Category: Habits

TED talk notes: Allan Pease on why you should speak with palms up, and Chris McDougall on humans as born runners

I love listening to TED talks, and take notes on most of them. Every week, I share notes from some of my favorites! Here’s the complete list (pardon the load time, it’s just a continuous, single page).

Allan Pease, Body language: the power is in the palm of your hands

  • in handshakes, whose hand is on top is usually dominating; to maximize appeal, go in at complete vertical and match pressure of other person
  • in a study where a speaker gave the same instructions to 3 different audiences:
    • palms up — highest retention and cooperation
    • palms down — medium
    • finger pointing — lowest
  • forming a bridge (touch your fingertips together) gives you confidence and poise

* * * * *

Christopher McDougall: Are we born to run?

  • Tarahumara — famous running tribe
  • unchanged for last 400 years
    • when the Spanish came, they hid in canyons (instead of being decimated like Aztecs and Incans)
    • they’re completely free of modern illness
  • arguably humans are DESIGNED for long-distance running, evidence:
    • women sprinters are much slower than male counterparts; gap MUCH smaller in long-distance, in ultra marathons top women are almost equal
    • also rare in long-distance running: 60-yos as fast as, if not faster than, 18-yos
    • humans are “hunting pack animal” – need women, elders to run long-distances too (so they’re not left behind)
    • we sweat really well, can run far on a hot day
    • our bodies are perfect for long distance running (long torso, short bipedal legs, head that can rotate side to side while running to watch for predators, obstacles)

* * * * *

Here’s the complete list of TED notes

TED notes: Kevin Kelly on the internet and Tom Chatfield on video games

Kevin Kelly, the next 5000 days of the web

  • the internet is only 5000 days old, what will the next 5000 days look like?
  • “it’s amazing, and we’re not amazed”
  • we’re basically creating one giant machine, and it’s the strongest/most reliable machine we’ve ever built
  • all our machines are portals into the one machine (every smartphone, every laptop, every IoT)
  • 3 changes: embodiment, re-structuring, co-dependence
    • copies have no value
    • attention is currency
  • humans are the machine’s extended senses
  • we’re linking data; first the connections were machine to machine, then page to page, now data to data
  • we shouldn’t need to port our friends to each social network, the web should just know
  • “to share will be to gain”
  • no bits will live outside the web — early version of software eating the world

* * * * *

Tom Chatfield: 7 ways video games engage the brain

  • it’s amazing that people spend $8B on virtual goods
  • Farmville has 70M players (talk is from 2010)
  • games provide rewards, both individual and collective
  • all about ambition + delight
  • in video games you can measure everything — big data
  • there’s always a “reward schedule”
  • 7 ways to use game lessons in real world
    1. have experience bars to measure progress
    2. set multiple long and short-term aims
    3. they reward effort — get credit for every bit of work/effort
    4. provide rapid, frequent, clear feedback
    5. have element of uncertainty — variable rewards, dopamine
    6. offer windows of enhanced attention
    7. add other people! social, cooperation

Here’s a running list of TED talks and notes (it’s a long page so it could take a few seconds to load).

Bertrand Russell on competition, from The Conquest of Happiness

Recently I’ve started to rewrite passages from old books. It’s been a good way to practice writing in different styles, while learning new things. My current project is Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness. Over the next few weeks I’ll publish more excerpts, and I may publish the finished version as an ebook.

From Chapter 3, on Competition:

The treadmill that people run on doesn’t take them anywhere. These runners are people who do well, earn a decent income, people who could, if they chose, work less or work on something that truly excites them. But deviating from their existing path would be embarrassing, like deserting the army in the face of the enemy, though if you ask what is the greater good of their work, they’re unable to respond, or they’ll articulate a phrase they heard on TV or read in a textbook.

[…]

The main problem is greed. The businesswoman’s religion demands she become rich; to become happy instead, she must quit the church. As long as she desires only success and believes a person who does otherwise is inferior, she’ll remain too focused and anxious to be happy.

[…]

While in non-business professions there is a desire to compete and win, what’s respected is not success alone but excellence in the job. For example, a scientist may be wealthy or poor, but her respect is not tied to her income. And no one would be surprised to find a famous artist in poverty; in fact, poverty is an honor. But for the businesswoman, there is no success beyond the competitive struggle to get rich.

[…]

But life’s primary aim cannot be competition. It’s too grim, too much about desire and tension, to create a life worth living for more than a few decades. Soon it produces nervous fatigue, a desire to escape and a need for pleasures as aggressive as the work itself. True relaxation becomes impossible. The competitive focus poisons not only work but leisure, too. Leisure that was once calm and refreshing becomes dull and silly. This sort of life results in drugs and eventual collapse. The only way to cure it is by seeking sensible and quiet pleasures within a balanced life.

*Note: where Russell used a male pronoun, I replaced it with a female one (eg, businesswoman instead of businessman)

6 more simple beautiful piano songs to play (with pdfs)

Given the popularity of this post, here are the sheet music for 6 more beautiful piano songs. Not all are “simple” (especially the latter part of Hanarete Imo), but I think you’ll enjoy them.

  1. Legends of the Fall theme song
  2. Hanarete Imo (Even When We’re Apart) by Jun K (I’m not confident about the title or author)
  3. My Heart Will Go On by James Horner, theme song from Titanic
  4. I Believe, theme song from My Sassy Girl (these are jpgs)
  5. Yi Ran Ai Ni by Wang Leehom (王力宏－依然爱你)

*sorry there are only 5 now, I had a copyright claim to take down one of them

I’m looking to expand my library so please send me more!

Bertrand Russell on why science — and today, technology — is the happiest profession

Of the highly-educated professions, the happiest today are the men of science. Many of them get such pleasure from their work that they can be happy even in marriage. Artists and writers consider it normal to be unhappily married, but scientists can often achieve so-called domestic bliss. This is because their highest intellects are so absorbed by their work, that they’re not allowed to invade other parts of their life where they would be harmful. They’re happy with their work because science today is progressive and powerful, and its importance is never questioned by themselves or the broader population.

This was written before World War II, yet swap “men of science” with “men of technology” and it’d ring true today. I think a career in science has lost value in many areas and for many reasons. A reduction in career prestige. Less everyday appreciation among the public, and more irrational outrage (eg, GMOs). The increasingly specialized nature of PhD programs. The stagnant academic job market. Challenges in higher ed posed by technology and software. And so on.

But technology today is progressive and powerful. Its importance is not questioned, really, by technologists or the broader population. Their jobs consume their mental energy. Hard to think of another highly-educated profession which is “happier”.

On the science vs technology divide, Kevin Kelly has a great piece.

*I have no opinion on domestic bliss…remember, in Russell’s time, female labor participation was below 25%. Mad Men was progressive by comparison

**I’m rewriting Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness, here’s a snippet