The Week's Links: June 7, 2013

All the links posted on social networks this week:

• The Animated History of the Tulip ➞
• We Are All Nerds Now - Have We All Become Nerds? ➞
  
• People who feel they deserve success are among those most likely to fail when challenges arise, research has revealed ➞
  
• The $1.3B Quest to Build a Supercomputer Replica of a Human Brain ➞
  
• Are We Truly Overworked? An Investigation—in 6 Charts ➞
  
• Jason Santa Maria: On Web Typography ◉
  
• List of common misconceptions ➞ /via @kottke
  
• A closer look at zoom. - FiftyThree on Making the Paper app. ➞
  
• What If There's No Internet? ➞
  
• Creativity Top 5: Week of June 3, 2013 ◉
  
• Keep a "Research List" to Track Long-Term Goals ➞
  
• Insights from Hosain Rahman, Josh Reich, Heather Payne, & More at the 2013 99U Conference ➞
  
• TED: 8 lyrical talks about the violin ➞
  
• The creative process behind Edward Hopper's paintings ➞
  
• TED's Chris Anderson: How to Give a Killer Presentation ➞
  
• Case Study: Typographic Design Patterns And Current Practices (2013 Edition) ➞
  
• Steven Heller: The Art of Facebook ➞
  
• The Hopkinson Report » Health insurance for individual entrepreneurs – what you need to know ➞
  
• The ABCs of Contemporary Creatives ➞
  
• Scott Berkun: The tyranny of category ◉
  
• Linda Holmes: Dear Tiny Desk, Miss You ➞
  
• The Little Metronome That Wouldn't ➞
  
• Beautiful web type — the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory ➞
  
• When Patents Attack And Their Collateral Damage ◉
  
• Who's The Best Drinker? Dogs? Cats? Or Pigeons? ➞
  
• Mariinsky Theatre broadcasts first live ballet in 3D ➞
  
• Starters Guide to iOS Design ➞
  
• How does copyright work in space? ➞
  
• Google and NASA Launch Quantum Computing AI Lab ➞
  
• What kind of unique are you? ◉
  
• Complete Beginner's Guide to Interaction Design ➞
  
• The Vintage Years: How the Older Brain Both Facilitates and Benefits from Fine Arts Expression ➞
  
• Max Out Your Humanity: Oprah's Harvard Commencement Address on Failure and Finding Your Purpose ➞
  
• 70 year old Creativity Technique That Is Still Relevant Today ➞
  
• We’re Not Unhappy, We’re Designers: Morgan Knutson ➞
  
• Subscribing to blogs, Feedly and the evolution of RSS ◉
  
• Simplicity and Innovation ◉
  
• Cannes Unveils Shortlist for First Innovation Awards - Advertising Age ➞
  
• The Fragility of Intelligence: Why you sometimes feel smart and sometimes feel dumb. ➞
  
• Bringing New York City Dance Into the Limelight ➞
  
• Does Brain Training Work? Yes, If It Meets These Five Conditions ➞
  
• Students, Professors: We Want Your Best #College #Longreads ➞
  
• Learn To Code, Code To Learn: How programming prepares kids for more than math ➞
  
• A Hologram for the King book packaging: McSweeney’s ➞
  
• Do You Know How Much Data is Created Every Minute? ◉
  
• Ha! And now for some fun: 20 Surefire Ways to Anger Creatives ➞
  
• Seth Godin on Revolutions ◉
  
• The K-Cup coffee conundrum, and the cost of convenience ➞
  
• The joy of conferences and video games that teach ➞
  
• An awesomely generated list of 80s videos from Ask MetaFilter. ➞
  
• Making the Transition from Development to Design ➞
  
• Solving the email-while-on-vacation problem ➞
  
• Faced With Overload, a Need to Find Focus ➞
  
• Arts patrons nationwide alerted to hacking of ticket sales data ➞
  
• 'The New Inbox': Mobile's Impact on Email Marketing and Social Media ➞
  
• 25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time ➞
  
• New research suggests training designed to increase feelings of compassion can lead to more altruistic behavior. ➞
  
