Adam Victor Brandizzi

It’s been over a year since we last checked in with artist duo Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panickerof Hari & Deepti, who construct elegant cut paper dioramas inside backlit light boxes. The medium is perfect for depicting the depth of thick forests, pools of water, or subterranean caves inhabited by spirits and fantastic creatures.

Over the last year Hari & Deepti relocated from Denver to Mumbai where they just completed work for their first European show at Blank Space Gallery in Oslo titled ‘We Are All Made of Stars.’ Like previous exhibitions the event was held in a darkened gallery with the only light emitted from their artwork to better emphasize the themes of travel and adventure depicted in their light boxes.

Keep an eye out for new works in December at Context Art Miami with Black Book Gallery. You can also see more on Instagram.

‘Are these new players providing a valuable new service or are they merely an arbitrage play?’

Peer-to-peer markets used to be simple: there was eBay. If you had a broken laser pointer you wanted to sell, eBay was the place to find a buyer. Then came the local marketplace Craigslist and, before long, peer-to-peer markets were linking buyers and sellers in every market imaginable: crafts (Etsy); chores (TaskRabbit); transport (Uber); accommodation (Airbnb); consumer loans (Zopa); and even booze (Drizly).

It was exciting, for a while, to realise that you could actually get a car home on a Saturday night in San Francisco, or make money renting out your attic, but the backlash has been simmering for some time. That backlash mixes two complaints, elegantly exemplified when a group of taxicab owners and drivers sued Uber in Atlanta a year ago.

“Uber has been operating in Atlanta with little concern about the safety of their passengers and zero concern for the laws that protect them,” said one of the plaintiffs in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Our incomes have steadily dropped since Uber started and legally licensed drivers are leaving the business.”

In other words, peer-to-peer services such as Uber are said to be hazardous, and they are also unwelcome competition for incumbents. (Several studies have supported the common-sense conclusion that these new competitors threaten the revenue of existing players.)

These might seem very different issues. It’s one thing to worry about signposting fire exits when you let out a spare room on Airbnb. Protecting the profit margins of fine upstanding local hoteliers is another matter.

Yet the two questions are inevitably tangled up, because both touch on the way incumbents are regulated. One would hope that regulators protect consumers, employees and the public by making it more difficult for drunks and sexual predators to drive cars, for firetraps to host unsuspecting tourists, and for employers to exploit workers. But some regulations seem designed more to protect insiders than to protect consumers.

Consider the New York taxi medallion system: you can’t drive a taxicab without one, and they’ve been million-dollar assets at times, often owned by investors and leased to drivers at a rate of $100 or more a day. New kids Uber and Lyft not only compete for passengers, they compete for drivers too, who may prefer to pay commission to these new players than the flat fee to the medallion owner.

Taxi medallions are a scarce asset created purely by a stroke of the regulator’s pen, and you don’t need to be a hardcore libertarian to conclude that, in this case, the regulator is motivated by protecting the value of this asset. Nor does it take a free-market fundamentalist to believe that if consumers think that taxicabs provide a safer service, they will pay for that safer service.

It may help to approach the debate from a different direction. Are these new players providing a valuable new service or are they merely an arbitrage play, using technology to sidestep taxes that others must pay, and to limbo-dance under regulatory hurdles that rivals must jump?

If the economic value is real, then it is up to the regulators to figure out how to unleash that value rather than trying to legislate it out of existence.

A new study of peer-to-peer markets by economists Liran Einav, Chiara Farronato and Jonathan Levin argues that the economic value is there all right. Peer-to-peer markets make two things possible that were previously hard to imagine.

The first is to make arid markets lush and fertile. The quintessential example is eBay, enabling buyers and sellers of the quirkiest products to find each other and gain by trading. Etsy fits the eBay mould, with sellers who will knit you a cuddly toy designed to resemble a dissected frog, a product that seems unlikely to find a niche on the high street.

The second peer-to-peer trick is to introduce part-timers into the market to meet surges in demand. It’s inefficient to build hotels just to cope with the summer rush, or taxis to cope with New Year’s Eve but, if the demand is there, peer-to-peer markets can pull in a bit of extra supply. As a result, it should be easier to get a cab at 11pm on a Friday, and prices for hotel rooms should be more reasonable during school holidays.

Peer-to-peer markets are well worth having. The challenge for regulators, then, is to catch up. How should Airbnb landlords who let a room for 10 nights a year be placed on a level playing field with regular bed-and-breakfast landlords? Are Uber drivers employees (as a California labour commissioner recently ruled)? Or freelancers using Uber’s software to help them do their jobs (as Uber insists)? Or something else?

James Surowiecki, writing in The New Yorker, recently argued for “something else”, and called for a regulatory overhaul to give “gig-economy workers a better balance of flexibility and security”. That sounds like an admirable aim, although achieving it isn’t straightforward. Giving pensions, vacation rights or unemployment insurance to Uber drivers or TaskRabbit “taskers” would require both clever rules and clever admin systems.

Peer-to-peer markets may once have been simple; now there is more at stake than the occasional broken laser pointer.

Written for and first published at ft.com.

This is one good boy right here. Today’s comic is inspired by a sweet tweet sesh with Zack! Zack is one of the Three Very Fine Moderators of the Toilcore tumblr, (the other two are Keith and me!)
Follow Zack, Follow Keith and of course, Toilcore is a Very Good tumblr to follow, yes indeed, so please follow that, too.

BTW, I just reordered a batch of Robbie and Bobby books--they should be here in a bout a week–I’ll let you know as soon as they get here!

Comece instalando as ferramentas:

sudo apt-get install colordiff kbtin

Agora você pode:

diff arquivo1.txt arquivo2.txt | colordiff | ansi2html > diff.html

Ou, com git:

git diff | colordiff | ansi2html > gitdiff.html

Você também pode salvar a saída de qualquer comando que retorne ANSI colorido:

ls -lha --color | ansi2html > ls.html

O post Salvando diff em HTML apareceu primeiro em Elcio Ferreira - fechaTag.

yeoldenews:

A selection of strange and cryptic personal ads from The New York Herald, 1860s to 1890s. 3/?

Happy Monday!

banananauyu:

thedevilspanties:

spart117mc:

viridieanfey:

romanimp:

beatnikdaddio:

admiring the stockings. 1940’s.

