Here is your dose of “The Weekly Picks”, a curated list of what I’m enjoying.
A 20 second summary of what you can find more about down bellow:
🧠 The Two Mindsets
📖 The Need To Read by Paul Graham
💎 Proof You Can Do Hard Things by Nat Eliason
🌌 Similarities in constellations across cultures
🎮 Art Installation: G80
The Two Mindsets:
"The other thing exceptional people seem to have is a special talent for converting life’s setbacks into future successes." Carol Dweck
The Need To Read by Paul Graham (@paulg)
“You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things. People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to.”
Proof You Can Do Hard Things by Nat Eliason (@nateliason)
This blog article discusses the importance of tackling difficult challenges and proving to oneself that they can overcome them. Nat Eliason argues that the ability to do hard things is one of the most valuable assets one can possess, and it can be developed by taking on challenging tasks such as learning calculus or running a marathon. The article also explores the idea that there are many ways to demonstrate the ability to do hard things, and grades are not necessarily the best indicator of this ability.
Ultimately, Nat encourages readers to develop habits, learn new skills, and create something to change their default response to challenges from "that seems hard" to "I can figure it out.”
This article reminded me of some useful ideas I discovered while listening to the audiobook version of "Do Hard Things" by Steve Magness (@stevemagness). During this period, I was training for my first marathon last year.
🌌 Similarities in constellations across cultures
Humans are adept at finding patterns, and some patterns are more appealing to us than others.
This interesting paper shows that, across 27 cultures, we tend to give the same names to patterns of stars. This is because the perceptual systems of humans are all attracted to the same types of patterns.
This research paper explores the organization of the night sky into constellations across cultures and the idea that constellations result from a process of perceptual grouping. Data from 27 cultures is used to establish which constellations appear frequently across cultures, revealing that the list of recurring constellations extends beyond familiar examples. A computational model is presented and evaluated to capture how humans group stars into constellations, based on proximity and brightness alone. The results suggest that basic perceptual factors account for a large set of similarities in constellations across cultures, despite the influence of culture-specific knowledge on constellation shapes.
G80
G80 is a modern version of Buckminster Fuller's World Game, a simulation tool designed in the 1960s to achieve fair global resource distribution, based on war simulations.
Created by Swiss collective Fragmentin for Mudac, G80 features an 80-slider matrix on a console that resembles a control room. Each slider represents a specific variable, with + and - marks indicating its scale. Some variables are based on those established by Buckminster Fuller and his students, while others were created by Fragmentin to address current challenges such as ecology, migration, gender equality, and technological innovation.
Visitors play the console to stabilize the world by changing each variable. However, they soon realize that all sliders are interrelated and the variables create patterns that change without the players' intervention, representing the intervention of other institutions.
⤷ Hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Weekly Picks! You can check the previous editions here
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