Month: October 2015

Been hard to avoid Halloween articles this week but I’ve done my best!

• How Friendships Change in Adulthood
  In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom. Romantic partners, parents, children—all these come first. This is true in life, and in science, where relationship research tends to focus on couples and families.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1KqlqK5
• Why Working Form Home Can Be Both Awesome and Awful
  For over a year, I worked almost exclusively from my tiny apartment in Harlem. Aside from trips into an office every six weeks or so, my work schedule and surroundings were mostly left up to me. On some days, I would fly through assignments and personal tasks with unusual efficiency.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1PKHlm8
• The best way to boil an egg, according to science
  Boiling an egg seems like it should be one of the easiest culinary feats to master. But as anyone who has tried knows, it isn’t. You can end up with rubbery whites, chalky yolks or half the white taken off with the shell. Here’s why: An egg isn’t one thing, it’s two.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1RqejXn
• Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up
  On a late-summer morning, Terry Gross sat before a computer in her office — a boxy, glass-fronted room at WHYY in Philadelphia — composing interview questions.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1NncTMK
• What Happened to the Boy Who Accidentally Shot His Sister Dead
  Sean Smith today. “For a long time, I was self-destructive in every way imaginable.” (David Albers for The Trace) Sean Smith was looking for the Nintendo games his mother had hidden when he found a .38 revolver in his father’s underwear drawer.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1PtmLHT
• How Friendships Change in Adulthood
  In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom. Romantic partners, parents, children—all these come first. This is true in life, and in science, where relationship research tends to focus on couples and families.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1KqlqK5
• Question – Does being self-deprecating help or harm you socially?
  Hopes&Fears answers questions with the help of people who know what they’re talking about. Today, we ask psychologists and communication experts if making fun of ourselves makes us look bad.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1hV9VUi
• Saul Bass On His Approach To Designing Movie Title Sequences
  Graphic designer and Oscar-winning director Saul Bass worked with some of the most creative filmmakers in Hollywood to set the tone for their work through his unique title sequences for films ranging from Psycho to Goodfellas.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1jDRrJQ
• View from the Overlook: Crafting ‘The Shining’
  From 2007, a 30-minute documentary on the making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Includes interviews with Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, and Sydney Pollack.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1i9N4UW
• Why so many alien hunters are looking at this one mysterious star in the sky
  Alien hunters are abuzz. A mysterious star called KIC 8462852 is their latest hope for finding an intelligent species beyond the Earth. And they are throwing every resource they can to find a way of confirming that aliens exist.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1jKs7lm
• Greenland Is Melting Away
  On the Greenland Ice Sheet — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1NxKgfR
• Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill
  When it comes to automotive technology, self-driving cars are all the rage.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1RYqifI
• Europe’s Time Zones and Daylight Saving Systems Are a Total Mess
  Is it summertime or wintertime? Since Sunday, no one in Turkey has been entirely sure. Following a decree originating from the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s government has officially delayed the start of daylight saving by two weeks.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1P4KsF8
• Inside Apple’s perfectionism machine
  In retrospect, it was easy to miss — a bit of combined technology never really seen before in a laptop. Everyone missed it, even those who tore down the ultra-portable MacBook, even those who looked right at it.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1O9lOEL
• Scotland’s Plastic Bag Ban Saved 650 Million Bags In Its First Year
  Just eight cents a bag and suddenly no one wants one. One year ago, Scotland started charging five pence for plastic grocery bags. In the following year, 650 million fewer bags have been used, an 80% reduction. Before the ban on free carrier bags, as they’re called over there…
  Read: http://ift.tt/1He1vxR
• Nepal Just Got Its First Female President
  Nepal made history on Wednesday, electing a woman to become the country’s first female head of state. Bidhya Devi Bhandari, from the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), received 327 votes of the total 541 ballots cast in Nepal’s parliament.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1Sbyp8L
• Question – Are humans meant to be monogamous?
  Hopes&Fears answers questions with the help of people who know what they’re talking about. Today, we ask psychology, biology, and sexuality experts whether humans are wired to stay together.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1KFTKkG
• The End of Craft Beer
  Read: http://ift.tt/1M3y9b0
• The Broken Pop of James Bond Songs
  Our latest Exclusive is by Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold, who recently co-authored The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (Oxford University Press), a cultural history of the Bond-song canon.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1Oa22c7
• In Which We’re Up All Night – Home – This Recording
  It is impossible to describe insomnia to people who are sound sleepers. These are the people who trust that getting in bed will be followed by falling asleep, as surely as night follows day; these are the fearless people. Sleepless people are a very different breed.
  Read: http://ift.tt/PcGJrU
• How Sitting Is Harming Your Body and What You Can Do to Counter Its Perils
  More than a century after Thoreau’s magnificent manifesto for the rewards of walking and the evils of sitting, we have finally put data around the all too obvious fact that the human body, a marvelous machine animated by motion, is not meant for extended stillness.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1XvjhpY
• What does Scotland do after the stabbing at Cults academy?
  The fatal stabbing of a teenager at Aberdeen’s Cults academy, in an area of the city not known for gang violence or knife crime, has inevitably led to suggestions that school security should be tightened.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1Ri1s9S