#[40S COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER VOICE] WHAT’S BETTER THAN THIS? GALS BEING PALS

Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said “Look I can give you the names, but you’ll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.” And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)

Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, “I’m giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.’ We’re going to get rid of them.”

“I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I’ll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.’

“And he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps’s name may be second, but mine will be first.’

“Then I looked at him, and I said, ‘Sir, you’re right. They’re lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the drivers—every woman in the WAC detachment—and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us—then I’ll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we’ve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.’

“And he said, ‘Forget the order.’

- The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

I’ve reblogged this before but it didn’t have these comments and HOLY HOT DAMN DID IT NEED THEM.

make this a TV show please

The Sweeping Shadow - Total Solar Eclipse, Australia

For more of her art, check out Nina's Tumblr.

Octopus makes its own quicksand then vanishes inside it

Modern life now forces us to do a multitude of things at once — but can we? Should we?

Forget invisibility or flight: the superpower we all want is the ability to do several things at once. Unlike other superpowers, however, being able to multitask is now widely regarded as a basic requirement for employability. Some of us sport computers with multiple screens, to allow tweeting while trading pork bellies and frozen orange juice. Others make do with reading a Kindle while poking at a smartphone and glancing at a television in the corner with its two rows of scrolling subtitles. We think nothing of sending an email to a colleague to suggest a quick coffee break, because we can feel confident that the email will be read within minutes.

All this is simply the way the modern world works. Multitasking is like being able to read or add up, so fundamental that it is taken for granted. Doing one thing at a time is for losers — recall Lyndon Johnson’s often bowdlerised dismissal of Gerald Ford: “He can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.”

The rise of multitasking is fuelled by technology, of course, and by social change as well. Husbands and wives no longer specialise as breadwinners and homemakers; each must now do both. Work and play blur. Your friends can reach you on your work email account at 10 o’clock in the morning, while your boss can reach you on your mobile phone at 10 o’clock at night. You can do your weekly shop sitting at your desk and you can handle a work query in the queue at the supermarket.

This is good news in many ways — how wonderful to be able to get things done in what would once have been wasted time! How delightful the variety of it all is! No longer must we live in a monotonous, Taylorist world where we must painstakingly focus on repetitive tasks until we lose our minds.

And yet we are starting to realise that the blessings of a multitasking life are mixed. We feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we might plausibly be doing at any one time, and by the feeling that we are on call at any moment.

And we fret about the unearthly appetite of our children to do everything at once, flipping through homework while chatting on WhatsApp, listening to music and watching Game of Thrones. (According to a recent study by Sabrina Pabilonia of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, for over half the time that high-school students spend doing homework, they are also listening to music, watching TV or otherwise multitasking. That trend is on the increase.) Can they really handle all these inputs at once? They seem to think so, despite various studies suggesting otherwise.

And so a backlash against multitasking has begun — a kind of Luddite self-help campaign. The poster child for uni-tasking was launched on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter in December 2014. For $499 — substantially more than a multifunctional laptop — “The Hemingwrite” computer promised a nice keyboard, a small e-ink screen and an automatic cloud back-up. You couldn’t email on the Hemingwrite. You couldn’t fool around on YouTube, and you couldn’t read the news. All you could do was type. The Hemingwrite campaign raised over a third of a million dollars.

The Hemingwrite (now rebranded the Freewrite) represents an increasingly popular response to the multitasking problem: abstinence. Programs such as Freedom and Self-Control are now available to disable your browser for a preset period of time. The popular blogging platform WordPress offers “distraction-free writing”. The Villa Stéphanie, a hotel in Baden-Baden, offers what has been branded the “ultimate luxury”: a small silver switch beside the hotel bed that will activate a wireless blocker and keep the internet and all its temptations away.

The battle lines have been drawn. On one side: the culture of the modern workplace, which demands that most of us should be open to interruption at any time. On the other, the uni-tasking refuseniks who insist that multitaskers are deluding themselves, and that focus is essential. Who is right?

The ‘cognitive cost’

There is ample evidence in favour of the proposition that we should focus on one thing at a time. Consider a study led by David Strayer, a psychologist at the University of Utah. In 2006, Strayer and his colleagues used a high-fidelity driving simulator to compare the performance of drivers who were chatting on a mobile phone to drivers who had drunk enough alcohol to be at the legal blood-alcohol limit in the US. Chatting drivers didn’t adopt the aggressive, risk-taking style of drunk drivers but they were unsafe in other ways. They took much longer to respond to events outside the car, and they failed to notice a lot of the visual cues around them. Strayer’s infamous conclusion: driving while using a mobile phone is as dangerous as driving while drunk.

Less famous was Strayer’s finding that it made no difference whether the driver was using a handheld or hands-free phone. The problem with talking while driving is not a shortage of hands. It is a shortage of mental bandwidth.

Yet this discovery has made little impression either on public opinion or on the law. In the United Kingdom, for example, it is an offence to use a hand-held phone while driving but perfectly legal if the phone is used hands-free. We’re happy to acknowledge that we only have two hands but refuse to admit that we only have one brain.

Another study by Strayer, David Sanbonmatsu and others, suggested that we are also poor judges of our ability to multitask. The subjects who reported doing a lot of multitasking were also the ones who performed poorly on tests of multitasking ability. They systematically overrated their ability to multitask and they displayed poor impulse control. In other words, wanting to multitask is a good sign that you should not be multitasking.

We may not immediately realise how multitasking is hampering us. The first time I took to Twitter to comment on a public event was during a televised prime-ministerial debate in 2010. The sense of buzz was fun; I could watch the candidates argue and the twitterati respond, compose my own 140-character profundities and see them being shared. I felt fully engaged with everything that was happening. Yet at the end of the debate I realised, to my surprise, that I couldn’t remember anything that Brown, Cameron and Clegg had said.

A study conducted at UCLA in 2006 suggests that my experience is not unusual. Three psychologists, Karin Foerde, Barbara Knowlton and Russell Poldrack, recruited students to look at a series of flashcards with symbols on them, and then to make predictions based on patterns they had recognised. Some of these prediction tasks were done in a multitasking environment, where the students also had to listen to low- and high-pitched tones and count the high-pitched ones. You might think that making predictions while also counting beeps was too much for the students to handle. It wasn’t. They were equally competent at spotting patterns with or without the note-counting task.

