Cofounders Need to Learn How to (Productively) Disagree

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Cofounders Need to Learn How to (Productively) Disagree While there are many factors to consider on the road to success, one lies directly within your control. Sixty-five percent of startups fail due to founder conflict, according to Noam Wasserman, author of The Founder’s Dilemmas. That means, if you want your new venture to beat the odds, you need to learn how to productively collaborate, and more importantly, disagree with your business partner. Continued here

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The 10 most exciting sci-fi movies coming out in 2023 2023 is looking to be a big year for science fiction. Marvel and DC both have highly anticipated new installments, while Brandon Cronenberg tries his hand at doppelgangers and Greta Gerwig tries her hand at satire. From Adam Driver fighting the dinosaurs to Timothée Chalamet riding sandworms, this year’s sci-fi movies offer a wide and exciting variety of stories. Whether you’re looking for original epic stories, exciting sequels, or the latest entries in your favorite fandom or franchise, here are 10 sci-fi movies that we’re looking forward to the most in 2023, ranked from least to most exciting. Continued here

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Where did the new year's resolution come from? Well, we've been making them for 4,000 years As we welcome in the new year, a common activity across many cultures is the setting of new year resolutions. New year represents a significant temporal milestone in the calendar when many people set new goals for the year ahead. Here in Australia, over 70% of men and women (over 14 million Australians) are reported to have set at least one new year resolution in 2022. New year pledges or promises are not new. This practice has been around for some time. Most ancient cultures practised some type of religious tradition or festival at the beginning of the new year. Continued here

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Borrowing money isn't always a bad thing - debt can be a sensible way to build wealth Bomikazi Zeka works for the University of Canberra and does not use this platform, or any other, to provide financial advice. Debt, in some form or another, is part of our financial profiles whether we like it or not. And it can be a useful way to build wealth if it is managed carefully and wisely. Continued here

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It's OK to aim lower with your new year's exercise resolutions - a few minutes a day can improve your muscle strength One of the most popular new year’s resolutions is to exercise more. Many of us set ambitious goals requiring a big, regular commitment, but then abandon them because they’re too much to fit in. Plans to exercise more in the new year are often broken within a month. If the aim is to build long-term fitness and health, the exercise must be sustainable. It may be achievable to resolve to do an extra few minutes of muscle-strengthening exercises every day. Continued here

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Six classic stories that could become video games in 2023 The first day of the new year marks Public Domain Day. This annual occurrence marks the day numerous works enter into the United States public domain and are free to use by anyone with no fear of any copyright claims being levied against them. In 2023, works entering the public domain date to 95 years ago, so the hottest media from 1927 is soon to be rife for adaptation. What better source could there be for game studios to take ideas from? Here are the six best properties that should be adapted into video games ASAP. Video games and movies have a back-and-forth of homage and adaptation that goes both ways. While video games based on movies and movies based on video games both have their good, bad, and ugly titles it is hard to deny cinema’s influence on gaming. The 2010s solidified a style of cinematic game that we still see today in games like God of Wår Ragnarok. Continued here

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The M.T.A. Holiday Train Shit Show If you enjoyed the Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Garden, you might want to catch the M.T.A. Holiday Train Shit Show, inspired by some of the greatest achievements of New York’s finest transportation system. All our displays are fabricated from a special compound of floor bagels, rat hair, and tunnel-stalactite juice. Continued here

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Marvel’s biggest movie ever could finally make the X-Men MCU canon The map of Marvel’s Multiverse Saga is a long and winding one, and the arc that began with WandaVision in 2021 will conclude with Avengers: Secret Wars in 2026. Since the beginning of Phase 4 and the weekly mystery of WandaVision, fans have speculated that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) would usher mutants into the MCU in a reversal of her infamous “no more mutants” spell from the comic book storyline House of M. That proliferation of mutants hasn’t happened… yet. Sure, we’ve seen a few, including Professor X in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the reveal that Ms. Marvel is a mutant herself. But we’re still pretty far away from a full-blown X-Men invasion of the MCU. Continued here

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The Ice Age Has Nothing on ‘Snowball Earth’ Five hundred million years before the dawn of dinosaurs, strange animals ruled a frozen planet. Planet Earth used to be something like a cross between a deep freeze and a car crusher. During vast stretches of the planet’s history, oceans from pole to pole were covered with a blanket of ice a kilometer or so thick. Scientists call this “snowball Earth.” Continued here

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The Senate Needs More Kyrsten Sinemas America’s most popular party affiliation isn’t Republican or Democratic. So why does Congress have so few independents? Many Democrats fumed last month when Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona left the party and changed her affiliation to independent. But her decision has at least one good consequence: It makes Congress more representative of America. Continued here

