Hi! I'm Emma. I'm an ideator, optimizer, and personal growth nerd, with a dash of woo and politics. This is my "kitchen sink" blog, where I share random notes from my life, including the various rabbit holes I go down.
How the Brain Perceives Fear
We’re getting closer to understanding the biology and biochemistry underneath trauma reactions. Here’s another article in a similar vein about the role of neurotensin.
Verge: Interview with Midjourney founder
I love this: “Right now, people totally misunderstand what AI is. They see it as a tiger. A tiger is dangerous. It might eat me. It’s an adversary. And there’s danger in water, too — you can drown in it — but the danger of a flowing river of water is very different to the danger of a tiger. Water is dangerous, yes, but you can also swim in it, you can make boats, you can dam it and make electricity. Water is dangerous, but it’s also a driver of civilization, and we are better off as humans who know how to live with and work with water. It’s an opportunity. It has no will, it has no spite, and yes, you can drown in it, but that doesn’t mean we should ban water. And when you discover a new source of water, it’s a really good thing…How do we go from people who are scared of drowning to kids in the future who are surfing the wave?”
Current State of Fusion Tech
Interesting to see the number of privately funded fusion startups in the works.
ReligionforBreakfast: Why Humans Evolved to Play Music
Apparently, doing things synchronistically to a beat makes you bond with strangers quickly, like singing, drumming, or marching. Music could have evolved earlier than language as a way to promote social cohesion.
VICE: Invasive Species Are Riding Plastics Across Oceans
The debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan went all around the world, carrying invasive species with it in a “mass rafting event”.
Decluttering Hobby Stuff When Your Excitement Fades
I've always had a lot of potential-hobby clutter. I like to start new things. I get enamored of a new hobby and get so excited acquiring stuff for it and then I may or may not have a sustained interest in that hobby. But I might want to pick it back up again someday, so how do I justify getting rid of things?Vox: Who made these circles in the Sahara?
I find this whole video extremely charming. A worldwide network of nerds (even a guy who collects vintage sardine cans!) put together clues that solved a mystery that a reddit user found while looking at satellite images in the middle of the Sahara.
Offline: Chris Hayes on Attention vs Recognition
Chris’s thesis is that attention is the addictive-drug version of recognition (someone seeing and acknowledging your humanness). I think the moral panic about corporations hijacking our attention is disempowering. We can turn it off. This whole era in human history may be calling us to develop a conscious relationship with our attention.
exurb1a: Buddhism is Kinda Out There, Man
Enjoyably existential. The answer is to our problems is down and in, not up and out.
Insider: How Disney’s Animated Hair Became So Realistic, From Tangled to Encanto
This explains the hair modeling behind the animations of 3D Disney characters, which got a lot more complex in Encanto with more different hair types represented…fascinating!