how it has enabled me to do more and to be in a career I wouldn't have imagined. I have no doubt that there is more and better to come. But lauding this year's tinsel and saying yeah, but, but, next year, just you wait, that is too asinine to take seriously.
Well, there are limits. I want you to see an illustrated plan of my typical or pattern week because I want you to see if it’d be any use to you too. Plus, I hope that showing it you here means I’ll stick to it and find out whether it’s really any use to me.
Previously on Pattern Weeks… really the only thing to check out if you want to know more about this is the first post I wrote back on 31 December. Now read on.
Or rather, look on. Here’s the final thing: a pattern for my week that I’ve made my desktop wallpaper on my iMac and, here, my MacBook. The MacBook and its screen are artistically blurred; the tea mug in the foreground is mistakenly blurred.
And below it is the actual pattern, albeit without any incriminating text.
I won’t get any points for artistry. And without the incriminating text, I think there is only a little you can take away from the idea. But it’s a good little. And it’s this: I have put these many tentpoles into the week where at certain times I will do these certain things. That means on the one hand that I’m trying to guarantee that these get done but also on the other that there’s all that whitespace. That’s when the real work of the week will be done. If I planned it out too much, I’d be so often breaking the plan that I’d come to ignore it.
I think what I’m trying to create here is analogous to an ordinary office job’s schedule. Whatever you do, you have certain times in which to do it and there are points when you have to attend meetings or deliver reports. And as I say in The Blank Screen (US edition, UK edition) I believe that when you have a commitment like those, it takes away a lot of the churning stress. It adds other issues, but for that hour or whatever, you know you are doing what you have to do and you therefore don’t spend a lot of energy questioning it. You just get on with the gig.
The one other thing to say is that I’ve got to underline the word pattern. This is what my week should look like, it is the pattern for the future. And I know it won’t be like this. For one thing, I’ve planned out here 05:00-15:00 which I’m finding is a good amount of time to work both in when I’m at my best and in how much I can get done. But this coming Thursday, for instance, I’m definitely working until 21:00 so I might start either that day or Friday a bit later than usual.
But we’re halfway through January already and while I’m getting a lot done, I need to do more and the visual reminder right here on my screen, constantly, permanently, I am hoping that it will help. That it will keep me on track through the week and that it will also appeal to the visual side of me as I go.
We’ll see. But this is something new and just sometimes I suspect I need a new toy to help me work.