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You need to watch the most contentious sci-fi sequel on HBO Max ASAP In 1984, two very different Bill Murray movies appeared in theaters. One was a slow and serious film about a man searching for meaning after facing the trauma of trench warfare. It was an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge, and it was Murray’s first attempt to expand beyond his Saturday Night Live persona. It was a complete flop. The other movie was Ghostbusters. While it’s unlikely that Murray expected his art-house drama to do as well as his special effects-laden comedy, the strong reactions to both were enough to drive him away from the screen for years. He ditched America and went to study philosophy in France, and when he finally returned to the big screen he seemed to have accepted his fate. His first two movies upon his return were about ghosts: The Christmas Carol-focused Scrooged in 1988, and then, in 1989, Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters II. Continued here

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Exploring the mathematical universe - connections, contradictions, and kale Science and maths skills are widely celebrated as keys to economic and technological progress, but abstract mathematics may seem bafflingly far from industrial optimisation or medical imaging. Pure mathematics often yields unanticipated applications, but without a time machine to look into the future, how do mathematicians like me choose what to study? Over Thai noodles, I asked some colleagues what makes a problem interesting, and they offered a slew of suggestions: surprises, contradictions, patterns, exceptions, special cases, connections. These answers might sound quite different, but they all support a view of the mathematical universe as a structure to explore. Continued here

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In-Person Events Are Back. How Activity-Based Businesses Are Striking a Balance Between Virtual and IRL In-person events are coming back. But businesses say they still need online services to survive in this gloomy economy. Continued here

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Look up! 5 celestial events you can't miss in January 2023 Don't miss the full Moon, Earth's close approach with the Sun, a meetup of two bright planets, and more skywatching events in January 2023. Continued here

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It's Never Too Late to Switch Careers Millions of people have left their jobs this past year. According to Bonnie Dowling, a co-author of McKinsey’s recent Great Attrition report, this isn’t just a passing trend, or a pandemic-related change to the labor market. There’s been a fundamental shift in workers’ mentality, and their willingness to prioritize other things in their life beyond whatever job they hold. Continued here

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Tampa, Bali bombings, 9/11 and the Kyoto Protocol: today's cabinet paper release shows what worried Australia in 2002 Every year, the National Archives of Australia releases the cabinet records from 20 years earlier, and this year’s batch is out today. This release, from the cabinet records of 2002, is framed by two events of the previous year. Continued here

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5 Ways to Talk About Salary During a Job Interview The most nerve-wracking question of all might just be: What are your salary expectations? To gain more insight into how to answer this question in a smart way, I reached out to a few of my colleagues — across job titles, departments, industries, and levels of experience — for advice. Here’s what they had to say: Continued here

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What You Need to Know About Launching a Startup Right Out of College In the fall of 2020, when the world was in lockdown, Kris Christmon, a life sciences Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, USA, was surprised to learn that entrepreneurship was a career option for her. When the university announced a competition to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in agriculture and environmental sustainability, Christmon decided to give it a shot. Her team pitched an idea around recycling plastics and won the first prize. Continued here

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Maybe Edward the Black Prince didn't die from chronic dysentery after all Edward of Woodstock, known as the Black Prince, was a formidable mid-14th century warrior who emerged from multiple battles relatively unscathed—only to be felled by disease at the relatively young age of 45. Historians have long believed he died of chronic dysentery, but James Robert Anderson, a military historian with 21 Engineer Regiment, believes the Black Prince was more likely brought down by malaria or inflammatory bowel disease. He and his co-authors made their case in a short December paper published in the journal BMJ Military Health. Continued here

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Life Expectancy Just Hit the Lowest Point in Decades. Here's a Leading Physician's Formula (and 4 Simple Tests) for Living a Longer, Healthier Life You take care of your business, but do you take care of yourself? As with most things, success often comes down to doing a few things right, over and over again. Continued here

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Did Black Lives Matter Change Broadway? During the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Broadway theatres were among the many institutions to announce a commitment to equity and protecting Black lives. But, for many Black performers, the promise rang hollow. Frustrated by what he perceived to be a lack of accountability, the actor Britton Smith and his colleagues at Broadway Advocacy Coalition organized events that pointed to the industry’s failures and called for genuine change. B.A.C. won a Tony Award for its work. Two years later, however, “the fire [has] crumbled into ashes, and now the ashes are starting to settle,” Smith tells Ngofeen Mputubwele. “You have to go through a process of [finding] peace. . . . Some people are horrible. Some people want to learn, some people don’t. Some people want to keep their power, some people don’t.” © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices Continued here