But here’s the catch: when the researchers then followed up by asking more abstract questions about the patterns, the cognitive cost of the multitasking became clear. The students struggled to answer questions about the predictions they’d made in the multitasking environment. They had successfully juggled both tasks in the moment — but they hadn’t learnt anything that they could apply in a different context.

That’s an unnerving discovery. When we are sending email in the middle of a tedious meeting, we may nevertheless feel that we’re taking in what is being said. A student may be confident that neither Snapchat nor the live football is preventing them taking in their revision notes. But the UCLA findings suggest that this feeling of understanding may be an illusion and that, later, we’ll find ourselves unable to remember much, or to apply our knowledge flexibly. So, multitasking can make us forgetful — one more way in which multitaskers are a little bit like drunks.

Early multitaskers

All this is unnerving, given that the modern world makes multitasking almost inescapable. But perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much. Long before multitasking became ubiquitous, it had a long and distinguished history.

In 1958, a young psychologist named Bernice Eiduson embarked on an long-term research project — so long-term, in fact, that Eiduson died before it was completed. Eiduson studied the working methods of 40 scientists, all men. She interviewed them periodically over two decades and put them through various psychological tests. Some of these scientists found their careers fizzling out, while others went on to great success. Four won Nobel Prizes and two others were widely regarded as serious Nobel contenders. Several more were invited to join the National Academy of Sciences.

After Eiduson died, some of her colleagues published an analysis of her work. These colleagues, Robert Root-Bernstein, Maurine Bernstein and Helen Garnier, wanted to understand what determined whether a scientist would have a long productive career, a combination of genius and longevity.

There was no clue in the interviews or the psychological tests. But looking at the early publication record of these scientists — their first 100 published research papers — researchers discovered a pattern: the top scientists were constantly changing the focus of their research.

Over the course of these first 100 papers, the most productive scientists covered five different research areas and moved from one of these topics to another an average of 43 times. They would publish, and change the subject, publish again, and change the subject again. Since most scientific research takes an extended period of time, the subjects must have overlapped. The secret to a long and highly productive scientific career? It’s multitasking.

Charles Darwin thrived on spinning multiple plates. He began his first notebook on “transmutation of species” two decades before The Origin of Species was published. His A Biographical Sketch of an Infant was based on notes made after his son William was born; William was 37 when he published. Darwin spent nearly 20 years working on climbing and insectivorous plants. And Darwin published a learned book on earthworms in 1881, just before his death. He had been working on it for 44 years. When two psychologists, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, studied Darwin and other celebrated artists and scientists they concluded that such overlapping interests were common.

Another team of psychologists, led by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, interviewed almost 100 exceptionally creative people from jazz pianist Oscar Peterson to science writer Stephen Jay Gould to double Nobel laureate, the physicist John Bardeen. Csikszentmihalyi is famous for developing the idea of “flow”, the blissful state of being so absorbed in a challenge that one loses track of time and sets all distractions to one side. Yet every one of Csikszentmihalyi’s interviewees made a practice of keeping several projects bubbling away simultaneously.

Just internet addiction?

If the word “multitasking” can apply to both Darwin and a teenager with a serious Instagram habit, there is probably some benefit in defining our terms. There are at least four different things we might mean when we talk about multitasking. One is genuine multitasking: patting your head while rubbing your stomach; playing the piano and singing; farting while chewing gum. Genuine multitasking is possible, but at least one of the tasks needs to be so practised as to be done without thinking.

Then there’s the challenge of creating a presentation for your boss while also fielding phone calls for your boss and keeping an eye on email in case your boss wants you. This isn’t multitasking in the same sense. A better term is task switching, as our attention flits between the presentation, the telephone and the inbox. A great deal of what we call multitasking is in fact rapid task switching.

Task switching is often confused with a third, quite different activity — the guilty pleasure of disappearing down an unending click-hole of celebrity gossip and social media updates. There is a difference between the person who reads half a page of a journal article, then stops to write some notes about a possible future project, then goes back to the article — and someone who reads half a page of a journal article before clicking on bikini pictures for the rest of the morning. “What we’re often calling multitasking is in fact internet addiction,” says Shelley Carson, a psychologist and author of Your Creative Brain. “It’s a compulsive act, not an act of multitasking.”

A final kind of multitasking isn’t a way of getting things done but simply the condition of having a lot of things to do. The car needs to be taken in for a service. Your tooth is hurting. The nanny can’t pick up the kids from school today. There’s a big sales meeting to prepare for tomorrow, and your tax return is due next week. There are so many things that have to be done, so many responsibilities to attend to. Having a lot of things to do is not the same as doing them all at once. It’s just life. And it is not necessarily a stumbling block to getting things done — as Bernice Eiduson discovered as she tracked scientists on their way to their Nobel Prizes.

The fight for focus

These four practices — multitasking, task switching, getting distracted and managing multiple projects — all fit under the label “multitasking”. This is not just because of a simple linguistic confusion. The versatile networked devices we use tend to blur the distinction, serving us as we move from task to task while also offering an unlimited buffet of distractions. But the different kinds of multitasking are linked in other ways too. In particular, the highly productive practice of having multiple projects invites the less-than-productive habit of rapid task switching.

To see why, consider a story that psychologists like to tell about a restaurant near Berlin University in the 1920s. (It is retold in Willpower, a book by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.) The story has it that when a large group of academics descended upon the restaurant, the waiter stood and calmly nodded as each new item was added to their complicated order. He wrote nothing down, but when he returned with the food his memory had been flawless. The academics left, still talking about the prodigious feat; but when one of them hurried back to retrieve something he’d left behind, the waiter had no recollection of him. How could the waiter have suddenly become so absent-minded? “Very simple,” he said. “When the order has been completed, I forget it.”

One member of the Berlin school was a young experimental psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik. Intrigued, she demonstrated that people have a better recollection of uncompleted tasks. This is called the “Zeigarnik effect”: when we leave things unfinished, we can’t quite let go of them mentally. Our subconscious keeps reminding us that the task needs attention.

The Zeigarnik effect may explain the connection between facing multiple responsibilities and indulging in rapid task switching. We flit from task to task to task because we can’t forget about all of the things that we haven’t yet finished. We flit from task to task to task because we’re trying to get the nagging voices in our head to shut up.

