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.
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!
Game: Alter Ego
Interesting game. Like Choose Your Own Adventure, but of an ordinary human life, starting at infancy. It gets tedious after awhile, but it does make you reflect on how many different interactions you had as an infant where you concluded things about the world that you don’t remember.
Techlore: Privacy Specialist Responds to John Oliver’s Data Brokers Segment
Great info and good links in the description box to tools for protecting your privacy.
How to Cook That: A.I. Wrote an Oreo Cake Recipe…Is it any good?
This is a great illustration of just how un-intelligent “AI” is right now. It’s basically a sophisticated regurgitation algorithm…when you try to get it to write something like a recipe, it has no mechanism for making sure you actually use the ingredients it called for, or that the end result is any good. Your robot overlords, these ain’t.