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You need to play the best sci-fi brawler on Nintendo Switch Online ASAP Like any form of art, video games build on each other. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, this was especially apparent to anyone paying even moderate attention. Games were starting to take quite liberally from those around them, which sometimes resulted in lawsuits. To follow one specific strain, in 1986, Enix released the first-ever Dragon Quest game, an RPG in a fantasy world setting. In 1987, Technos released the first-ever Double Dragon game, a massive beat ‘em up hit about two brothers taking down endless hordes of bad guys. Elements of both were pulled for Sega’s 1989 arcade game Golden Axe, a beat ‘em up set in a fantasy world where you can ride dinosaurs and stab enemies. Continued here

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The Greatest Tax System in the World If one thing unites all Americans, it’s the conviction that paying taxes is a pain. Even those like myself who don’t mind contributing their fair share to keep seniors off the street hate having to fill out all of the paperwork, especially if our taxes are complicated. The Tax Foundation estimates that filling out tax forms eats up 6.5 billion hours of work a year, for an economic cost of something like $313 billion. There’s a better way—but for depressing reasons, the United States probably won’t take it. I recently traveled to the Faroe Islands, a small, semi-autonomous part of Denmark out in the North Atlantic, for a joint reporting project for The American Prospect and the People’s Policy Project. The idea was to investigate the country’s tax authority, which is called TAKS. I’d heard it is the cleanest and most efficient in the world. Continued here

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Got a strong sense of smell? Then you probably also have this special skill. This article was first published on Big Think in October 2018. It was updated in January 2023. Smell is a funny thing. Some people—like actor Jason Sudekis—have no sense of smell at all. This might seem like a good thing until you realize just how important smell is to not only your sense of taste but your sense of memory, too. Turns out that a keen sense of smell is also good for something else: your sense of direction. Continued here

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Netflix's 'Kaleidoscope' is creating a new way to watch television The stars of Netflix’s new heist series talk about how the show makes the viewing experience personal. One of the most under-appreciated elements of streaming television is just how tailored the experience can be. From the second you open Netflix, the algorithm suggests a whole row of shows and movies that fit your viewing profile. Even the thumbnail that appears on the screen for each of those suggestions is changed according to your interests. Continued here

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Quadrantids: You need to see 2023's most elusive meteor shower just after New Year's Day The Quadrantids, peaking just after the New Year, are one of the most spectacular but hardest-to see meteor showers of the year. The Quadrantids meteor shower is known for lighting up the sky with bright fireball meteors — but only if you can catch them during their few hours of peak awesomeness, which will happen on the night of January 3-4, 2023, between midnight and dawn. The Moon will be nearly full, so the best viewing will be in the very early morning hours, in the dark hour just before dawn. Continued here

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Space traffic is about to get worse — thanks to the U.S. military Sometime this coming March, a network of 10 small satellites winged with solar panels is scheduled to launch into Earth's low orbit. Though likely invisible to the naked eye, the satellites will be part of a future herd of hundreds that, according to the Space Development Agency, or SDA, will bolster the United States' defense capabilities. The SDA, formed in 2019, is an organization under the United States Space Force, the newly formed military branch that operates and protects American assets in space. And like all good startups, the agency is positioned as a disruptor. It aims to change the way the military acquires and runs its space infrastructure. For instance, the forthcoming satellite network, called the National Defense Space Architecture, will collectively gather and beam information, track missiles, and help aim weapons, among other tasks. Continued here

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Jorie Graham Takes the Long View The poet Jorie Graham is one of our great literary mappers of everything, everywhere all at once. As James Longenbach put it, she engages “the whole human contraption . . . rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems.” Graham is a chronicler of bigness, the overawing bigness of our planet but also the too-bigness, at times, of the self. “I am huge,” she writes mournfully, in “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” an elegy for what humans have already blotted out. Many of Graham’s subjects—politics, technology, natural history, and climate loss—have a sweeping scope. This year, she compiled four of her books on global warming—“Sea Change,” “Place,” “Fast,” and “Runaway”—into “[To] The Last [Be] Human,” which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022. In spring, Graham will publish “To 2040,” her fifteenth collection. (It begins: “Are we / extinct yet.”) Graham’s attention to bigness is set off by a gift for evoking smallness. She notices an “almost tired-looking” tendril of wisteria; she pauses to wonder “what it is we mean by / ok.” Our own comprehension of enormity, Graham writes, slides off of us “like a ring into the sea.” It’s a truism that poetry’s task is finding amazement in the everyday. Graham turns this into a terrifying as well as a moral project. (In her ocean metaphor, the ring is vast, and the unknowingness in which we lose it is vaster still. Perhaps her poems are salvage divers.) What makes Graham especially unique is her long, galloping line, a line that she consistently thematizes: she has described line breaks as cliffs that the reader tumbles down, over and over. Some of the poems in “[To] The Last [Be] Human” are right-justified; rather than fall off a ledge, the reader careens into a wall. Continued here