Of course, there is much to be said for “focus”. But there is much to be said for copperplate handwriting, too, and for having a butler. The world has moved on. There’s something appealing about the Hemingwrite and the hotel room that will make the internet go away, but also something futile.

It is probably not true that Facebook is all that stands between you and literary greatness. And in most office environments, the Hemingwrite is not the tool that will win you promotion. You are not Ernest Hemingway, and you do not get to simply ignore emails from your colleagues.

If focus is going to have a chance, it’s going to have to fight an asymmetric war. Focus can only survive if it can reach an accommodation with the demands of a multitasking world.

Loops and lists

The word “multitasking” wasn’t applied to humans until the 1990s, but it has been used to describe computers for half a century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first used in print in 1966, when the magazine Datamation described a computer capable of appearing to perform several operations at the same time.

Just as with humans, computers typically create the illusion of multitasking by switching tasks rapidly. Computers perform the switching more quickly, of course, and they don’t take 20 minutes to get back on track after an interruption.

Nor does a computer fret about what is not being done. While rotating a polygon and sending text to the printer, it feels no guilt that the mouse has been left unchecked for the past 16 milliseconds. The mouse’s time will come. Being a computer means never having to worry about the Zeigarnik effect.

Is there a lesson in this for distractible sacks of flesh like you and me? How can we keep a sense of control despite the incessant guilt of all the things we haven’t finished?

“Whenever you say to someone, ‘I’ll get back to you about that’, you just opened a loop in your brain,” says David Allen. Allen is the author of a cult productivity book called Getting Things Done. “That loop will keep spinning until you put a placeholder in a system you can trust.”

Modern life is always inviting us to open more of those loops. It isn’t necessarily that we have more work to do, but that we have more kinds of work that we ought to be doing at any given moment. Tasks now bleed into each other unforgivingly. Whatever we’re doing, we can’t escape the sense that perhaps we should be doing something else. It’s these overlapping possibilities that take the mental toll.

The principle behind Getting Things Done is simple: close the open loops. The details can become rather involved but the method is straightforward. For every single commitment you’ve made to yourself or to someone else, write down the very next thing you plan to do. Review your lists of next actions frequently enough to give you confidence that you won’t miss anything.

This method has a cult following, and practical experience suggests that many people find it enormously helpful — including me (see below). Only recently, however, did the psychologists E J Masicampo and Roy Baumeister find some academic evidence to explain why people find relief by using David Allen’s system. Masicampo and Baumeister found that you don’t need to complete a task to banish the Zeigarnik effect. Making a specific plan will do just as well. Write down your next action and you quiet that nagging voice at the back of your head. You are outsourcing your anxiety to a piece of paper.

A creative edge?

It is probably a wise idea to leave rapid task switching to the computers. Yet even frenetic flipping between Facebook, email and a document can have some benefits alongside the costs.

The psychologist Shelley Carson and her student Justin Moore recently recruited experimental subjects for a test of rapid task switching. Each subject was given a pair of tasks to do: crack a set of anagrams and read an article from an academic journal. These tasks were presented on a computer screen, and for half of the subjects they were presented sequentially — first solve the anagrams, then read the article. For the other half of the experimental group, the computer switched every two-and-a-half minutes between the anagrams and the journal article, forcing the subjects to change mental gears many times.

Unsurprisingly, task switching slowed the subjects down and scrambled their thinking. They solved fewer anagrams and performed poorly on a test of reading comprehension when forced to refocus every 150 seconds.

But the multitasking treatment did have a benefit. Subjects who had been task switching became more creative. To be specific, their scores on tests of “divergent” thinking improved. Such tests ask subjects to pour out multiple answers to odd questions. They might be asked to think of as many uses as possible for a rolling pin or to list all the consequences they could summon to mind of a world where everyone has three arms. Involuntary multitaskers produced a greater volume and variety of answers, and their answers were more original too.

“It seems that switching back and forth between tasks primed people for creativity,” says Carson, who is an adjunct professor at Harvard. The results of her work with Moore have not yet been published, and one might reasonably object that such tasks are trivial measures of creativity. Carson responds that scores on these laboratory tests of divergent thinking are correlated with substantial creative achievements such as publishing a novel, producing a professional stage show or creating an award-winning piece of visual art. For those who insist that great work can only be achieved through superhuman focus, think long and hard on this discovery.

Carson and colleagues have found an association between significant creative achievement and a trait psychologists term “low latent inhibition”. Latent inhibition is the filter that all mammals have that allows them to tune out apparently irrelevant stimuli. It would be crippling to listen to every conversation in the open-plan office and the hum of the air conditioning, while counting the number of people who walk past the office window. Latent inhibition is what saves us from having to do so. These subconscious filters let us walk through the world without being overwhelmed by all the different stimuli it hurls at us.

And yet people whose filters are a little bit porous have a big creative edge. Think on that, uni-taskers: while you busily try to focus on one thing at a time, the people who struggle to filter out the buzz of the world are being reviewed in The New Yorker.

“You’re letting more information into your cognitive workspace, and that information can be consciously or unconsciously combined,” says Carson. Two other psychologists, Holly White and Priti Shah, found a similar pattern for people suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

It would be wrong to romanticise potentially disabling conditions such as ADHD. All these studies were conducted on university students, people who had already demonstrated an ability to function well. But their conditions weren’t necessarily trivial — to participate in the White/Shah experiment, students had to have a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, meaning that their condition was troubling enough to prompt them to seek professional help.

It’s surprising to discover that being forced to switch tasks can make us more creative. It may be still more surprising to realise that in an age where we live under the threat of constant distraction, people who are particularly prone to being distracted are flourishing creatively.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be entirely surprised. It’s easier to think outside the box if the box is full of holes. And it’s also easier to think outside the box if you spend a lot of time clambering between different boxes. “The act of switching back and forth can grease the wheels of thought,” says John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University.

Kounios, who is co-author of The Eureka Factor, suggests that there are at least two other potentially creative mechanisms at play when we switch between tasks. One is that the new task can help us forget bad ideas. When solving a creative problem, it’s easy to become stuck because we think of an incorrect solution but simply can’t stop returning to it. Doing something totally new induces “fixation forgetting”, leaving us free to find the right answer.

Another is “opportunistic assimilation”. This is when the new task prompts us to think of a solution to the old one. The original Eureka moment is an example.