• Tanya Cordrey, on the Guardian's planned move to a brand new global domain later this year ➞
  
• Be All Your Selves: Joss Whedon's 2013 Wesleyan Commencement Address on Embracing Our Inner Contradictions ➞
  
• Study: How to Entice People to Buy Symphony Tickets ➞
  
• The Future Of Technology Isn't Mobile, It's Contextual ➞
  
• Startups, This Is How Design Works – by Wells Riley ➞
  
• Building The New Financial Times Web App: A Case Study ➞
  
• Brains built from newspapers, chocolate and fruit. What are you feeding your mind with? ➞
  
• Unheap - A tidy repository of jQuery plugins ➞
  
• 100 Films | 100 Behind the Scenes Photos (1931-2012) ➞
  
• Class of 2013: Start Designing Your Life ➞
  
• 30 Top HTML5 Tutorials for All Skill Levels ➞
  
• The 20 Most Beautiful Libraries on Film and TV ➞
  
• How Twitter Is Reshaping The Future Of Storytelling ➞
  
• How You Can Harness Irrationality to Improve Your Life ➞
  
• Help Save Podcasting! EFF is partnering with leading lawyers to bust a key patent being used to threaten podcasters. ➞
  
• Can Brain Scans Really Tell Us What Makes Art Beautiful? ➞
  
• Is It Possible To Think Without Language? ➞
  
• The Story of Elizabeth Keckley, Former-Slave-Turned-Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker ➞
  
• The Story Behind the QWERTY Keyboard ➞
  
• Benjamin Franklin's Phonetic Alphabet ➞
  

Recommended This Week: 

Creativity Top 5: Week of June 3, 2013

When Patents Attack And Their Collateral Damage

This week This American Life takes a look at patents. In particular Host Ira Glass and Zoe Chace from NPR’s Planet Money talk with Jim Logan and Richard Baker of Personal Audio, which claims it holds a patent used by all podcasters. This episode is a continuation of a previous episode aired in 2011. To find out more about how you can help the efforts to save podcasting visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.) 

Update: WSJ - Obama Tries To Curb Patent-Holding Firms​

Subscribing to blogs, Feedly and the evolution of RSS

In less than a month Google Reader will close. Many people relied on Google Reader to subscribe to their favorite websites' RSS feeds. The retirement of the service has left many like me trying to figure out how to make sure people can subscribe to our blogs in as convenient a way as Reader. ​Since the announcement of the retirement many companies that offered third-party apps, that allowed access to Reader with additional functionality and better design, have stepped up as potential replacements. This is interesting because it will most likely lead to RSS innovations that were not pursued simply because Reader was obviously the dominant provider. 

We have already begun to see such innovation from Feedly. They have bowed to clone the Reader API and allow Reader users a smooth transition once Reader is shut down. I've been using the service since the Reader announcement. Yesterday they took it a step further by announcing partnerships with some of the most used RSS feed apps in the market currently, including Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader.​

I encourage you to try Feedly and follow their many helpful suggestions to facilitate a smooth transition from Reader. I've also added links to our RSS feed (to subscribe directly on your preferred app) and Feedly feed in the sidebar of the blog next to our social network links. You can also subscribe to the blog via email. 

Simplicity and Innovation→

Excerpt from the book Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity by Irene Etzkorn and Alan Siegel:

We use the term breakthrough simplicity to describe an approach to innovation that is rooted in finding new ways to make everything simpler. It’s a way of thinking that, once adopted, enables you to envision and pursue a wide range of possibilities that can lead to major breakthroughs.

This puts a fresh spin on “innovation”—that much-used, oft-misunderstood buzzword. There’s a tendency to think of innovation as coming up with the latest gadget, or adding new features onto existing ones. But the concept of breakthrough simplicity recognizes that today, the most powerful forms of innovation don’t manifest themselves in new bells and whistles. They take the form of better customer experiences (or patient experiences, or citizen experiences). And one of the best ways to improve any experience is to simplify it—to remove complications, unnecessary layers, hassles or distractions, while focusing in on the essence of what people want and need in that particular situation.