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The last fisherman of Monaco It's often just past midnight when Eric Rinaldi unties the mooring lines and carefully manoeuvres his fishing boat Diego out of Monaco's harbour, Port Hercules. Contemplating the hours of inky darkness in front of him, he'll steer past rows of superyachts as he heads out into the open sea, their polished hulls and elaborate designs a stark contrast to the simple practicality of his fibreglass workboat. Onboard Diego – named for his young son – Rinaldi's biggest luxury is an old Nespresso machine, one of the few comforts among the jumble of nets, hooks, bright orange buoys and other tools of his trade.  Continued here

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Was ‘Adulting’ Actually Good for Us? Ten years ago, Kelly Williams Brown’s advice book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps was published. The book’s success went beyond its place on the New York Times’ best-seller list to become part of the Obama-era Zeitgeist. The word adulting acknowledged that adolescence now extends into the second and often third decade of life and that young adults prefer self-deprecating their way to some kind of behavioral maturity rather than making a series of major decisions and learning to live with the consequences, which, from what I understand, is what “adulthood” used to be about. The word adulting has jumped the shark (Bill Maher’s latest show on HBO is called #Adulting, goddess help us), but in 2013 a lot of people found it cute. Recall, this was the era of Parks and Recreation, of “put a bird on it” — less curdled times. Brown does not claim to have invented the verb form of the noun, but she did single-handedly popularize it. “I knew it was annoying the first time I said it,” she told me. “And then I consigned myself to say it 17 million more times.” Continued here

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What Are You Reading? Hey, thanks for coming over to catch up. How are you? Actually, let me stop you right there, because I have a more important question. Let’s dim the lights. I’ll recline on this lush, velvet daybed, and you can rest on that one. I’m lowering my eyelids, tilting my head a little bit, and settling into my deep Kathleen Turner voice. Continued here

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What It’s Like to Retire in Your Early 20s Some former college athletes face the existential crisis of a career ending at a young age. In the United States, sports can dominate kids’ whole lives. Weekends are filled with games, tournaments, and travel. For the most talented, participation in club teams can lead to state teams, followed by national ones. Then, with the pursuit of college sport scholarships, and eventually playing in the NCAA, a teenager’s entire identity can become intertwined with athletic success. In chasing that dream, “a young person starts giving up all the other aspects of their life,” Francesca Cavallerio, a sports psychologist and lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, in the United Kingdom, told me. Continued here

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The 12 most exciting space missions of 2023 This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink. It is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here. 2022 was a big year for missions to space — NASA finally got its massive new moon rocket off the ground, the James Webb Space Telescope delivered its first science images, and the world’s first planetary defense mission successfully slammed into an asteroid. Continued here

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When Your Company's Results Fall Short, Grab a Mirror If effort doesn't match results, the problem is usually in the C-Suite. Continued here

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My favourite fictional character: Seven Little Australians' wild heroine, Judy, was equipped to conquer the world - but not to survive it I can’t remember if I first met Judy Woolcot on the TV screen or in print: the two versions have cohered into a single entity. The television series of Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians first aired in 1973, so if I met her on-screen, it must’ve been via re-runs. I know my mother’s paperback copy of the novel featured a still from the series on its cover: a family portrait — Meg, Bunty, Baby, Nell, Pip; the General in a nightshirt, clinging to his young mother. The ultra-Victorian Captain Woolcot, played by Leonard Teale, his chin jutting out so precipitously that it threatens to pierce through the picture. And Judy, with bundles of shoulder-length hair, perched on a sofa arm, seeming somehow too big, too angular for the frame. Continued here

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A Large Hadron Collider discovery could point the way to dark matter For decades, astrophysicists have theorized that the majority of matter in our universe is made up of a mysterious invisible mass known as dark matter (DM). While scientists have not yet found any direct evidence of this invisible mass or confirmed what it looks like, there are several possible ways we could search for it soon. One theory is that dark matter particles could collide and annihilate each other to produce cosmic rays that proliferate throughout our galaxy — similar to how cosmic ray collisions with the interstellar medium (ISM) do. Continued here

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12 ways to finally achieve your most elusive goals The best advice when making resolutions is to set goals that are “SMART” – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant (to you) and time-bound. Read more: Three ways to achieve your New Year’s resolutions by building 'goal infrastructure' Continued here

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What are companies doing with D-Wave's quantum hardware? While many companies are now offering access to general-purpose quantum computers, they're not currently being used to solve any real-world problems, as they're held back by issues with qubit count and quality. Most of their users are either running research projects or simply gaining experience with programming on the systems in the expectation that a future computer will be useful. Continued here

