LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #59:

HOW MUCH HAVE WE FIGURED OUT YET?

“Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.” ~ Nora Roberts

New Ideas must use Old Buildings

_Image Source: http://rsautomotive.com_I’ve used this fantastic quoteby Jane Jacobs before:

“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

I was talking about the Adjacent Possible, the concept that ideas cannot leap freely through an opportunity space, bust must hop from one neighbour to the next in order to thrive.

Here’s an interesting real-world example of that idea:

An American gas station quit selling oil-based fuel in favour of electric energy.But that’s not what’s interesting here. What is interesting is the decision the editors of BigThink (who are reporting on the story) made about images: The stock photo they used to illustrate the story shows a row of chargers with an interesting design decision: They look exactly like gas pumps, even if there is absolutely no rational reason to do so:

_Image Source: Image source: John_T/ Shutterstock_My guess this is because that’s just what a gas station is supposed to look like. (I bet they’ll call it ‘gas station’ long after the last oil-based engine stopped running)

So, there actually is statistical proof of gender bias

Here’s something a lot of people might have suspected all along: We talk about men and women differently. When we talk about women, we tend to talk about their physicality. And when we talk about men, we tend to talk about their values or their behaviour (which is just an expression of their values). What’s your first reaction to this statement? Do you agree?

Before you form an opinion, let me tell you that researchers analysed 3.5 million books and compared adjectives used to describe men and women, and found exactly that.

Here’s the list of the most often used adjectives to describe men and women:

Rethinking how we think about climate change

It’s not so much only the bad stuff we’re adding (pollution, radioactive waste, …). It’s also what we’re removing from the ecosystem that is harming our long-term chances of survival.

Did you know that wales are incredibly effective carbon sinks? Both their defecations as well as their bodies (after their death) help trap carbon near the ocean floor.

Even though their impact on a global scale is small, all living great wales together still can sink as much carbon as technical equipment with a value of roughly 1 trillion dollars.

So, it’s not only what we’re adding to the ecosystem, it’s also what we’re removing from it that’s causing this climate crisis.

A Scanner Darkly.

Imagine this: You mount a surveillance camera to monitor the outside of your house, and set it up to notify you whenever it sees something concerning. And your surveillance camera can also detect faces and will text you whenever it sees one.

And now imagine your surveillance camera going full-paranoid when it hallucinates a face in the snow and keeps texting you about it.

That’s exactly what happened to this house owner.

Pareidolia’s not only for humans.

Do not erase.

Image Source:https://jessicawynne.com

A physics professor scribbling wildly seeming nonsense on a huge blackboard is a common TV and movie trope.

But as a former mathematics/logic student, I can attest to the accurateness of this cliché. Photographer Jessica Wynnehas assembled a wonderful collection of please-keep-this-in-the-condition-I-left-it-in chalkboards full of great, indecipherable and hard-to-grasp ideas.

Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?

How the heck should I know, but it looks like octopodes dream of something.

I think it’s weird that we as a species exist for a couple of ten thousand years now, and still have figured out so little about how everything around us_actually_works. There’s this theory that Darwin interpreted his research results in a colonial fashion and the theory of evolution actually is not Survival of the Fittest, but rather Survival of the most Cooperative, and we - just like the Dinosaurs before us - are in the process of being filtered out of the ecosystem because we’re unable to cooperate. So here’s a biiiiiig high-five for all of you out there who want to cooperate! 🙌