The Week's Links: May 10, 2013

All the links posted on social networks this week:​

• Nikola Tesla's Amazing Predictions for the 21st Century ➞
• The Newspaper of Tomorrow: 11 Predictions from Yesteryear ➞
• The Secret to a Long Life May Be Deep Inside Your Brain ➞
• Eight New Things We've Learned About Music ➞
• 10 New Things We Know About Food and Diets ➞
• Five Innovative Technologies that Bring Energy to the Developing World ➞
• Pop Culture Through The Lens Of Nostalgia: The Evolution Of 8-Bit Art ◉
• Five Surprising Facts About the Common Cold ➞
• Scientists Figure Out What You See While You're Dreaming ➞
• So clever: An Ingenious Cookbook Uses Infographics Instead Of Words ➞
• 'Vogue,' 'Wired' to Launch Online TV Channels This Month ➞
• How To Be Gracious, And Why ◉
• The Story Behind the QWERTY Keyboard ➞
• Michael Benson's Awe-Inspiring Views of the Solar System ➞
• The Vast World Of Lego Art ◉
• The Strange Beauty of David Maisel's Aerial Photographs ➞
• The Earliest Stop Motion Animations are Weirdly Wonderful ➞
• Can Cloning Giant Redwoods Save the Planet? ➞
• Ancient Maya Were Cultural Sponges ➞
• The Center of the Earth Is as Hot as the Sun ➞
• Slaves To The Algorithm ◉
• The First LPs Weren’t for Music—They Were Audiobooks for the Blind ➞
• This New Robot Has a Sense of Touch ➞
• PBS Idea Channel: Are Hologram Tupac and Hologram Freddie Mercury Nostalgia or New Aesthetic? ◉
• Saturn’s Mysterious Hexagon Is a Raging Hurricane ➞
• It’s Crazy to Move a Hundred-Year-Old Tree, But This One Is Thriving ➞
• Physicists Have Been Waiting For This Painfully Slow Experiment for Nearly 86 Years ➞
• Check out today's fantastic Google Doodle celebrating the birthday of brilliant opening title designer Saul Bass. ➞
• Where Are the Centers for Education Innovation? ➞
• 6 Influential Stop-Motion Movies From Ray Harryhausen (RIP) ➞
• And now a few moments of joyful humanity, brought to you by Russian dash cams. ➞
• Tribeca transmedia: The power of "Sandy Storylines" ➞
• Creativity Top 5: Week of May 6, 2013 ◉
• Inside the MIT Media Lab ◉
• Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom on What Really Happened When Facebook Bought Instagram: Vanity Fair ➞
• MIT Brain Scans Show That Entrepreneurs Really Do Think Different ➞
• Typecast: How New Technology Is Reinventing Typography ➞
• 47 Top Typography Tools and Resources ➞
• Adobe Abandons Its Creative Suite to Focus on Creative Cloud ➞
• New York Times launches web-only documentaries with Retro Report ➞
• Brand Thinking: Seth Godin, Dan Pink, and Other Mavens on How and Why We Define Ourselves Through Stuff ➞
• Robert Krulwich On Becoming Yourself ◉
• High Speed Photos of Flying Liquids by Manon Wethly ➞
• Gorgeous: Incredibly Surreal Scenes Where Women Defy Gravity ➞
• What do we talk about when we talk about the economic impact of the arts? ➞
• Permission to Play: Let's Make Fixing Things Cool Again ➞
• World's smallest movie: IBM uses individual atoms to make record-breaking short film of boy kicking football ➞
• Some timely perspective: HERE IS TODAY ➞
• Musicals are booming ◉
• Good Science Fiction ◉
• Michael Bierut: Typography, Modern Applications, and Timeless Communication Challenges ➞
• The 15 Most Important Minutes Of The Work Week ➞
• Tony Fadell: Building With Atoms, Electrons, Frustrations & Constraints ◉
• How to Get More Done: The 1-3-5 Rule ➞
• Why Kickstarter Can't Usurp the Hollywood Entertainment-Industrial Complex ➞
• How Australia is transforming their libraries. ➞
• How Coffee Influenced The Course Of History ➞
• Why Caffeine In Coffee Is A Miracle Drug For The Tired ➞
• WSJ. asks six luminaries to weigh in on a single topic. This month: Design. ➞
• Life in the City Is Essentially One Giant Math Problem ➞
• The 50 Most Perfectly Timed Photos Ever ➞
• 10 Beautiful Words About Love That Don’t Exist in English ➞
• Who Was Mather? Meet the Lesser-Known Men Behind Famous Agency Names ➞
• Meet The Accidental Designer Of The GitHub And Twitter Logos ➞
• MIT Technology Review: Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface ➞
• An Introduction To Programming Type Systems: Smashing Coding ➞
• 20 Amazing Outdoor Libraries and Bookstores From All Over the World ➞
• Sir Ken Robinson: Why We Need to Reform Education Now ➞
• Hermione Hoby spends an evening backstage with the unsung heroes of opera: the dressers ➞
• What Happened To Opera? When you weren't looking… some things changed. ➞
• TED Playlists: Words, words, words. Ten talks on the wonder of words. ➞
• Secrets of the Most Successful College Students ➞
• Amazon's bid for rights to sell secondhand ebooks ➞
• For the First Time Ever, You Can Now Hear What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like - Technology ➞
• NYTimes, Grantland and now Microsoft deliver a responsive essay: 88 Acres ➞
• Well done BBH, well done: This Heartwarming Tale of Friendship out of BBH London is a Must-Watch for Parents: ➞
• First NYTimes and now Grantland deliver a responsive essay: Out in the Great Alone ➞
• Artificial Intelligence Is The New Uncanny Valley ➞
• David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity ➞
• How to Tell a Story with Data ➞
• 10 Secrets to Eye-Popping Package Designs ➞
• An Exit Interview With the Man Who Transformed the Oxford English Dictionary ➞
• How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built: A New Theory in 3D Animation ➞
• The Abstraction Method of Problem Solving ➞