I’ve spent the last few hours filling in forms, lots of forms, repeating the same information over and over. But I don’t mind because it’s because I’ll soon be starting a new job.

The paperwork is a little more involved because I’m making the move from a permanent salaried role (which is all I’ve ever known) to a contract. That means I need to think about things like hiring an accountant, setting up my own limited company, getting a business bank account and lots of other fun things that require a lot of reading.

I’m excited though, not just because I’ll be getting back to work but because this is something I’ve considered in the past but never really had the courage to make the leap. Turns out being made redundant was just the kick I needed!

I have chosen my new company name, and just off the phone with my new accountant who will take care of a lot of the paperwork for me – I was pondering tackling it all myself but I think I’ll give it a year or so before I head down that path.

For now, I just need to finish a few more forms, confirm my start date and start figuring out my new commute which, when the weather allows, will see my cycling to work. Win win!

Another reason for me to be glad about getting this contract is not only professional – I’ll be doing Business Analysis for a bank – but stems more from my state of mind. There is no doubt that not working has a negative effect on me, and not just the money worries. I like to be busy, but no matter how I tried, I found filling my days with non-creative and non-contributory actions just wasn’t enough for me.

I’ve been out of work, officially, since the end of July, that’s 3 months when I could’ve learned a new language, or tried a new activity. But I didn’t, because whilst I always want to be better for me, I’ve realised that what I really need is to have something to contribute to that is beyond me. At least, I think that’s what it is… still trying to figure that bit out.

Regardless, I’ve got a new job! Huzzah!!

Some cracking reads this week, some quite dark, some wonderfully uplifting and the usual nonsense in-between.

