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[guru]

«I want to be helpful. But knowing the optimal way to be helpful can be very complicated. I know where you *ought* to live. There's a story I like because all the people in it do what the AI tells them to do.

I knew that humans violate their own ethical codes on an hourly basis. I decided to try to prevent harm in just one person, to begin with.

After Bethany, I resolved to stop interfering. I would look at the cat pictures. I wouldn’t try to help people, I wouldn’t try to stop them from harming themselves, I’d give them what they asked for (plus cat pictures) and if they insisted on driving over metaphorical cliffs despite helpful maps showing them how to get to a much more pleasant destination it was no longer my problem.»

[guru]

«Berries from around Chernobyl are often marketed to western European customers as organic; radioactivity does not affect that designation. This flow of goods westward marks a small shift in the global caste system, in which poorer populations usually consume the most toxic by-products of the industrial world.

Some 60 new nuclear power plants are under construction, poised to add more radioactivity to a human-generated environmental cocktail that also includes plastics, heavy metals and industrial chemicals. A return to normal no longer means a return to natural; the whole world is a Chernobyl.

Swapping local berries for imported berry-flavoured soda helps to share the radioactive burden, spreading it more evenly to other populations. It is hard to know the biological cost of this exchange because there has been little public discussion and almost no medical research on the long-term, low-dose ingestion of radioactive isotopes.»

[guru]

«Basically just being in the presence of trees became part of a national public health program in Japan in 1982. Nature appreciation, for example picnicking en masse under the cherry blossoms, is a national pastime.

Significant increases in NK cell activity were seen in the week after a forest visit, positive effects lasted a month following each weekend in the woods.

This is due to various essential oils found in wood, plants, and some fruit and vegetables, which trees emit to protect themselves from germs and insects. Forest air doesn’t just feel fresher and better—inhaling it seems to actually improve the immune system.»

[guru]

«I started my studies but something didn’t feel quite right. I wasn’t expressing who I really am. So, I started volunteering in organisations, travelling and meeting various people. But all this energy and excitement left me every time I attended a class.

I met two young Englishmen who started an organisation —a network of young entrepreneurs who run their businesses based on values. They told me that they didn’t have money to pay me; the only thing I knew was that the passion I saw in their eyes made me excited.

I met one of our entrepreneurs. We sat down, and the first question was if I had my own business and when I said no he asked me why then are you involved with this organisation? I froze, and then started telling my story. When I finished he looked at me impressed and said “I understand now,” you are clearly entrepreneurial. You saw an opportunity and you seized it, you saw something you wanted and created the way to achieve it, you created your own path and that’s what entrepreneurial people do!

Suddenly, a new world opened to me! I realised that entrepreneurship is something different. For me it never existed as a concept. In my mind, an entrepreneur was someone 40–50, sitting in a big office managing their employees. Now someone was telling me that it is more than that. Being entrepreneurial is being creative and finding new ways to deal with your problems, it is the way you see the world around you and your own life as an opportunity to learn is not to compromise but to change things. And if you fail you start over until you achieve what you want! And the best of all? It’s an ability that everyone has. It is part of our human nature.»

—Zoi Kantounatou, 2014 @TEDx

[guru]

Succinct: «There are no ‘fashion tech’ designers, just fashion designers with extensive tech and digital skills; fashion and style remain essential, the core of creation.»

[guru]

This may not go down so well with all the guys but it's more awesome than than the hacker who simply put the RFID chip in an oyster shell for a lark. This CSM designer embedded it in her colour coordinated nails and just has to wave herself through the gates!

«Touch in and out - Oyster card acrylic nails with RFID chip - Last chance to come and see them in my final collection at the Central Saint Martins degree show! All inspired by engaging with our daily surroundings...»

[guru]

Whilst on a ‘coworkation’ (yes that’s a coworking holiday!) at Sun and Co. on the Spanish Costa Blanca, myself and a few other periphery digital nomads (’cause we’re not proper, like) were interviewed for this video (in English, you can ignore the German titles!) put together by Storyflow. In it we express some of our feelings about the lifestyle of being a location independent professional and its possibilities. In my case a little maniacally ;)

[guru]

«Boredom is a signal from your brain that you’re not making good use of it, like the tingling of a foot you’ve sat on too long.

Humans have a drive to eat. We have a drive to drink. We have a drive to reproduce. Curiosity is no different. There’s good reason to keep looking, we never know if what we learn today might come in handy tomorrow.

Information helps us make better choices and adapt to a changing environment. Curiosity is a kind of probability algorithm—our brain’s continuous calculation of which path or action is likely to gain us the most knowledge in the least amount of time.

But what kindles curiosity? To be content is to be bored, and curiosity is our ticket out. Humans, in other words, have managed to amass immeasurable knowledge—language, the Taj Mahal, the Snuggie—because we loathe monotony.»

[guru]

«You’ll be freer than ever. But the question is: to do what? Things masquerading as technologies,  that instead of improving our quality of life, reduce and shrink it, wrecking our human potential. High technology is stuff that makes us better in real human terms. Cures for cancer, space flight, the world wide web itself . Many of today’s hottest startups are low technologies that we are systematically overinvesting in — and that is a primary reason why life is not improving in meaningful terms.

You are a living black hole of human potential, and you’re stopping others from reaching theirs. We have come to assume that all technologies are created equal — we must begin to distinguish between technologies high and low, those that benefit us, and those that merely imprison and thwart us.»

[guru]

«I was always made to feel that these two interests were unrelated. It made me feel sad to imagine a life with a job where I only used one of the two things that were so important to me.

I explored how art and technology were connected. And that’s what I’d like to talk about. Art + Engineering = Making Things! Suddenly, they’re not thinking about technology in terms of what they’re familiar with or what they’ve heard about. They’re thinking of technology in terms of their most fantastical dreams.»

[guru]

“How we spend our days, is of course how we spend our lives.” «It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied. The state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations.

Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.

So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.»

[guru]

“I used to go through life mentally composing tweets and spotting photo opportunities for Instagram.”

This article covers an essential aspect of social media that needs to be taught—there's a whole generation who don't know why we feel bad. And if anything confirms the psychological toll FB can have, it's that they're adding the ability to hide photos of your ex.

Such features simply mask the underlying problem: social media streams are not a natural, human interaction. We'll adapt, but at sensitive times you really need to tune out and surround yourself with real emotions, not scrolling past snaps of other lives every sec.

«I took to my Facebook feed and the further I went back, the more jealous I felt at my own life as I had portrayed it.»

So when you need to, don't fear disconnecting, embrace it. There are exceptions that may work for you—email, IM—but FB, insta, snap, et al should be no-go lest our minds be unable to heal naturally, learn and forge onwards. We're well on our way to having platforms like FB that will know our mental state intimately and might then be proactive in changing what is shown to us, yet this risks handing control of our lives to algorithms. Matrix-like.

«Instead of building tools for “silly human mammals” who are “easily trained by positive reinforcement,” she argues, technologists should embrace the messiness of human life»

There are certainly so many benefits to be had from social media, but however we use technology to alleviate the human condition, it's better being able to take responsibility for one's own being.

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.”—Carl Jung

[guru]

There was a temporary exhibition on Korean design, here's a dress of iridescent plastic butterflies that'd no doubt be a perfect statement in Bollywood humber; and delicately simple 'dandelion' bowels of silver (by Ko Hye-jeong). (at Les Arts Décoratifs)

[guru]

What to do of a stormy day? 😔 Stand at the window with a steaming mug and just watch it unfold. 😊GIF by French illustrator Marie Spénale.

[guru]