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The base of the iceberg: It’s big and teeming with life To most humans, icebergs play a simple role in the seas: They sink ships. After all, the most famous berg in history gained notoriety by killing 1,500 people when it sent the Titanic to the bottom of the ocean. But as melting poles set more large chunks of ice afloat, icebergs may be in for a reputation overhaul. To  scientists studying these frozen barges, they are anything but simple. As they slowly see-saw and spin through polar currents, icebergs fertilize the oceans. Carrying nutrients from land and sometimes reaching the size of small US states, they drive blooms of life that influence the carbon cycle, as shown in the diagram above. Much more than cold, lifeless killers, they are wandering, dynamic islands — promoting marine life, sucking carbon dioxide from the air and changing as they traverse the seas. The massive and mysterious habitats they create are realms scientists have only just begun to understand. Continued here

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Why Do You Get Sick in the Winter? Blame Your Nose Inside the sticky confines of the human nose, a gluey layer of mucus surrounds small hairs and cells. While this ooze may appear gross, it is teeming with important components of the immune system. After all, “the front of the nose is the area that is the first point of contact with the outside world,” says Benjamin Bleier, an otolaryngologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. This precious mucus contains tiny extracellular vesicles—nano-sized lipid spheres—that may be critical to combating viruses like those that cause the common cold. In work recently published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Bleier, along with Mansoor Amiji, a chemist at Northeastern University, determined that during viral infection, cells in the nose release a swarm of these vesicles to fight off pathogens. Critically, the scientists found that in colder temperatures this antiviral release is impaired—which could explain why colds and other upper respiratory infections become more common in the winter. Continued here

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"Law of Jante": The grim Danish philosophy that actually makes people happy This article was first published on Big Think in March 2017. It was updated in January 2023. The United States of America was ranked the 19th happiest country in the world in 2016 in the World Happiness Report. A part of America’s unhappiness can be linked to the social structure of the country. Continued here

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Video Games Need Better Dinosaurs. Paleontologists Can Help In 1982, one of the first 3D games ever released doubled as one of the earliest examples of survival horror. In the pixelated 3D Monster Maze, you not only had to find your way out of a maze but survive being hunted by a T. rex. In the decades since, the dino-horror genre has only grown, from 1999’s DinoCrisis to 2016’s Far Cry Primal, but dinosaurs have also become more than in-game monsters.  We’ve seen dinosaurs as allies (Yoshi, Pokemon), dinosaurs as attractions (park sims like Zoo Tycoon or Jurassic World), or dinosaurs and their fossils as collectibles (see the in-game markets of Sims or Animal Crossing). The way games have depicted both ancient animals and the paleontologists who study them has gotten richer and deeper as time has passed—though there’s still plenty of pixelated T. rexes chomping off people’s heads. Continued here

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Pope Benedict XVI: A man at odds with the modern world who leaves a legacy of intellectual brilliance and controversy To many observers, Benedict, who died on Dec. 31, 2022 at the age of 95, was known for criticizing what he saw as the modern world’s rejection of God and Christianity’s timeless truths. But as a scholar of the diversity of global Catholicism, I think it’s best to avoid simple characterizations of Benedict’s theology, which I believe will influence the Catholic Church for generations. While the brilliance of this intellectual legacy will certainly endure, it will also have to contend with the shadows of the numerous controversies that marked Benedict’s time as pope and, later, as pope emeritus. Continued here

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Want to Improve Your Mental Health in 2023? This 5-Question Quiz Will Tell You What to Focus On   The research-backed mental health quiz will tell you what to focus for the biggest boost in happiness. Continued here

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Why teenagers aren't what they used to be You know the trouble with young people these days? The younkers think they're better than the rest of us, the ephebes are growing up too fast, and the backfisch? Well, they are far too precocious. If you don’t recognise these words, you wouldn't be alone. They are all old terms for adolescents that have fallen out of common usage. Continued here

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Mathematics explains why non-conformists always end up looking alike This article was first published on Big Think in March 2019. It was updated in January 2023. We’re here for such a short time, and we’d like to think we matter. “I’m not just one more person — I’m different.” That’s true, and also… not. We’re very much like one another, though the particular details of our lives are, of course, pretty unique. Still, particularly in the Western world, we like to be seen as separate from — and better than? — the herd. Many of us go out of our way to look different than “them,” too, declaring our uniqueness in our appearance. Continued here