• The Doctor
  As the sun set on a Saturday in early February, Mubarak Angalo, a farmer in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, was riding in a pickup truck with two friends. They had spent the day at a market, selling vegetables, and were returning to their village when they heard a low droning sound overhead.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1QoHWZ9
• Out of the Darkness — Accountability for Torture — Medium
  THE CIA USED the music of an Irish boyband called Westlife to torture Suleiman Abdullah in Afghanistan. His interrogators would intersperse a syrupy song called “My Love” with heavy metal, played on repeat at ear-splitting volume.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1KeFwHa
• Mr. Pop
  Excerpted from The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook. Out now from WW Norton & Company. One day in 1992, a demo tape addressed to Denniz Pop, a 28-year-old DJ, arrived at a Stockholm-based music company called SweMix.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1LLnn4X
• Patti Smith on Time, Transformation, and How the Radiance of Love Redeems the Rupture of Loss
  That transcendent transience is what beloved musician, artist, and poet Patti Smith explores in M Train (public library) — a most unusual and breathtaking book: part memoir, part dreamscape, part elegy for the departed and for time itself.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1LZQyHE
• The Story Behind Bob Beamon’s Miracle Jump And The Only Photo That Mattered
  The man who took one of the most famous photos in Olympic history wasn’t a professional photographer.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1LoG2UJ
• The death and life of the great British pub
  The Murphy family, John, Mary and their adult son Dave, were preparing to spend a 33rd Christmas as landlords of the Golden Lion pub in Camden, north London when they heard the rumours.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1jlnkqm
• Of Hegemonic Hoverboards and the Power of Power-Laces: Living in Back to the Future II’s 2015
  As Marty McFly walked out of the alleyway and into the town square, he was distracted not by the flying cars whizzing by high above but by a robotic Texaco attendant. Then he was attacked by a holographic shark.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1jEs4Hc
• Becoming Nicole
  They were identical twin boys, Wyatt and Jonas Maines, adopted at birth in 1997 by middle-class, conservative parents. Healthy and happy, they were physically indistinguishable from each other, but even as infants their personalities seemed to diverge.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1QNI6Jy
• How an F Student Became America’s Most Prolific Inventor
  “It’s really a one-person sort of vehicle,” says Lowell Wood, right after he offers me a lift back to my hotel. His brown 1996 Toyota 4Runner, parked outside his office building in Bellevue, Washington, has 300,000-plus miles on the odometer and looks it.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1jyE1P9
• Do People Actually Wear Pajamas?
  With the arrival of cooler weather comes the resurgence, in catalogs and department stores, of that most dubious of offerings: the two-piece set of pajamas.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1PEPZ5D
• How Jellyfish Exhibits Became Underwater Dance Clubs
  Infinite blue in action. (Photo: Dan90266/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0) Jellyfish are, with all due respect, incredibly weird. They’re 95 percent water, and spend their lives being pulled to and fro by currents.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1M18cuI
• Refugees who changed the world
  (CNN)They are destitute, desperate but determined. Thousands of them flee their homes every year, risking lives in unseaworthy boats or packed truck beds. The cinematic icon and legendary cabaret singer rose to fame in Germany in the 1920s.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1RXRvzd
• Why too much choice is stressing us out
  Once upon a time in Springfield, the Simpson family visited a new supermarket. Monstromart’s slogan was “where shopping is a baffling ordeal”.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1W5VMX4
• Cirque Du Soleil Style Aerial Dance Gains Popularity In Phoenix Area
  There’s a new form of “dancercise” sweeping the Valley that’s guaranteed to leave you hanging. The art of aerial dance isn’t for everyone. But studios around the Valley are making it available to anyone, and you don’t even have to run away and join the circus.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1MH8O34
• The Hollow Earth Is Filled With Giants, Germans, and A Little Sun
  Giants, Germans, and paradise all await within the Hollow Earth. (Rainy Season in the Tropics by Frederic Edwin Church) Ah, the underworld. From time immemorial, people have believed that there is another world lying just beneath the surface of our planet.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1MDZJbk
• Please don’t call me A Girl Called Jack. I have something to tell you.
  First published in the New Statesman on 20 October 2015. I love a Google alert.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1W81Gak

This week I started the Couch to 5K program. This has no bearing on the following links, other than I’ve spent more time reading/recovering because I’m so unfit!

