Creative Destruction

Nick Bilton writing in The New York Times Bit's Blog, Disruptions: Apple’s Next Unveiling Could Make or Break a Business: 

The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” in 1942 to describe the less-than-tidy way free markets lead to progress: the telephone replaced the telegraph; the cellphone replaced the telephone; the smartphone (we’re still in the middle of this one) is replacing the cellphone; and so on. Something gets destroyed and something new and exciting is built on top of it.

...

The destruction and renewal upon which the tech industry has thrived has accelerated thanks to the Internet, cheap smartphone apps and lower costs of doing business. Facebook, for example, which in just a few years has gone from a start-up to one of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, has to constantly be on the lookout for the next big threat. And when it can’t take those competitors out at the knees, it buys them, like the photo-sharing service Instagram.

So who is safe from the perils of the smartphone? No one, it seems. Not even Apple.

In praise of laziness

The Economist Schumpeter blog: 

The most obvious beneficiaries of leaning back would be creative workers—the very people who are supposed to be at the heart of the modern economy. In the early 1990s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist, asked 275 creative types if he could interview them for a book he was writing. A third did not bother to reply at all and another third refused to take part. Peter Drucker, a management guru, summed up the mood of the refuseniks: “One of the secrets of productivity is to have a very big waste-paper basket to take care of all invitations such as yours.” Creative people’s most important resource is their time—particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time—and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings. Indeed, creative people may be at their most productive when, to the manager’s untutored eye, they appear to be doing nothing.

The Week's Links: September 6, 2013

All the links posted on social networks this week: 

• Remembering the Spark That Ignited a Creative Fire ➞
• From Collaborative Coding to Wedding Invitations: GitHub Is Going Mainstream ➞
  
• 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance ➞
  
• An Oral History Of Apple Design: 1992 ➞
  
• 3 inspiring TEDx Talks on happiness at work ➞
  
• FBI’s “Vault” Web Site Reveals Declassified Files on Hemingway, Einstein, Marilyn & Other Icons ➞
  
• 5,000-Year-Old Gaming Pieces Found In Turkey ➞
  
• Top 10 Fastest Supercomputers In The World ➞
  
• The New York Times (quietly) drops the F-bomb ➞
  
• Australian archive says 1996 pop art-inspired version of Shakespeare was first movie created for the internet ➞
  
• Should We Teach Literature Students How To Analyze Texts Algorithmically? ➞
  
• Inside The Mind Of A Chef ◉
  
• Pumpkin Spice Latte, the Drink That Almost Wasn’t ➞
  
• Marissa Mayer's notes on the new Yahoo logo: Geeking Out on the Logo ➞
  
• A New App Tells A Neverending Bedtime Story, Of A Kid's Own Design ➞
  
• Very cool: Concert Master - A new way to choose a classical concert ➞
  
• Big Think: The 7 Most Popular Ideas of Summer 2013 ➞
  
• A Big Bach Download: The Complete Organ Works for Free ➞
  
• LOUD ◉
  
• Recommended: Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager ◉
  
• Study: To The Human Brain, Me Is We ➞
  
• Interesting: E-Books Could Be The Future Of Social Media ➞
  
• The future of handwriting ➞
  
• Ancient Pottery Fragments Show That Prehistoric Humans Used Spices Too ➞
  
• The Science Behind Honey's Eternal Shelf Life ➞
  
• 10 Things We've Learned About Learning ➞
  
• Think You're Doing a Good Job? Not If the Algorithms Say You're Not ➞
  
• A WWII Propaganda Campaign Popularized the Myth That Carrots Help You See in the Dark ➞
  
• Slurred Lines: Great Cocktail Moments in Famous Literature ➞
  
• How the Coffee Cup Sleeve Was Invented ➞
  
• These Ocean Waves Look Like Liquid Sculptures ➞
  
• What Digitization Will Do for the Future of Museums ➞
  
• A Little Music Training In Childhood Goes A Long Way ◉
  
• See the Greatest Architecture in 36 Different European Cities in This One, Gorgeous Time-Lapse ➞
  
