Author: robert.adlington
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The weekend is 100 years old – but have ‘skiveday Fridays’ and hybrid working ruined it for everyone? | Work-life balance | The Guardian
Before industrialisation, there was little concept of consecutive days of leisure, because animals and crops could not be so long neglected. Work was dictated by the weather and the seasons, the clock mattering less than the sun. Factories, with their whistles and watches, changed the way time worked. A mechanised drumbeat of shifts and paydays…
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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
Howes says that “innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. … when people do not innovate, it is often simply because it never occurs to them to do so.” Joel Mokyr says, similarly, that “progress isn’t natural” — Read on blog.rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-bicycle
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The Art of the Copyist
Velázquez’s brain is on that canvas. So we’re encountering a person’s brain that doesn’t exist anymore when we’re looking at a painting by them. I’m literally interacting with Velázquez. — Read on kottke.org/26/08/the-art-of-the-copyist
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Dark Hours, what’s actually visible in your sky tonight
Whether tonight is worth going out for, when to go, and which way to look. Real astronomy, live weather, and a light-pollution model that shows its error bars. — Read on darkhours.io/
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Reading Maps – Maps & Travel Routes from Books & Films
Reading Maps plots real-world journeys from classic novels and films – Around the World in 80 Days, Heart of Darkness, James Bond, On the Road – on an interactive atlas. — Read on readingmaps.com/
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Are You Good at Mowing Lawns?
So it’s not about thinking more or faster, but when thinking happens. That’s what a good heuristic does: it spends your attention on the decisions that matter and nothing on the ones that don’t. — Read on kottke.org/26/08/are-you-good-at-mowing-lawns
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Inflammation Keeps Us Alive. It’s Also Making Us Sick. – The New York Times
Another obstacle, until recently, was a longstanding belief that the immune systems of the brain and body were separate. Anatomically speaking, there didn’t appear to be any lymph vessels in the brain to allow communication with the immune system. Then, in 2015, Jonathan Kipnis and his colleagues found a network of tubes hidden in the…
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‘Am I 68? 69?’ Irvine Welsh on growing old, getting clean, bashing out his new novel – and flirting with guns | Irvine Welsh | The Guardian
“The worst part is the psychological thing. Once [drug use] is in your emotional vocabulary as your get-out – ‘I can stop feeling crap by doing this’ – you have to reorder your thinking.” View image in fullscreen Las Vegas, where Welsh’s new novel is set. Photograph: Heather Diehl/Getty Images Reordering thoughts isn’t always easy,…
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Avec les canicules, « des dégradations importantes des fonctions physiologiques et cognitives apparaissent »
Ensuite, ce sont les fonctions sociales qui vont être mises en retrait. Parler, écouter, regarder l’autre, ses expressions faciales, interagir requiert du cerveau qu’il traite une quantité d’informations considérable. Avec, à la clé, un risque de « surchauffe ». Tout ceci explique pourquoi, lors de fortes chaleurs, on peut se sentir plus irritable, moins sociable et avoir…
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I’ve spent years researching what it means to be alive. This is what I’ve learned | Melanie Challenger | The Guardian
Our bodies both generate and direct energy to preserve our own organisation. In this sense, it is the body that is synonymous with selfhood. This is no longer a philosophical claim. In cognitive science, Lawrence Barsalou’s influential account of “grounded cognition” argues that thought depends on perception, bodily states and situation. In neuroscience, Antonio Damasio’s…