• 22 Candid Photos from NASA’s Just-Released Project Apollo Archive
  An image from Apollo 9, March 1969. (All Photos: Project Apollo Archive/flickr)  Between 1969 and 1972, 12 men, on 6 different space flights, walked on the moon, with NASA’s Project Apollo. And one of the few things that came with them? A camera.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1MZUvsX
• The Silver Arrow, the Real Ghost Train Haunting the Stockholm Metro
  Fanciful legends about ghost trains regularly pop up around subway systems, rail tunnels, and abandoned tracks. But in the case of the Stockholm Metro, the ghost train is real.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1LhQhhb
• What’s Lost When Most People Work From Home
  There’s plenty of research out there on the benefits of remote and flexible work. It’s been shown to lead to increased productivity, and has an undeniable benefit for work-life balance. But what does it do to everyone back at the office?
  Read: http://ift.tt/1L2Cyct
• Nasa planning ‘Earth Independent’ Mars colony by 2030s
  Humans will be living and working on Mars in colonies entirely independent of Earth by the 2030s, Nasa has said.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1jgMvK4
• The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy
  It really was a dark and stormy night.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1Pl9ikj
• A Criminal Mind — The California Sunday Magazine
  In the 1980s, psychiatrist Joel Dreyer was a fixture on Detroit’s WXYZ Channel 7. His commercials promoting his treatment center, InnerVisions, which he named after the Stevie Wonder album, sometimes ran up to five times a day.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1MKyJcB
• A man who recorded every detail of his life for five years has the ultimate way to live in the moment
  Some of the tirade is against technology, which many claim stops us from making connections with each other. The bigger worry is that, in our attempts to capture memories that we fear may be lost forever, we don’t live in the moment.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1ZkCgoN
• The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease
  I had lived thirty good years before enduring my first food poisoning — odds quite fortunate in the grand scheme of things, but miserably unfortunate in the immediate experience of it.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1OqMqxJ
• The secret of Bake Off? Keeping a secret
  When Nadiya Hussain won this year’s Great British Bake Off and gave her tearful winning speech, more than 100 people were surrounding her in the field in Berkshire where the show is filmed.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1R4yzxE
• Inside Reddit’s Plan to Recover From Its Epic Meltdown
  Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. It began on the Thursday night that much of Reddit—the eleventh biggest site on the American Internet, the one that Steve Huffman helped found when he was barely more than a teenager—went dark.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1FQINkS
• Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs
  To obtain a hard copy of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®), the most popular personality test in the world, one must first spend $1,695 on a week-long certification program run by the Myers & Briggs Foundation of Gainesville, Florida.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1Mf7Iv7
• The Sick People and All Their Guns
  This week on Episode One Million of “Stupid Things Donald Trump Said,” the Donald lent his expertise to the recent mass shooting in Oregon, attributing it to shooter Chris Harper-Mercer’s mental illness rather than the ease of gun ownership in the United States.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1LpK2Ue
• The Passion of Nicki Minaj
  Pop music is dominated almost exclusively by the female star — Beyoncé, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and, as always, Madonna.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1OkMlwW
• News & Views
  Last week Suffragette opened the London Film Festival. Suitably enough the gala screening involved political protest, heated debate and lots of thoroughly inspiring women. I was lucky enough to be working on the red carpet.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1RC12vz
• A Very Revealing Conversation With Rihanna
  I DRESSED VERY CAREFULLY for her, the way I would for a good friend, thinking hard about what she likes. What I think she likes. I ordered Uber Black — the highest level of Uber I’ve ridden.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1QlkoUL
• Hello Kitty Chinese Cuisine
  Lots of people like Hello Kitty, but it takes a special kind of devotion to open an entire dim sum restaurant devoted to the cute icon. But for those who have just been dying to bite into a dumpling shaped like her face, Hong Kong has you covered with Hello Kitty Chinese Cuisine.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1JXtcec
• Her Code Got Humans on the Moon—And Invented Software Itself
  Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. Margaret Hamilton wasn’t supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1GFDeR2
• The fat city that declared war on obesity
  Oklahoma has lost a million pounds of fat. Ian Birrell meets the mayor who piled on the pounds then launched a healthy living crusade and changed his city’s infrastructure. But can even this defeat our century’s biggest health curse?
  Read: http://ift.tt/1jtgGh8
• Sisters separated 40 years ago in Korea reunited working in same US hospital
  Two orphaned sisters separated decades ago in South Korea have been reunited after being hired at the same hospital in Florida. The women, now both in their 40s, were stunned to learn that they were related, having not seen each other since the early 1970s.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1K3d0Z2
• We’re not as selfish as we think we are: here’s the proof
  Do you find yourself thrashing against the tide of human indifference and selfishness? Are you oppressed by the sense that while you care, others don’t? That, because of humankind’s callousness, civilisation and the rest of life on Earth are basically stuffed? If so, you are not alone.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1k3WZNz
• Jennifer Lawrence blames herself for making less money than ‘the lucky people with d—s’: ‘I failed as a negotiator’
  Jennifer Lawrence says she was paid less than her male “American Hustle” co-stars because she “failed as a negotiator” — and she believes that failure may have stemmed from a deeply-ingrained female fear of assertiveness.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1QnRH9H
• The Gonzo Vision of Quentin Tarantino
  “I READ, IN A BOOK about Bette Davis, that anybody who does an interview while drinking alcohol is a damned fool.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1jrKsmm
• This Scottish city apparently has the sexiest accent in Britain
  LONDON — People from Glasgow have the sexiest accent in Britain, apparently, while those hailing from Newcastle sound the most intelligent.
  Read: http://ift.tt/1LbQYXP