As the story has it, Archimedes was struggling with the task of determining whether a golden wreath truly was made of pure gold without damaging the ornate treasure. The solution was to determine whether the wreath had the same volume as a pure gold ingot with the same mass; this, in turn, could be done by submerging both the wreath and the ingot to see whether they displaced the same volume of water.

This insight, we are told, occurred to Archimedes while he was having a bath and watching the water level rise and fall as he lifted himself in and out. And if solving such a problem while having a bath isn’t multitasking, then what is?

Tim Harford is an FT columnist. His latest book is ‘The Undercover Economist Strikes Back’. Twitter: @TimHarford

Six ways to be a master of multitasking

1. Be mindful

“The ideal situation is to be able to multitask when multitasking is appropriate, and focus when focusing is important,” says psychologist Shelley Carson. Tom Chatfield, author of Live This Book, suggests making two lists, one for activities best done with internet access and one for activities best done offline. Connecting and disconnecting from the internet should be deliberate acts.

2. Write it down

The essence of David Allen’s Getting Things Done is to turn every vague guilty thought into a specific action, to write down all of the actions and to review them regularly. The point, says Allen, is to feel relaxed about what you’re doing — and about what you’ve decided not to do right now — confident that nothing will fall through the cracks.

3. Tame your smartphone

The smartphone is a great servant and a harsh master. Disable needless notifications — most people don’t need to know about incoming tweets and emails. Set up a filing system within your email so that when a message arrives that requires a proper keyboard to answer — ie 50 words or more — you can move that email out of your inbox and place it in a folder where it will be waiting for you when you fire up your computer.

4. Focus in short sprints

The “Pomodoro Technique” — named after a kitchen timer — alternates focusing for 25 minutes and breaking for five minutes, across two-hour sessions. Productivity guru Merlin Mann suggests an “email dash”, where you scan email and deal with urgent matters for a few minutes each hour. Such ideas let you focus intensely while also switching between projects several times a day.

5. Procrastinate to win

If you have several interesting projects on the go, you can procrastinate over one by working on another. (It worked for Charles Darwin.) A change is as good as a rest, they say — and as psychologist John Kounios explains, such task switching can also unlock new ideas.

6. Cross-fertilise

“Creative ideas come to people who are interdisciplinary, working across different organisational units or across many projects,” says author and research psychologist Keith Sawyer. (Appropriately, Sawyer is also a jazz pianist, a former management consultant and a sometime game designer for Atari.) Good ideas often come when your mind makes unexpected connections between different fields.

Tim Harford’s To-Do Lists

David Allen’s Getting Things Done system — or GTD — has reached the status of a religion among some productivity geeks. At its heart, it’s just a fancy to-do list, but it’s more powerful than a regular list because it’s comprehensive, specific and designed to prompt you when you need prompting. Here’s how I make the idea work for me.

Write everything down. I use Google Calendar for appointments and an electronic to-do list called Remember the Milk, plus an ad hoc daily list on paper. The details don’t matter. The principle is never to carry a mental commitment around in your head.

Make the list comprehensive. Mine currently has 151 items on it. (No, I don’t memorise the number. I just counted.)

Keep the list fresh. The system works its anxiety-reducing magic best if you trust your calendar and to-do list to remind you when you need reminding. I spend about 20 minutes once a week reviewing the list to note incoming deadlines and make sure the list is neither missing important commitments nor cluttered with stale projects. Review is vital — the more you trust your list, the more you use it. The more you use it, the more you trust it.

List by context as well as topic. It’s natural to list tasks by topic or project — everything associated with renovating the spare room, for instance, or next year’s annual away-day. I also list them by context (this is easy on an electronic list). Things I can do when on a plane; things I can only do when at the shops; things I need to talk about when I next see my boss.

Be specific about the next action. If you’re just writing down vague reminders, the to-do list will continue to provoke anxiety. Before you write down an ill-formed task, take the 15 seconds required to think about exactly what that task is.

Written for and first published at ft.com.

When you look at the vintage advertisement above, it’s hard not to notice some things about it that you wouldn’t see in ads today.

For one, you’d of course never see a company these days depicting spanking. And though it’s still around, you never see ads for Sanka anymore, period.

But there’s another interesting difference on display in the old ad: a public recognition that drinking caffeine may have some ill-effects.

Today, caffeine is America’s most popular drug — touted as an energy-boosting, focus-enhancing wonder supplement without any downside.

But is this really the case? Setting aside all the hype created from millions of dollars spent by the marketers of coffee and energy drinks, what’s the truth about caffeine? And is it possible that quitting it just might help you become a better man?

My Story of Quitting Caffeine

I can remember when I first started consuming caffeine in a deliberate attempt to enhance my performance. Before that point, I didn’t drink Coke or Dr. Pepper hoping it would help me run faster or think better; I drank soda because it tasted good with my Mazzio’s pizza.

But my relationship to caffeine changed during my junior year of high school football. Looking for any advantage I could get during games, I started drinking Red Bull before I took the field and during half-time. I guess I thought it helped, because I stuck with this energy drink regimen throughout the rest of my high school football career.

But football games were the only time I drank energy drinks. I didn’t use caffeine to wake up (even though I was rising at 5:45AM for early morning scripture study with some other high school kids) and I didn’t really drink caffeine during the day, except for an occasional soda on the weekends.

But then I got to college. One semester my sophomore year, I had to pull an all-nighter to finish a project for class. There was a 7-Eleven right next to my apartment complex, so I walked over and got a Big Gulp of Diet Mountain Dew. The fizzy, citrus taste was wonderful, and the 162 mg of caffeine in my 32oz cup kept me alert and awake through the night.

Of course, I was tired the next morning. So on my walk to campus, I made a detour to the 7-Eleven and got another Big Gulp to enjoy on my trek. And I did it again the next morning. And the next one after that. Pretty soon, swigging 32 ounces of neon yellow elixir became a regular part of my balanced breakfast.

Then I learned about 5-hour Energy. They were too expensive for my broke college student budget, so I only used them when I thought I really needed an edge, like before a big exam or when writing a research paper. The daily morning Diet Mountain Dew continued, and after I got married, I even got Kate drinking the stuff — though she was satisfied with just a few sips.