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What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It) Although most people believe that they are self-aware, true self-awareness is a rare quality. In this piece, the author describes a recent large-scale investigation that shed light on some of the biggest roadblocks, myths, and truths about what self-awareness really is — and what it takes to cultivate it. Specifically, the study found that there are actually two distinct types of self-awareness, that experience and power can hinder self-awareness, and that introspection doesn’t always make you more self-aware. Understanding these key points can help leaders learn to see themselves more clearly. Continued here S7 Nigerian influencers could soon need government approval for sponsored posts On December 12, 2022, the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) advised influencers and digital content creators in the country to obtain its approval before sharing any advertising and marketing content online. The new rule would apply to brand owners, digital agencies, bloggers, vloggers, influencers, comedians, and skit makers. “Most of the advertisements exposed by this group are not only unethical with unverified claims and misinformation, but also in violation of the Nigeria Code of Advertising Practice,” the statement said. According to ARCON’s director-general, Olalekan Fadolapo, some of the unethical behavior by influencers and digital content creators includes endorsing investment opportunities that turn out to be scams. Continued here S48 Here’s the truth about chronic pain — and what you can do to help When pain persists beyond the normal healing time, it is no longer considered simply a symptom but a disease in its own right. Imagine living with pain every day for months or even years — pain that is so intrusive it disrupts every day of your life. Continued here S49 Medieval manuscripts reveal why humans loved cats — with one big exception Cats had a bad reputation in the middle ages. Their presumed links with paganism and witchcraft meant they were often treated with suspicion. But despite their association with the supernatural, medieval manuscripts showcase surprisingly playful images of our furry friends. From these (often very funny) portrayals, we can learn a lot about medieval attitudes towards cats — not least that they were a central fixture of daily medieval life. Continued here S8 Musk has made Twitter a right-wing safe space in Brazil For months, Brazil’s far-right has questioned the results of the election that gave Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva another presidential term. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, Brazilians and international observers alike have worried that cutbacks in moderation would add to the ranks of the country’s far-right.  Eight experts from digital rights organizations and universities in Brazil and the United States told Rest of World they have heard anecdotal evidence of right-wing accounts purportedly seeing increases in followers as Lula prepares to take office on January 1. Artur Pericles, an associate research scholar at Yale Law School, and formerly the head of research and freedom of expression at InternetLab in São Paulo, believes that Musk’s arrival at Twitter may have acted as a dog whistle for the right. “[The increase in right-wing followings] might just be people taking a cue from Musk,” Pericles told Rest of World. “That now Musk is in charge, things will be better for them.” Continued here S50 Super popular & insanely clever home upgrades people are making that are under $35 on Amazon Maybe your kitchen and bathroom are begging for a complete remodel, but you don't have a ton of cash to spend on upgrades. Don't worry: Small improvements don't have to cost a fortune. My specific approach is starting with the little things because they can make a big difference. For example, before I change the cabinets, I change the handles — and before I replace the flooring, I put down throw rugs. It's possible to make these kinds of changes without spending hundreds of dollars, especially with these Amazon products that are under $35. That's right: Thanks to the items on this list — which range from home improvement tools to luxurious bed sheets — upgrading your space can be easy and affordable. From an adjustable mount that lets you put a recipe screen in the kitchen to a curtain made of glistening string lights to help create a soothing atmosphere, you'll find loads of terrific, cost-effective, and fun home upgrades. There are even things like silicone furniture feet to help protect your hardwood floors, along with peel-and-stick backsplash for your kitchen. Continued here S9 Mighty Morphin' Turtle Robot Goes Amphibious by Shifting Leg Shape A new transforming turtle robot can explore treacherous regions where the land meets the sea—and may lead to future machines that navigate complex real-world conditions. Combining the best mobility features of an ocean-swimming turtle and a land-walking tortoise, the Amphibious Robotic Turtle (ART), described recently in Nature, can morph its limbs from turtlelike flippers to tortoiselike legs. “Most amphibious robots … use dedicated propulsion systems in each environment,” says Yale University roboticist Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, who is the senior author on the paper. “Our system adapts a single unified propulsion mechanism for both environments: it has four limbs, and those limbs can transition between a flipper state for aquatic locomotion and a leg state for terrestrial locomotion.” Continued here S11 What Is a Pig Butchering Scam? Digital swindles like business email compromises and romance scams generate billions of dollars for criminals. And they all start with a little bit of “social engineering” to trick a victim into doing something disadvantageous, whether that's trusting someone they shouldn't or sending money into the void. Now, a new variation of these schemes, known as “pig butchering,” is on the rise, ensnaring unsuspecting targets to steal all of their money and operating at a massive scale thanks in large part to forced labor. Pig butchering scams originated in China, where they came to be known by the Chinese version of the phrase shāzhūpán because of an approach in which attackers essentially fatten victims up and then take everything they’ve got. These scams are typically cryptocurrency schemes, though they can involve other types of financial trading as well.  