Reads: Reading, Climate Change & More
[A wrap up of some of the interesting reads from across the Web.]
Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say - Washington Post
In this modern technology-driven world, we hit the Internet more often than ever, and most importantly find ourselves just skimming through articles posted on various websites, looking for the most important words, checking if they pique our interest. If not, we proceed to the next item that probably deserves our attention. Does this sort of "cursory sentence galloping" affect serious reading, like say for instance when we sit down to read a novel? Is the human brain slowly getting adapted to an altogether new form of non-linear reading so as to process the information overload on the Web? New research says so:
To cognitive neuroscientists, [this] experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. "I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing," said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." >>
How Important Is A Bee? - NPR
When bees, the most effective insect pollinators, didn't show up (due to pesticides, deforestation etc.), as they would normally, during the apple season of mid-1990's, the farmers in Maoxian County in China took it upon themselves to spread pollen from flower to flower using chopsticks, chicken feathers and even cigarette filters. The program was a resounding success, at least economically. The apple production wasn't impacted by the absence of bees, and the harvest was 30-40% more owing to efficient pollination carried out by humans. This brings up an intriguing question: can humans live well enough even in a biologically less diverse world? Going by this thought process, what are the other species that can be expunged with less or no effect to humans? And is it the right way to deal with habitat loss?
All of us think about this from time to time. In a world with 28,000 different species of beetles, is it so terrible to imagine living perfectly well with a few hundred or even a few thousand fewer? Beetle lovers and conservationists believe the right thing to do is to save as many as we can — all of them if possible. But in a practical way, with an extra billion new humans on the planet every 13 years, we know there's going to be habitat loss. Somebody's got to go, but who? Which ones do we sacrifice? If three endangered species of beetle differ by the number of red dots on their abdomens, what do we do? >>
Diamonds Are Bullshit - Priceonomics
Diamonds have been seen as a status symbol, so much that engagement ceremonies these days can't do without the customary exchange of diamond rings. But how did this come to happen in the first place? All credit goes to De Beers's successful market manipulation and a clever business strategy of boosting prices by creating an artificial demand, but keeping them low in supply.
We covet diamonds in America for a simple reason: the company that stands to profit from diamond sales decided that we should. De Beers’ marketing campaign single handedly made diamond rings the measure of one's success in America. Despite its complete lack of inherent value, the company manufactured an image of diamonds as a status symbol. And to keep the price of diamonds high, despite the abundance of new diamond finds, De Beers executed the most effective monopoly of the 20th century. Okay, we get it De Beers, you guys are really good at business! >>
World War One: 10 interpretations of who started WW1 - BBC
It's the 100th anniversary of World War 1, and even now the exact origins of the war aren't clear. Which countries should take the blame for starting it? Is it Germany? Serbia? Soviet Union? Austria? France? Or Britain? BBC attempts to clarify the muddled history of the conflict!
WW1 did not break out by accident or because diplomacy failed. It broke out as the result of a conspiracy between the governments of imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary to bring about war, albeit in the hope that Britain would stay out. >>
It's Bliss: behind the iconic Windows XP photo - CNET
Did you know that the iconic landscape photo that adorns Windows XP desktops is a real photo taken by National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear at California in 1996? The photo, titled Bliss, was later purchased by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. Windows XP may be on its last throes, but the wallpaper, I'm sure, would be unforgettable just like the operating system!
"I think it's going to be around forever," he [Charles] says. "When you are 90 years old, somewhere a photograph like Bliss will appear and you will say 'I remember that. When we had computers on our desk, that was on the screen'. Anywhere on this planet right now, if you stop somebody on the street and you show somebody that photograph, they're going to say 'I've seen that somewhere, I recognise that'." >>
Goodnight. Sleep Clean. - The New York Times
A good night's sleep is not only for taking rest, but also to clean the brain of toxic by-products that were accumulated during the day when you were awake. In a time when we are spending lesser and lesser amounts of time sleeping due to longer working hours, shifts and the likes, could this sleep deprivation accelerate neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers's and Parkinson's? Or is it possible for us to stay awake and still induce the brain to kick-start its clean-up activities? That would mean "we never have to sleep at all!"
It’s a pernicious cycle. We work longer hours, become more stressed, sleep less, impair our brain’s ability to clean up after all that hard work, and become even less able to sleep soundly. And if we reach for a sleeping pill to help us along? While work on the effects of sleeping aids on the glymphatic system remains to be done, the sleep researchers I spoke with agree that there’s no evidence that aided sleep is as effective as natural sleep. >>
How Gmail Happened: The Inside Story of Its Launch 10 Years Ago - Time
From this year's Google Maps Pokemon challenge to Google Magic Hand, search kingpin Google has had a lot of April Fools' pranks up its sleeves since they started the tradition in 2000. But when it decided to launch its own email service back in April 1, 2004, many thought it to be a hoax. Boasting of an unheard of 1GB storage space, the project was also Google's first foray outside web search. Google Email has doubtless revolutionized email, and also brought along with it, the ugly user privacy wars. Time documents the entire history in this interesting article.