Fast forward to law school, and my morning Dew habit just wasn’t enough to keep me going through my long days in the library, so I expanded to a second one at lunch. 5-hour Energy made more frequent appearances in my routine too. On exam days, I’d have one shot in the morning and another right before starting the test.

It was also at law school that I discovered pre-workout supplements. I started off with one scoop that contained 100 mg of caffeine, but I adapted rather quickly to it. It was only a matter of weeks before I was throwing back four scoops at once. By this time, I could afford to buy 12-packs of 5-hour Energy, and I’d knock one back at lunch, and take another when the 3PM drowsiness started kicking in. At dinnertime, I’d often have some sort of caffeinated soda with my food, so I’d have the energy to do some work after the kids went to bed. And I’d sometimes take a few sips of 5-hour Energy right after dinner as a “palette cleanser.”

Doctors and scientists recommend that folks consume no more than about 300-400 mg of caffeine a day. I didn’t know it, but I was averaging over a 1,000 mg a day.

I never noticed any overt signs that the caffeine was having any ill-effects on my health. My body had developed such a tolerance for it, that even after imbibing caffeine all day long, I could still fall sleep by 11PM, and I slept pretty well through the night. My blood pressure was a bit elevated, but not too much. I learned after getting my genome sequenced at 23andMe that I’m a fast caffeine metabolizer, meaning I can consume 100 mg of caffeine, and the effects will be gone within 30 minutes. This probably explains why I didn’t notice any obvious effects, as well as why I felt like I needed to consume greater and greater amounts of caffeine to feel any “buzz.”

But during my ten years of increasing consumption, a few subtle changes started popping up. I got moodier. Pissy would be the more accurate word. Now, as I’ve discussed in my series on depression, I’m kind of morose by nature, but I had always considered myself a pretty laid back, friendly guy. But little things started to annoy me and my resilience began to shrink. Even Kate noticed that something was different, but neither of us connected my increasing anger and irritability with caffeine. I just figured that increasing irritability came with increasing responsibility with work and fatherhood; I just needed to meditate, write in my journal more, or double-down on my study of stoicism.

My dandruff also started proliferating, and I even started getting these red scales on my scalp. I also started getting an irritating rash that would appear now and then on my cheeks and nose. I had never had the problem before, so I went to a dermatologist and was told it was seborrheic dermatitis. She prescribed me a really expensive cream and shampoo to treat it.

Then, about two months, ago, I felt impressed to give up caffeine. I’m not sure why; the idea just kind of came to me, and I figured I’d give it a 30-day trial simply to see what would happen. I slowly decreased my daily intake over a week and then my no caffeine experiment began, and I quit cold turkey.

I had a pretty bad headache my first day without any caffeine, but I got through it with some aspirin. After that it was pretty much smooth sailing. I thought I would be dragging throughout the day and that I would have little or no focus, but the complete opposite occurred. I actually felt like I had more energy and better, steadier attention. The monkey mind went away. I had a bit of a tired slump in the afternoon, but didn’t feel any more fatigued than when I would take an energy shot to supposedly thwart it. Even more interesting, when I was drinking boatloads of caffeine, I’d be super drowsy by 9PM and would be ready to hit the hay. Without caffeine, I didn’t fall into that evening crater of fatigue. Sure, I was tired, and could fall asleep easily, but I could still do some reading without feeling like I was about to pass out.

My dandruff and seborrheic dermatitis started clearing up too, and I found myself using the prescription shampoo and cream less and less.

The biggest change though was in my mood. The pissiness? Gone. Little things that would once cause me to fly off the handle no longer bothered me. I just felt more patient, steady, and calm. I even felt more genuinely happy, a feeling that, due to my morose nature, doesn’t usually come easily for me. Kate and the kids readily noticed the change, and I felt like I became a better husband and father.

When it came to irritability and the responsibilities of adulthood, I had mixed up correlation and causation. I thought my full plate was making me irritable, but instead it had just led me to think I needed more and more caffeine, and it was the caffeine that was actually making me feel perennially pissed off.

After my month-long break from caffeine, I figured that maybe I had reset my body and mind, and I could go back to drinking energy drinks or soda. In moderation, of course. But even just a couple scoops of pre-workout in the morning or a single 5-hour Energy would cause my cheeks to flare up with seborrheic dermatitis the next day. And my pissiness quickly returned. So after a week of moderate caffeine use, I decided to say goodbye to the drug indefinitely (with the exception of using it before doing an obstacle race or staying up all night for a GoRuck Challenge). For caffeine and I, it was a good 10-year run, but I’m tired of being a pissy, dandruff-covered crank.

Might quitting caffeine have the same kind of benefits for you that it had for me? Today we’ll take a look at America’s most popular drug: how it works, why you might consider giving it up, and methods you can use to kick your own caffeine habit.

How Caffeine Works

The popular conception of caffeine is that it gives you scot-free energy. But the reality is more complicated.

Throughout the day, your brain produces a neurotransmitter called adenosine. When it binds to adenosine receptors in your neurons, nerve activity in the brain slows down, and you start feeling drowsy. To a nerve cell, caffeine looks just like adenosine, which means caffeine can bind to a neuron’s adenosine receptor. When caffeine does this, actual adenosine can no longer bind to the neuron, which means the brain can’t get its “time to get drowsy” message. Because your brain isn’t getting adenosine, instead of slowing down, neural activity starts speeding up.

The pituitary gland observes the increased brain activity as a signal that some sort of an emergency is going on, so it releases hormones that tell the adrenal glands to produce adrenaline (epinephrine) and cortisol. Adrenaline is the “fight or flight” hormone, and it has a number of effects on your body, including dilating your pupils, increasing your heartbeat, and releasing sugar from the liver into the bloodstream for extra energy. These reactions are why you feel a buzz after you consume caffeine.

Besides adrenaline, your body also releases cortisol when you consume caffeine. Cortisol stays in the bloodstream much longer than adrenaline and works with adrenaline to prepare your body to fight or flee. It constricts blood vessels, increases the amount of glucose and insulin in your blood (for quick energy), and increases and partially shuts down the immune system.

Basically, caffeine allows you to activate your physiological fight-or-flight reaction on demand. This stress response was designed to help humans deal with immediate challenges and threats, which is why occasional, short-term bouts of it can indeed be beneficial — making you feel more alert and focused. But dialing up the stress response, and elevating your cortisol all the time, even when you’re sedentary and relatively relaxed, can create problems and deleterious effects in the long-term.

