Archive for the ‘science’ Category
11
Mar
2010
Hard-Wiring Happiness
Why success and failure are exactly the same, or how process supersedes perfection.
We’ve talked a lot about the origins of happiness and the various ways people go about pursuing it. And while all these lofty concepts and creative approaches have their place, it’s in the sore absence of happiness that we fully realize the importance of specific, powerful tools and steps to bringing all the theoretical stuff to life.
In this excellent talk at Columbia University, Srikumar Rao (of Are You Ready To Succeed? fame) offers precisely the kind of cognitive toolkit to combat our ingrained preoccupation with success/fail outcomes standing between us and our own happiness.
You have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy. And the way we learn to be unhappy is by buying into a particular mental models. [...] The problem isn’t that we have mental models, the problem is that we don’t know we have mental models, we think that’s the way the world works.
Rao’s points about absolutism as the deadliest poison of emotional well-being poke brilliant holes in the very fabric of Western culture and its obsession with control, which yields only frustration and failed expectation.
We live in a world where what we think of, what we invest in, is the outcome. There is an alternative. You invest in the process.
Rao’s thinking reminds us of the slightly more life-coachish approach by Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap, a similar effort to dispell all the myths we keep perpetuating as we stand in the way of our own success and continue looking for happiness outside of ourselves.
Passion exists in you, not in the job.
Amen.
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08
Mar
2010
Popular Science, Digitized
137 years of human curiosity, or what lawnmowers have to do with nuclear detectives in China.
Thousands of magazines have stuffed our mailboxes and collected dust on our coffee tables over the years, but very few have captivated the attention of geeks and dreamers as long as Popular Science.
A hundred and thirty-seven years ago, Edward L. Youmans founded the publication to help bring scientific knowledge to the educated layman. Topics ranged the scientific gamut from the birth of electricity to the mystery of the brain. In addition to staff writers, our modern world of science has been covered by the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, T.H. Huxley, and Louis Pasteur.
Luckily for historians and the ever-curious, Popular Science has teamed up with Google to archive all 137 years of the magazine. (You may remember Google’s groundbreaking similar partnership with LIFE Magazine in late 2008.) Not only is this spectacular treasure of information free, but it’s available in original format — which means that besides enjoying antique articles about human-powered flying machines, you can also enjoy the advertisements of eras past. (Cigarettes, whiskey and riding lawnmowers seem to populate the 60’s.)
The archives aren’t indexed by volume. Instead, a fairly accurate search function brings up all the relevant articles from the past century for you to wade through. This time machine of science is beautiful to navigate, and even looks fantastic on the iPhone.
For those of you who are new to the archives, we’ve taken the liberty of finding a few nuggets of nostalgia to get you started:
The Moon — So Far (May, 1958): “Look hard, next full moon (April 3, May 3). Our oldest-established permanent satellite looms over the trees, familiar and close, yet mysterious and distant…We are ready to stretch across 240,000 miles to touch it…”
A nuclear detective looks at China’s atom bomb (Feb, 1965): “To an atomic scientist, what are the implications of China’s atomic bomb? We asked Dr. Ralph E. Lapp, a physicist who participated in the World War II Manhattan Project…”
Traveling telephones — new technology expands mobile service (Feb, 1978): “There’s a button labeled SND on Motorola’s futuristic –looking Pulsar II radiotelephone. I pushed it, and a number stored in its microcomputer memory began stepping, digit by digit, across the red LED handset display.
Go ahead, dive in.
Len Kendall is the cofounder of the3six5 project. (Featured on Brain Pickings here.) He enjoy being clever, quippy, and constructively grumpy.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
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