Continued here S53 The language that doesn't use 'no' Through the winter mist of the hills of the Terai, in lowland Nepal, 18-year-old Hima Kusunda emerges from the school's boarding house, snug in a pink hooded sweatshirt. Hima is one of the last remaining Kusunda, a tiny indigenous group now scattered across central western Nepal. Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated. And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", or any words for direction. Continued here S54 What happened to the world's ozone hole? In the late 1970s, Jonathan Shanklin, a meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey, spent much of his time tucked away in an office in Cambridge working through a backlog of data from the southernmost continent on our planet. Shanklin was responsible for supervising the digitisation of paper records and computing values from Dobson spectrophotometers – ground-based instruments that measure changes in atmospheric ozone. Continued here S13 How has the Universe changed since last year? Earth consequently spirals outward, increasing our orbital radius by 1.5 cm (0.6 inches) annually. Gravitational interactions slow our planet’s rotation; days are 14 microseconds longer than last year. Continued here S52 The 10 most exciting sci-fi TV shows coming out in 2023 As we enter a new year, there’s another slate of exciting sci-fi TV shows on the horizon. Popular franchise installments, follow-ups to some of the best shows of yesteryear, new adaptations of manga and games, and brand-new ideas will keep genre fans glued to their screens in the months to come. These are the shows we know are confirmed for a 2023 release date (no “2023 or 2024” here), so mark your calendars and plan your snacking strategy for the next 12 months. Continued here S58 What does it look like to “turn on” a gene? In the murky darkness, blue and green blobs are dancing. Sometimes they keep decorous distances from each other, but other times they go cheek to cheek — and when that happens, other colors flare. The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it. For the first time, they were witnessing details of an early step — long unseen, just cleverly inferred — in a central event in biology: the act of turning on a gene. Those blue and green blobs were two key bits of DNA called an enhancer and a promoter (labeled to fluoresce). When they touched, a gene powered up, as revealed by bursts of red. Continued here S60 Up close and personal: Dolphin POV caught on camera while hunting for tasty fish Scientists attached GoPro cameras to six dolphins and captured the sights and sounds of the animals as they hunted and devoured various species of fish—even squealing in victory at the capture of baby sea snakes, according to an August paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. While sound and video has previously been recorded for dolphins finding and eating dead fish, per the authors, this is the first footage combining sound and video from the dolphins' point of view as they pursued live prey while freely swimming. The audio element enabled the scientists to learn more about how the dolphins communicated while hunting. Continued here S51 This insidious urban wildfire health risk happens after the fires stop One of the most destructive wildfires on record in Colorado left behind a trail of destruction. On Dec. 30, 2021, one of the most destructive wildfires on record in Colorado swept through neighborhoods just a few miles from our offices at the University of Colorado Boulder. The flames destroyed over 1,000 buildings, yet when we drove through the affected neighborhoods, some houses were still completely intact, right next to homes where nothing was left to burn. Continued here S55 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago: January 2023 “The basic dilemma represented by what has been termed the ‘world energy crisis’ can be simply stated: the earth’s nonrenewable fossil-fuel reserves will inevitably be exhausted, and in any event the natural environment of the earth cannot readily assimilate the byproducts of fossil-fuel consumption at much higher rates without suffering unacceptable levels of pollution. Major energy-consumption categories as transportation, space heating and heavy industrial processes are primarily supplied with fossil-fuel energy. If the ‘energy gap’ of the future is to be filled with nuclear power in the form of electricity, then the U.S. will have gone a long way toward becoming an ‘all-electric economy.’ A case can be made for utilizing the nuclear energy indirectly to produce a synthetic secondary fuel that would be delivered more cheaply and would be easier to use than electricity in many large-scale applications: hydrogen gas.” “Although the volume of secret Government research conducted in U.S. universities has declined sharply in the past decade, in part because of protests by students and faculties, a number of large institutions, chiefly state universities, continue to undertake classified projects. In fiscal year 1972 the Department of Defense has at least 29 classified contracts with universities, not counting contracts for work done at off-campus facilities. Of the contracts, 12 are with two institutions: the University of Texas and the University of Michigan.” Continued here S59 The "McGurk effect" is a mind-blowing auditory illusion—and you can listen to it here This article was first published on Big Think in January 2022. It was updated in January 2023. Imagine you were locked in a dark room for a very long time with no sound, no light, and not the slightest hint of what might be happening outside of your room. Every so often, a man called McGurk would come into the room and tell you what’s going on in the outside world. Continued here S57 You've Been Choosing Your Goals All Wrong If you're getting ready to set your yearly goals for 2023, stop. Chances are, you're going about building and breaking habits all wrong, according to the experts—especially if you're extremely motivated in January, but find yourself getting distracted or overwhelmed come February. Before we get into the specifics of how to start or break a habit that you'll actually stick to, there are a few things you need to know. The most important thing is that habits are actually separate from goals. "Goals are how we make decisions—how we commit to an exercise program, or to eating healthily, or to saving money," says Wendy Wood, provost professor emerita of psychology and business at the University of Southern California and the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick. "But habits are how you stick with a behavior."  