And of course that exactly describes the average American’s daily consumption of caffeine.

Why You Might Consider Quitting Caffeine

Caffeine use is not without its advantages. Research has shown that the moderate, long-term use of caffeine may provide benefits such as: improving memory, boosting testosterone, warding off Alzheimer’s, reducing the risk of kidney stones, reducing weight (by suppressing appetite), and providing protection from type-2 diabetes. The key word here, though, is moderate consumption (300-400 mg a day). Most people don’t know how much caffeine they’re actually consuming; a big 12-ounce mug of coffee can contain as much as 300 mg of caffeine. So if you drink 4 “cups” of it a day, you’ll easily consume 4X the recommended amount.

Research has also shown that caffeine can ward off fatigue during workouts and improve focus. But keep in mind that these studies are based on occasional consumption; if you use caffeine every day, you will develop a tolerance for it that mitigates and even eliminates these benefits. In other words, you only get a buzz when your caffeine use is sporadic.

So caffeine does have benefits, but with important caveats. On the flip side of the coin, quitting caffeine, or at least dialing back your consumption of it, comes with its own set of potential advantages:

Decreased depression and anxiety. Research has shown that heavy caffeine consumption can exacerbate existing depression. This may be because the increased dopamine release that accompanies caffeine can eventually desensitize your dopamine receptors. One symptom of depression is the lack of motivation to do things that once brought you joy. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of motivation, so if your brain is desensitized to it, motivation decreases, and you sink deeper into a funk. Thus if you’re already susceptible to depressive moods, caffeine might increase your vulnerability to visits from the black dog.

Caffeine can also exacerbate anxiety. The stress hormones that are released in response to caffeine can create jitters, heighten stress, and trigger anxiety attacks. If you’ve ever taken a weight loss drug, like Hydroxycut, which is packed with caffeine, you know it can make you feel insane.

Less irritability. The research is split on whether caffeine increases anger and aggression. Some studies say it doesn’t; others have shown that the stress arousal caffeine triggers can cause irritability, and that eliminating its consumption can decrease feelings of hostility.

The mixed results are probably rooted in the fact that caffeine seems to affect each individual differently. Some may be more sensitive than others. Kate drinks a pre-workout before running on an empty stomach in the mornings, and it doesn’t seem to affect her irritability. But for me, removing caffeine from my diet caused a night and day change in my pissiness. I was much less angry off caffeine than I was when I was drinking it every day. Becoming less irritable made quitting caffeine completely worth it for me.

Clearer skin. The stress hormones released by caffeine cause inflammation which shows up for some folks in the form of acne breakouts and other skin problems like dandruff. If you’ve been a grown-ass man for some time but are still fighting zits like a fifteen-year-old, you might look into eliminating caffeine from your diet to see if it helps.

Lower blood pressure. Caffeine does two things to increase your blood pressure. First, it constricts blood vessels, and second, it increases your heart rate. Several studies have shown that individuals who regularly consume high amounts of caffeine have elevated blood pressure levels compared to non-caffeine users. Even when caffeine users abstain from the stimulant, it typically takes a few days for resting blood pressure levels to decrease to a normal amount. If cardiac problems run in your family, you might consider giving up caffeine to protect your heart health.

More money. While you could get your caffeine by popping cheap pills of No-Doz, most folks prefer a liquid caffeine-delivery system. And these drinks are often expensive. The website Caffeine Informer put together some back-of the-napkin estimates on the amount folks spend per year to get their buzz and came up with the following numbers:

• A Grande Starbucks Latte: $3.65 a day | $26 a week | $1,332 a year
• Monster Energy Drink: $3 a day | $21 a week | $1,095 a year
• Home brewed coffee: $.71 a day | $5 per week | $259 a year
• 5-hour Energy: $3 a day | $21 a week | $1,095 a year

Many people are using a combination of the above drinks, so there’s a chance they’re spending $2,000+ a year to get their fix. What would you do with an extra $1,000 or $2,000 a year if you quit caffeine?

Greater antifragility. Strengthening antifragility in all areas of my life is a goal of mine, but my caffeine consumption worked against this aim. If I were somewhere I couldn’t get my fix, I’d get a headache and feel like crap. I’d have to remember to pack a 5-hour Energy when I went camping or on a trip. It affected me psychologically too; if I didn’t get my pre-workout in the morning, then I just didn’t think I’d have that great of a workout. Or if I didn’t get my energy shot in the afternoon, I felt like I couldn’t be as productive or creative in my work. I hated feeling emotionally and physically dependent on a substance to be able to function normally.

Better sleep. If you’ve had trouble sleeping, caffeine may be the culprit. If you don’t want to give up caffeine completely, at least consider cutting yourself off before 3PM so you can get a more restful slumber.

Caffeine will actually work when you really need it. If you’ve been drinking caffeinated beverages regularly, you’ve likely developed a tolerance for it, meaning it really doesn’t affect you or give you any kind of boost, beyond warding off effects of withdrawal. You drink it not to feel great, but just to avoid feeling bad; you’re basically spending money merely to maintain the status quo.

Caffeine is best reserved for use as a secret weapon — something you’ve got in your backpocket when you really do need a buzz, like before a race or an all-night study session.

Ultimately everybody has to decide for themselves if the benefits of caffeine are worth the price of the downsides. It’s a balancing act for sure, and each person is going to be different.

How to Quit Caffeine

If you’ve decided you’d like to experiment with eliminating caffeine from you life, here are some tips on how to successfully break the habit:

Go Cold Turkey…

Some folks just decide to give up caffeine completely. The big benefit of going cold turkey is that you can kick the habit faster and enjoy the benefits of a caffeine-free life sooner than if you took a more gradual approach. The big downside is that you may experience severe withdrawal symptoms like a pounding headache (the headache comes from the blood vessels in your head opening back up to their normal size and normal blood flow returning). These withdrawal symptoms may lead some to prematurely throw in the towel.

If you decide to go cold turkey, consider starting on a Friday, so you have the weekend to deal with the severe withdrawal symptoms that happen early in the quitting process. Drink plenty of water and have aspirin at the ready. Don’t give up even if it seems unbearable.