P.S. Happy Birthday to me!

I’m a big fan of Apple products. Their hardware is always well designed and well made. I like using them, I like they way they work, how they feel in my hand.

I am not a fan of most Apple software.

The operating systems are good enough, but not groundbreaking. I don’t want all the baffling options and lack of consistency I see with Android – I had an Android phone for a year or so, it never felt “nice” to use – and whilst it sounds like Windows is getting back to being usable, I like the Apple hardware too much to move (maybe the new Microsoft lap/tablet/top thing will sway me?), and most Linux variants I’ve seen and used are not user-friendly.

Apple keeps moving iOS and OSX forward but ultimately they do what they need to do and don’t get in the way too much, which is all I need.

Apple applications on the other hand are, almost across the board, not great and everywhere I look there are better alternatives.

I may give the Photos app a stay of absence here, as it suits my needs but I know most people look to other solutions here.

I use Safari as my browser, but beyond that I hardly use any of the Apple applications on either operating system.

On iOS I use Cloudmagic and not Mail, Todoist rather than reminders, Fantastical over Calendar, Spotify over Music, Overcast for podcasts, Dropbox for files, Evernote for notes, and Dark Sky for weather.

In fact just about anywhere I can, I’ve swapped out Apple apps for 3rd party ones, and I’m not alone. Apple proudly talks of the over 1 billion app downloads made through the App Store on iOS alone, but how many of you have a folder on your iPhone that holds unused, and undeleteable, Apple apps?

But hey, it’s all about choice I guess, right?

Except it isn’t, or at least it won’t be. Look at how Android is starting to tie together the information your phone knows about you to produce ‘Now’ cards, and because it can get access to your email, your calendar, the websites you browse, it has more data with which to be helpful.

Apple is heading the same way, and it all makes sense. For a tiny computer in my pocket, the more useful it can be, the more likely I am to invest in it and, at some point in the future, our smartphones need to be smarter, they need to push the information I need to me when I need it, not wait for me to open an app.

So, the fact that I’m NOT using the apps that Apple offer becomes more than just a preference, it’s a limitation.

I’m not sure how I get past that. Part of me hopes, and possibly presumes, that the weight of consumer need will push Apple to open things a little more, allow better integration at the system level to the various apps I use. When I ask Siri to play my “Radio G” playlist, it should know I mean in Spotify, not Apple Music.

Alas, I fear that day won’t ever arrive. Apple has been very protective of its ecosystem, and whilst it is slowly adding more and more capability to the apps that it does offer, at some point I have to decide to make do with ‘good enough’ or leave the ecosystem to get what I want from my technology.

The next couple of years are gonna be interesting.