Recommended This Week: ​

How To Be Gracious, And Why→

Esquire's Tom Chiarella: ​

Graciousness looks easy, but of course it is not. Do not mistake mere manners for graciousness. Manners are rules. Helpful, yes. But graciousness reflects a state of being; it emanates from your inventory of self. Start with what you already possess.
​
​...
​
​Remember that the only representation of you, no matter what your station, is you — your presentation, your demeanor.
​
​...
​
​So listen. Be attentive to what people say. Respond, without interruption. You always have time. You own the time in which you live. You grant it to others without obligation. That is the gift of being gracious. The return — the payback, if you will — is the reputation you will quickly earn, the curiosity of others, the sense that people want to be in the room with you. The gracious man does not dwell on himself, but you can be confident that your reputation precedes you in everything you do and lingers long after you are finished. People will mark you for it. You will see it in their eyes. People trust the gracious man to care. The return comes in kind.

Slaves To The Algorithm→

Intelligent Life magazine takes a look at the effects of algorithms in our everyday life: ​

Algorithms decide what we are recommended on Amazon, what films we are offered on Netflix. Sometimes, newspapers warn us of their creeping, insidious influence; they are the mysterious sciencey bit of the internet that makes us feel websites are stalking us—the software that looks at the e-mail you receive and tells the Facebook page you look at that, say, Pizza Hut should be the ad it shows you. Some of those newspaper warnings themselves come from algorithms. Crude programs already trawl news pages, summarise the results, and produce their own article, by-lined, in the case of Forbes magazine, "By Narrative Science". 

...
​
​An algorithm, at its most basic, is not a mysterious sciencey bit at all; it is simply a decision-making process. It is a flow chart, a computer program that can stretch to pages of code or is as simple as "If x is greater than y, then choose z".

What has changed is what algorithms are doing. The first algorithm was created in the ninth century by the Arabic scholar Al Khwarizami—from whose name the word is a corruption. Ever since, they have been mechanistic, rational procedures that interact with mechanistic, rational systems. Today, though, they are beginning to interact with humans. The advantage is obvious. Drawing in more data than any human ever could, they spot correlations that no human would. The drawbacks are only slowly becoming apparent.

Creativity Top 5: Week of May 6, 2013

​Stop motion atoms, that is all. 

Inside the MIT Media Lab→

Clive Cookson writing for the Financial Times delivers a great profile of the MIT Media Lab: ​

For 25 years or so after it opened in 1985, Media Lab focused on multimedia computing and communications – the interfaces between people and electronics – and it came up with important new technologies such as the electronic ink used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. Such research continues to thrive but Media Lab is spreading its academic wings to address broader social issues, says Joi Ito, who became director in 2011 after an unconventional career as an internet entrepreneur and social activist in the US and Japan.

​​...
​
​“We want to be anti-disciplinary – which means filling in the white space between disciplines,” he says. “City Science is a great example of something that brings together work from many fields across the lab. When you bring in kids who are interested in architecture, design, transport, energy, urban gardening, mobility and big data, you get a different way of looking at things.”

Higher education is almost always about honing your skills and research into one specific area. Media Lab is about the opposite, the juxtaposition of skills. ​