Interesting links (weekly)

  • My Mother’s blog. It’s in Bengali & deals with psychology and spirituality.

    tags: blog Bengali psychology

  • Another step towards longevity?

    tags: cancer nanotechnology medicine

  • Very interesting thoughts:
    “I make fun of Kinect, but it’s important to see this as what it is: The incredibly unsophisticated predecessor of tomorrow’s Skynet Terminator robots. On that note, I hope they don’t remember what I said about them.”

    tags: microsoft interview technology

  • Quite a comprehensive article. Google did do some things right and before Apple, after all.

    tags: android history

  • In case you ever wondered, this article explains quite a bit.

    tags: lens photography pricing

  • There are quite a few ways to use a monopod it seems, and treating it like a tripod & putting it in front of you is the weakest option of them all.

    tags: photography monopod guide tutorial

  • In case you ever wondered what kind of progress we have made as a civilization, this articles the best example you can find.
    “A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.”

    tags: progress technology civilization food cultivation

    • A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.
    • As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
  • Pretty interesting article on the pursuit of happiness – maybe we aren’t designed to feel happy all the time.
    “Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.”
    “Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing. But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”

    tags: psychology happiness parenting

    • Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy
    • Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing
    • But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaste
    • Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”
    • When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance.
    • In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.
    • Kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems. And they’re right—they don’t.
    • parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment
    • The irony is that measures of self-esteem are poor predictors of how content a person will be, especially if the self-esteem comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment. According to Jean Twenge, research shows that much better predictors of life fulfillment and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing—qualities that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day.
    • “Research shows that people get more satisfaction from working hard at one thing, and that those who always need to have choices and keep their options open get left behind,” Schwartz told me. “I’m not saying don’t let your kid try out various interests or activities. I’m saying give them choices, but within reason. Most parents tell kids, ‘You can do anything you want, you can quit any time, you can try this other thing if you’re not 100 percent satisfied with the other.’ It’s no wonder they live their lives that way as adults, too.”
    • underlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting go.
  • The journey has definitely been interesting for Apple

    tags: apple stocks market future

  • So there’s more than just ohm\mho:
    “An ananym is a word whose spelling is derived by reversing the spelling of another word. It is therefore a special type of anagram.”

    tags: wikipedia language

  • Useful tips by Michael Freeman (photographer & author of Photographer’s Eye\Mind books)

    tags: travel photography nytimes tips

  • The Kodak moment gives way to the iPhone moment.

    tags: kodak technology photography Business businessmodels

  • Steve Jobs was onto something with the 10″ form factor for tablets, it seems. This study indicates how difficult it is to use regular (desktop versions) websites on a 7″ tablet. Even though the screen is much larger, the user experience is better with the mobile version of a site on a 7″ screen.

    tags: usability tablet amazon kindle android design

  • The user experience is pretty messed up it seems, even after the introduction of Newsstand.
    This also indicates why Android has trouble with user experience (touch responsiveness & smoothness in particular). It all depends on the designer in the end, and iOS is no exception.

    tags: magazine ipad design publishing

  • Also serves as a roundup of the major events of the year

    tags: photos media news 2011 photography

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.