• Kids Trust Nice People Over Smart People ➞
  
• Creativity Top 5: Week of September 2, 2013 ◉
  
• Recommended: The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance ◉
  
• Getty Just Made 4,600 Incredible Images Free to Download and Use ➞
  
• Hide And Seek Might Be Good for Kids’ Brains ➞
  
• These Complex, Beautiful Board Game Pieces Are 5,000 Years Old ➞
  
• To Exercise More, Sleep More First ➞
  
• Computer Programmer Creates Beautiful Watercolor Paintings With Code ➞
  
• Boston Children’s Hospital Once Relied on the Opera to Power X-Rays ➞
  
• Just A Little Meditation Causes Brain-Wave Changes ◉
  
• Haters May Have a Natural Disposition to Hate ➞
  
• The Arecibo Observatory: Beyond The Big Dreams ◉
  
• Recommended: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action ◉
  
• New Element 115 May Finally Be Added to the Periodic Table ➞
  
• Guilt Is Contagious ➞
  
• Why Do We Cry When We’re Happy? ➞
  
• Museum Day Live! 9/28/13 Download a ticket for free admission to over 1,500 museums nationwide ➞
  
• The Insane and Exciting Future of the Bionic Body ➞
  
• What Your Favorite Book Looks Like in Colors ➞
  
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Seven-Minute Editing Master Class ➞
  
• How An Arcane Coding Method From 1970s Banking Software Could Save The Sanity Of Web Developers Everywhere ➞
  
• How To Find Inspiration In The Age Of Information Overload ➞
  
• Give Yourself Vertigo Plunging Into Hitchcock's Cinematic Obsessions ➞
  
• The 60-Second Guide To How Flashcards Actually Work ➞
  
• What Causes Nightmares? ➞
  
• 10 Things We've Learned About Learning ➞
  
• How Do You Rebrand a Country? A look at Japan’s attempt to call itself “cool” ➞
  
• Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses ➞
  
• Fantastic: Every Movie Poster that Saul Bass Ever Made ➞
  
• How To Build a High-Performing Digital Team - Perry Hewitt ➞
  
• Unblocked: A Guide To Making Things People Love (Part 1) ➞
  
• A Look at How Agency Compensation Has Changed ➞
  
• Stunning Paper Birds from Diana Beltrán Herrera ➞
  
• Airborne: Jose the Amazing photos by Chris Arnade ➞
  
• Engine: The History of a Concept, From 14th-Century Poetry to Google ➞
  
• 40 maps that explain the world ➞
  
• Here's What Really Happens When You Extend a Deadline - Heidi Grant Halvorson ➞
  
• Amazing: Incredibly Detailed Close-Ups of Van Gogh’s Masterpieces ➞
  
• Ha!: Scientists determine the formula for perfect melted cheese on toast ➞
  
• Reuters Top 100 Global Innovators ➞
  
• 50 Science Fiction/Fantasy Films That Everyone Should See ➞
  
• The Writing Tools of 20 Famous Authors ➞
  
• 10 Hollywood Hits Inspired By Magazine and Newspaper Articles ➞
  
• How This Brain Scientist Used Video Game Tech To Break New Ground ➞
  
• Digital magazines: how popular are they? ➞
• Edinburgh international book festival sees rise of author-as-performer ➞
  
• Just A Little Meditation Causes Brain-Wave Changes ◉
  
• Pre-Raphaelite mural discovered in William Morris's Red House ➞
  
• Communicating Across Species: Jonathon Keats' Honeybee Ballet ➞
  
• The Plight of the Honeybee ➞
  
• For the Met, Opera History Lives in a Newark Parking Lot ➞
  
• Design Better And Faster With Rapid Prototyping ➞
  
• The Surprising Complexity of Lobster Prices ➞
  

LOUD

George Prochnik, author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise in The New York Times: 

Mammalian hearing developed primarily as an animal-detector system — and it was crucial to hear every rustle from afar. The evolved ear is an extraordinary amplifier. By the time the brain registers a sound, our auditory mechanism has jacked the volume several hundredfold from the level at which the sound wave first started washing around the loopy whirls of our ears. This is why, in a reasonably quiet room, we actually can hear a pin drop. Think what a tiny quantity of sound energy is released by a needle striking a floor! Our ancestors needed such hypersensitivity, because every standout noise signified a potential threat.

There has been a transformation in our relationship to the environment over the millions of years since the prototype for human hearing evolved, but part of our brain hasn’t registered the makeover.

Every time a siren shrieks on the street, our conscious minds might ignore it, but other brain regions behave as if that siren were a predator barreling straight for us. Given how many sirens city dwellers are subject to over the course of an average day, and the attention-fracturing tension induced by loud sounds of every sort, it’s easy to see how sensitivity to noise, once an early warning system for approaching threats, has become a threat in itself.

Creativity Top 5: Week of September 2, 2013

Desmondo Ray will break your heart.