… Or Wean Yourself Off

A less painful method is to wean yourself off caffeine gradually. The upside of this method is you can reduce or even eliminate withdrawal symptoms. The downsides are that it takes longer to become caffeine free, and it requires you to be much more mindful of the amount of caffeine you’re drinking.

To wean yourself off, gradually reduce the amount of caffeinated beverages you drink over time. So if you’re a coffee drinker, you can reduce the amount of cups you drink by ¼ each day. If you drink energy drinks, cut back by half a can each day. If you’re doing a pre-workout, reduce your scoops by one each week. You get the idea.

You can control the pace at which you cut back; you can reduce to zero in a matter of days or you can give yourself a few weeks to eliminate caffeine. Experiment with the pace and see what works for you.

Replace One Ritual With Another

The reason people generally get their caffeine from drinks rather than tablets, is that they’re after more than the drug itself. Drinking a hot cup of coffee or a cold, fizzy energy drink is an enjoyable ritual to start the day or make it through a boring afternoon.

So instead of just going cold turkey or weaning yourself from caffeine to nothing, it can be beneficial to replace your usual caffeinated fare with non-caffeinated alternatives. Replacing your old drinks with plain old water can be effective for some folks, but you may need something that feels a little “richer” to fill the gap. So, for example, as you reduce the amount of caffeinated coffee, you could replace it with decaf (this substitute is popular among folks quitting joe) or herbal tea. As you decrease the amount of caffeinated soda you drink, you could swap it for sparkling seltzer. I really like to drink something with a little flavor in the morning, so I replaced my pre-workout supplement for one with just branch chain amino acids (this has the added benefit of possibly helping with my post-workout recovery, since I exercise in a fasted state).

Of course these replacements cost money, which will reduce the cost-saving benefit of quitting caffeine, but if it helps you break the habit, it can be worth it. Remember that whenever you “hack the habit loop” you keep the same routine as before, but replace the reward you used to get from your old behavior, with a new reward.

Switch to a Milder Form of Caffeine

Another method I’ve come across to reduce the ill-effects of caffeine isn’t to completely eliminate it from your life, but rather to replace your caffeinated beverages with a milder form. Green tea and yerba mate are the most popular coffee and energy drink alternatives. There are also chocolate beverages out there that provide a mild energy boost in the form of theobromine. These alternative drinks have much less caffeine, but still provide a gentle stimulating effect. What’s more, they offer a myriad of health benefits.

If you’re working on something especially challenging, and need a boost in focus, without the physiological effects of caffeine, try a nootropic.

Concluding Thoughts

Like most things in life, caffeine has its pros and cons. But also like most things in life, we often give very little thought to the two sides of the issue. We mindlessly knock back our caffeinated beverages because that’s what we’ve always done, and that’s what we see seemingly everyone else doing. There’s so much money invested in the energy drink business, and thus so much pro-caffeine hype out there, that you rarely run into a discussion of the drug’s potential downsides. But those downsides are at least worth considering.

By doing my own experiment, I’ve personally learned that caffeine isn’t for me, and that my life is better off without it. How does caffeine affect you? Do its pros outweigh the cons in your life? If you’re not sure, and especially if you feel like something’s not right with your life, but you don’t know what’s wrong, try your own experiment. If you don’t notice much of a change, then keep on keeping on with your caffeinated life. No harm, no foul. If do you notice a significant improvement in some areas of your life, then you can decide if giving it up altogether, or using it just for special occasions, might be a decision that helps you become a better man.

Want to share your thoughts on this article? Send us a tweet or join the discussion on Facebook!

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Sources

Caffeine edited by Gene A. Spiller

Caffeine Blues by Stephen Cherniske

Here’s my art for the upcoming pen and paper RPG Mutant: Maskinarium.
Fria Ligan has a kickstarter for it: (in Swedish):
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1192053011/mutant-maskinarium

Die Fünf Filmfreunde

Der erste Trailer zum Live-Action-Dschungelbuch ist endlich da und jagt einem gleich jede Menge Gänsehaut ein. Ich wollte mir einfach nicht vorstellen, dass es möglich sei, dass Disney ihre eigenen Klassiker noch einmal aufleben lassen könnte, aber hier kann man mal sehen wie man sich täuschen kann.

Unter der Regie von Jon Favreau (Iron Man) können die Tier sogar sprechen, ohne albern zu wirken: Panther Baghira wir von Ben Kingsley gesprochen, Bär Balu von Bill Murray, der Tiger Shir Khan von Idris Elba, Christopher Walken macht den Affenkönig Louie, Lupita Nyong’o spricht die Wölfin Raksha und Scarlett Johansson lispelt die Schlange Kaa.

Ob die deutsche Synchronisierung wenigstens die deutschen Pendants machen, oder ob wir Otto Waalkes, ein bis zwei Dschungelcamp Gewinner und einen beliebigen Ochsenknecht hören werden, habe ich jetzt erstmal nicht finden können. Hoffen wir das Beste.

via MP

Der Beitrag The Jungle Book (Trailer) erschien zuerst auf Die Fünf Filmfreunde.

Sometimes you’re a genius and you make a comic, what can I tell you?

And most exciting of all:
$9.99 for a beautiful, giftable, paperback copy.

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Get an e-mail the INSTANT this science is available!

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ArtStation - ruins of han, by Te Hu

More concept art here.

ArtStation - - H O M E -, by Eduardo García

steampunk-divas:

Steampunk

All images by Tõnu Tunnel

The soothing sounds of nature have never been easier to hear after a group of interior architecture students from the Estonian Academy of Arts decided to infiltrate a nearby forest with three giant wooden microphones. The sound-amplifying installation is near RMK’s pähni nature centre, an area where one can currently rest within the grooves of one of three megaphones to intently listen to the detailed rustling of leaves or chirping of birds both near and far.

Valdur Mikita, a writer who has often covered the way Estonian culture is tied to the 51% of forests that comprise it said, “It’s a place to listen, to browse the audible book of nature – there hasn’t really been a place like that in Estonia before.”

According to interior architect Hannes Praks the three-metre diameter megaphones will act as a “bandstand” for the environment around it. “We’ll be placing the three megaphones at such a distance and at a suitable angle, so at the centre of the installation, sound feed from all three directions should create a unique merged surround sound effect,” said Praks.

The structures will not only be available for solo meditation, but also serve as stages for intimate events and protective structures for spending the night in the woods—which in this forest you can do for free. (via Mental Floss)