Continued here S56 A Drug to Treat Aging May Not Be a Pipe Dream Life expectancy in the best-performing countries has been increasing by three months per year every year since the early 1800s. Throughout most of human history, you had a roughly 50–50 chance of making it into your twenties, mainly due to deaths from infectious diseases and accidents. Thanks to medical advances, we’ve gradually found ways to avoid and treat such causes of death; the end result is perhaps humanity’s greatest ever achievement—we’ve literally doubled what it means to be human, increasing lifespans from 40 to 80 years. On the other hand, this has allowed one scourge to rise above all the others to become the world’s largest cause of death: aging. Aging is now responsible for over two-thirds of deaths globally—more than 100,000 people every day. This is because, counterintuitive though it may sound, the chief risk factor for most of the modern world’s leading killers is the aging process itself: Cancer, heart disease, dementia, and many more health problems become radically more common as we get older. We all know that factors such as smoking, lack of exercise, and poor diet can increase the risk of chronic diseases, but these are relatively minor compared to aging. For instance, having high blood pressure doubles your risk of having a heart attack; being 80 rather than 40 years old multiplies your risk by ten. As the global population ages, the magnitude of death and suffering caused by aging will only increase. Continued here S63 Making a New Year’s Resolution? Don’t Go to War With Yourself “The difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute.” New Year’s resolutions are a time for reflection—a chance to think about the limited time we have on this Earth and how to use it wisely. Continued here S64 A Guide to Doing Nothing for People Who Are Really Bad at It This article is part of SELF’s Rest Week, an editorial package dedicated to doing less. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that taking care of yourself, physically and emotionally, is impossible without genuine downtime. With that in mind, we’ll be publishing articles up until the new year to help you make a habit of taking breaks, chilling out, and slowing down. (And we’re taking our own advice: The SELF staff will be OOO during this time!) We hope to inspire you to take it easy and get some rest, whatever that looks like for you. Angela Neal-Barnett, PhD, finds solace under her hair dryer. That’s when, for just a few moments, she can truly relax. The psychologist and director of the Program for Research on Anxiety Disorders Among African Americans at Kent State University is legally deaf. She uses cochlear implants and hearing aids throughout the day, but when she dries her hair, there’s no noise. “I feel calmer and do my best thinking then. It’s forced relaxation,” Dr. Neal-Barnett tells SELF. Continued here S62 The Superhero Movie That Actually Pulls Off Blockbuster Magic Xochitl Gonzalez’s culture picks include Yellowjackets, the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, and Black Panther This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here S65 How to party if you're shy, socially awkward - or just plain boring Three writers who struggle with socialising explain how they make it through festive season Fanny Brice was right. People who need people are the luckiest people, at least when party season rolls around. Imagine, if you will, wanting to go to a party. Imagine knowing that you will have a good time - that the mere experience of being around people fills you, as a matter of course, with joy and contentment. That you go home with a spring in your step, a song in your heart, a smile on your lips - refreshed, restored, rejuvenated and ready for the next one. Continued here S61 What Squirrels Taught Me About Life After Divorce Only 25 percent of gray squirrels survive their first year. Success rates for second marriages are almost equally dire. Noah likes to feed the squirrels naked. I don’t know if he does it this way when I am not here. But like clockwork on the weekend mornings we spend together, the squirrels will start to tap on the window. And Noah will rise from the bed as if responding to a baby monitor. He will stumble to the kitchen, grab a handful of unsalted almonds from a jar in the cabinet, return to the bedroom, and crack the window an inch, popping the almonds out one by one so they land on the sill in a line. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2024 (50) ►  October (2) ►  August (2) ►  July (4) ►  June (3) ►  May (5) ►  April (4) ►  March (2) ►  February (10) ►  January (18) ▼  2023 (834) ►  December (20) ►  November (54) ►  October (44) ►  September (108) ►  August (91) ►  July (29) ►  June (68) ►  May (104) ►  April (33) ►  March (30) ►  February (99) ▼  January (154) A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best... Feb 1, 2023 - 4 Startup Terms Explained With Analo... January 31, 2023 - Russian offensive "imminent" as... 'Tomb Raider' is Becoming a TV Series -- 'The Last... 9 Strategies to Improve Business Team Collaboratio... Jan 31, 2023 - The Jack Ma test for China"s promis... January 30, 2023 - Russia-Ukraine war live: Zelens... Does the Best Workout Exist? Exercise Scientists A... 25 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Explained: This Is the 'M... This Overlooked Scientist Helped Save Washington, ... 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