Blogs

Brain Series Current: Meditation for Skeptics Digital Detox All Posts Social Connection “Meditation is for hippies. I don’t have time to sit cross-legged chanting ‘om’ for an hour.” ...

In 2009, Air France Flight 447 was cruising at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. The Airbus A330 was one of the most automated aircraft ever built. The pilots barely needed to fly it-automation handled almost everything. Then the airspeed sensors iced over. The autopilot disengaged. Control handed to the pilots. And in the next four minutes, three highly trained pilots flew a perfectly functional aircraft into the ocean, killing all 228 people aboard. ...

Brain Series Current: Digital Detox Morning Routines All Posts Meditation for Skeptics The average person checks their phone 96 times per day-once every 10 minutes while awake. ...

Deeply Personal Current: Pawns & Paws Previous All Posts Comfort Food for the Soul Pawns & Paws: 5 Board Games You Can Actually Play ‘With’ Your Cat My wife and I share two great loves: board games and our cat, Ace. One rainy Saturday in Finland, as we stared at our shelf of games and our 3-year-old gray-and-white domestic shorthair staring back, we had a thought that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time: ...

In 2006, Netflix announced a challenge: improve our recommendation algorithm by 10%, win $1 million. The Netflix Prize became one of the most famous machine learning competitions ever. Thousands of teams from around the world competed for three years. In 2009, team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” won. They’d built an algorithm that was 10.06% better than Netflix’s existing system. Netflix awarded the $1 million prize. The press celebrated the triumph of data science. ...

Brain Series Current: Morning Routines The 20-20-20 Rule All Posts Digital Detox You wake up, grab your phone, scroll through notifications, check email, and rush into your day. ...

In the early 1990s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar made a curious observation while studying primates. He found a correlation between the size of a primate’s neocortex (the brain region handling social relationships) and the size of its social group. Chimps, with smaller neocortices, lived in groups of ~50. Gorillas: ~30. Humans, with the largest neocortices, should be able to maintain stable social relationships with about… 150 people. That’s it. Not 500. Not 1,000. 150. ...

Brain Series Current: The 20-20-20 Rule Blue Light and Melatonin All Posts Morning Routines You’re staring at a screen. Your eyes burn. Your head aches. You can’t focus anymore. You’ve been working for 4 hours straight without looking away. ...

In medieval England, villages had common grazing land-the “commons”-where all villagers could graze their sheep. Each shepherd faced a decision: How many sheep should I graze? The logic was simple: Adding one more sheep: I get 100% of the profit Cost of overgrazing: Shared among all shepherds So every rational shepherd added more sheep. And more. And more. Until the commons was destroyed. Overgrazed. Barren. Worthless to everyone. This wasn’t malice. Each shepherd was acting rationally in their own self-interest. ...

Brain Series Current: Blue Light and Melatonin Intermittent Fasting All Posts The 20-20-20 Rule You’re scrolling through your phone at midnight. The screen glows bright blue-white. Your brain thinks it’s noon. ...