And Now for Something Completely Different

Playful imagination and abundant talent: Postmodern Jukebox.

The Key to Understanding the World

In 1958, Leonard Read wrote a couple of pages on the seemingly mundane subject of how to make a pencil. “I, Pencil”, though an essay, works like Robert Frost's idea of a poem: it “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

If you had all the elements of a pencil right in front of you, could you make a pencil? It's not as easy as you might think. In fact, no single person on the face of the earth could do it without the help of countless others. And this is the key to understanding the world.

Here is a video adaptation.

Ground-Breaking Study that Should Change Your Life

An important study has been published

This spring, Dr. Johannes Bohannon and a team of German scientists discovered that people on low-carbohydrate diets could lose weight faster if they used one weird trick: Eat a bar of chocolate every day.
Newsrooms around the world responded eagerly to Bohannon's findings.
"Excellent News: Chocolate Can Help You Lose Weight!" Huffington Post India declared in a report...Even Europe's highest-circulation newspaper, Bild, got in on the action, publishing a report titled "Slim by Chocolate!"
Journalists and readers looked past the too-good-to-be-true nature of the findings and devoured the story wholesale.
But Bohannon's research was a hoax.
The health study was deliberately faked to test the hypothesis that scientists and reporters rarely detect junk science. No one caught on to this ruse.

No, not the one about the chocolate, the study about the quality of science reporting in our news. Bottom line: you need to learn science, method and critical reasoning because your betters aren't going to do it for you.

Both Awesome and Manly

Awesome Daily posts twenty illustrated skills from The Art of Manliness*

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How is Work?

Have you heard of TED talks? Do you know people who won't shut up about TED talks. Well, you're right they can be overplayed and the moments of genius seem to be in decline. Even so, there are gems. Cringing awkward storytelling mixed with crisp insight: here is my favorite from six years ago.

If you want to know more about Mike Rowe and the state of work in North America, go here. For more stories, go here.

What's so bad about work, anyway? John Calvin got it right five hundred years ago. Work is only secondarily that stuff we do to put food on the table. “Follow your passions”, “Do what you love and the money will follow”: that's the third priority, at best. No, work is how we serve one another and a practical way to show love.

Two Views of Intelligence

Do you think you're a natural at science? ...math? ...English? Sorry to hear that.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort or acquirable skills, not fixed ability, they can be remedied by perseverance. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

This Summer's Assignment

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School can be a good environment to learn academic skills like arithmetic, algebra, geology, grammar, history and essay construction. It is a lousy place to learn how to use your academic skills. That is an executive function.

Your education doesn't stop this summer. Develop those critical skills. Go play.

Want to travel at the speed of light?

OK, previous post notwithstanding, you can't. But MIT has a game out where you can see what it would be like to walk at nearly the speed of light. They don't make you walk really fast; instead they make light go really slowly. Popular Science has a description here.

MIT wants people to go beyond. What they are making is the game engine. That is, they do the hard work of the relativistic effects. You can then program your own game in their relativistic world.