Neetzan Zimmerman, then an editor at Gawker, a news and gossip site, knew it was destined for viral magic. But before he could publish a post about it, his editor made a request. Mr. Zimmerman was to include the epilogue omitted by most every other outlet: The kitten died of smoke inhalation soon after being saved.
.. The runners were more than twice as likely as the sedentary group to email the same article, he found. Why? Because they were already physiologically aroused, Mr. Berger theorizes, and forwarding or liking something serves as a form of release.
Oral-B has a connected toothbrush. You don’t need it.
Anything that helps people brush longer was great for him, but he didn’t think that there was value in the data. Insurance firms might beg to differ: Knowing when policyholders brush would be super-valuable information — though people who are a bit more casual about their dental care might not want to share their brushing habits.
.. Although I expect a lot of brands to launch silly goods like this to ride the Internet of Things bandwagon, I can’t wait until we’re out of the add-connectivity-for-connectivity’s-sake stage of this evolution.
The Self-Reflecting Pool
“Swimming is the ultimate form of sensory deprivation,” Diana Nyad told The New York Times in 2011, describing her attempt to be the first to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, a feat she finally accomplished last year. “You are left alone with your thoughts in a much more severe way.”
.. Ms. Nyad has spent a lifetime in the water, chasing an elusive mark in marathon swimming, and she has written about the exhilarating out-of-body experience she has when powering through long distances. The medium makes it necessary to unplug; the blunting of the senses by water encourages internal retreat.
.. Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of them all, was found to have A.D.H.D. when he was a child; he has called the pool his “safe haven,” in part because “being in the pool slowed down my mind.”
.. For better or worse, the mind wanders: We are left alone with our thoughts, wherever they may take us. A lot of creative thinking happens when we’re not actively aware of it. A recent Carnegie Mellon study shows that to make good decisions, our brains need every bit of that room to meander. Other research has found that problem-solving tends to come most easily when our minds are unfocused, and while we’re exercising.
.. The enforced solitude is at odds with where we are as a culture. Our gyms are full of televisions tuned to SportsCenter and cable news. We’re tethered to our devices ..
Different While Connected?
I think it was Jeff Hammerbacher at Facebook who said that the best minds of his generation were trying to get people to click on ads. Neal Stephenson, the science fiction writer, and others, have tried to suggest that we should step up and think big and not just be concerned with these very commercial and pedestrian and next quarter concerns, but really think out at the generational or civilizational scale. I applaud that 100 percent.
.. A really great question, is how one can protest against the system when it seems impossible even to communicate without it or, in some senses, be a modern person without it? You could say, well, the Amish are protesting in some sense because they’re out of it, but their protest is very feeble.
.. The real key is to remain different while you’re connected. The problem with being connected is it tends to homogenize everybody, so there’s this pressure to be the same if you’re connected. You go to any large city around the world, and there is a uniformity in what that downtown looks like. Connection tends to drive things to uniformity, but the value, the power of being connected is by remaining different. There’s this conundrum, this dilemma of remaining different while connected, because if you’re just different but not connected, there’s no power in that, and that’s actually easy to do, but can you remain different while connected?
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There’s an interesting thing about ancient China, because if you read through the history, almost every single major invention of the world was invented in China first, and sometimes it took hundred of years for each to either it to make it’s way to Western Europe or to be reinvented in Western Europe. That includes paper, printing, steel, gunpowder, the compass, rudder, suspension bridges, etc. It’s almost everything, and for a long time China led the world in civilization because it was able to make these things long before anyone else. But there was one invention that China did not invent, and it would turn out to be the most important invention, and that was the invention of the scientific method.