One remarkable thing about Gmail that wasn’t obvious in 2004: Its creators built it to last. The current incarnations of Outlook.com and Yahoo Mail have nothing to do with the email services Microsoft and Yahoo offered 10 years ago. But Gmail–despite having added features more or less continuously and gone through some significant redesigns–is still Gmail. >>
Is this all humans are? Diminutive monsters of death and destruction? - The Guardian
Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History posits the idea that human beings have been the biggest agents of change and are the most prolific overkillers in the history of life on our planet. And it seems that our killing spree began almost two million years ago, right from the beginning of our arrival. While the impacts are being slowly felt across in the present Anthropocene, we, humans, are in no mood to stop, writes George Monbiot in this compelling piece:
Almost everywhere we went, humankind erased a world of wonders, changing the way the biosphere functions. For instance, modern humans arrived in Europe and Australia at about the same time – between 40 and 50,000 years ago – with similar consequences. In Europe, where animals had learned to fear previous versions of the bipedal ape, the extinctions happened slowly. Within some 10 or 15,000 years, the continent had lost its straight-tusked elephants, forest rhinos, hippos, hyenas and monstrous scimitar cats.
In Australia, where no hominim had set foot before modern humans arrived, the collapse was almost instant. The rhinoceros-sized wombat, the ten-foot kangaroo, the marsupial lion, the monitor lizard larger than a Nile crocodile, the giant marsupial tapir, the horned tortoise as big as a car – all went, in ecological terms, overnight.
Is this all we are? A diminutive monster that can leave no door closed, no hiding place intact, that is now doing to the great beasts of the sea what we did so long ago to the great beasts of the land? Or can we stop? Can we use our ingenuity, which for two million years has turned so inventively to destruction, to defy our evolutionary history? >>
Think the new climate report is scary? The food-pocalypse is already upon us - The Guardian
At the risk of sounding alarmist, let me go on and say that the landmark IPCC report on climate change is terrifying. The word 'risk' is mentioned more than 150 times in the entire 44 page summary, and yet, what's perplexing is the general reluctance to act on it. But these 'forecasts' about food and water supply constraints due to changing weather aren't something that are waiting to happen, in fact, they are already happening, writes Richard Schiffman.
It's not all however. Can climate change also incite violence? Rising sea levels, flooding, crop failures lead to food-price increases and famines, causing people to revolt and fight for their survival. The Arab Spring is a case in example, wherein the rise in wheat prices partly drove the revolution to the state it is now.
... There are few climate-change skeptics amongst those who grow the world's food – if any. Farmers don't have to read UN reports to know how radically their weather is changing. And consumers don't need academic studies or bullet points to know that food prices are steadily rising.
A report issued last week by the development group Oxfam warns that global warming may delay the fight against world hunger by decades and put an extra 50m people at risk. The world "is woefully unprepared" for the impacts on food, says Oxfam. Over 75% of global seed varieties have vanished over the last century, and spending on critical agricultural research and development is at an all-time low. >>
Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say - Washington Post
In this modern technology-driven world, we hit the Internet more often than ever, and most importantly find ourselves just skimming through articles posted on various websites, looking for the most important words, checking if they pique our interest. If not, we proceed to the next item that probably deserves our attention. Does this sort of "cursory sentence galloping" affect serious reading, like say for instance when we sit down to read a novel? Is the human brain slowly getting adapted to an altogether new form of non-linear reading so as to process the information overload on the Web? New research says so:
To cognitive neuroscientists, [this] experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. "I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing," said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." >>
How Important Is A Bee? - NPR
When bees, the most effective insect pollinators, didn't show up (due to pesticides, deforestation etc.), as they would normally, during the apple season of mid-1990's, the farmers in Maoxian County in China took it upon themselves to spread pollen from flower to flower using chopsticks, chicken feathers and even cigarette filters. The program was a resounding success, at least economically. The apple production wasn't impacted by the absence of bees, and the harvest was 30-40% more owing to efficient pollination carried out by humans. This brings up an intriguing question: can humans live well enough even in a biologically less diverse world? Going by this thought process, what are the other species that can be expunged with less or no effect to humans? And is it the right way to deal with habitat loss?
All of us think about this from time to time. In a world with 28,000 different species of beetles, is it so terrible to imagine living perfectly well with a few hundred or even a few thousand fewer? Beetle lovers and conservationists believe the right thing to do is to save as many as we can — all of them if possible. But in a practical way, with an extra billion new humans on the planet every 13 years, we know there's going to be habitat loss. Somebody's got to go, but who? Which ones do we sacrifice? If three endangered species of beetle differ by the number of red dots on their abdomens, what do we do? >>
Diamonds Are Bullshit - Priceonomics
Diamonds have been seen as a status symbol, so much that engagement ceremonies these days can't do without the customary exchange of diamond rings. But how did this come to happen in the first place? All credit goes to De Beers's successful market manipulation and a clever business strategy of boosting prices by creating an artificial demand, but keeping them low in supply.
We covet diamonds in America for a simple reason: the company that stands to profit from diamond sales decided that we should. De Beers’ marketing campaign single handedly made diamond rings the measure of one's success in America. Despite its complete lack of inherent value, the company manufactured an image of diamonds as a status symbol. And to keep the price of diamonds high, despite the abundance of new diamond finds, De Beers executed the most effective monopoly of the 20th century. Okay, we get it De Beers, you guys are really good at business! >>
World War One: 10 interpretations of who started WW1 - BBC
It's the 100th anniversary of World War 1, and even now the exact origins of the war aren't clear. Which countries should take the blame for starting it? Is it Germany? Serbia? Soviet Union? Austria? France? Or Britain? BBC attempts to clarify the muddled history of the conflict!
WW1 did not break out by accident or because diplomacy failed. It broke out as the result of a conspiracy between the governments of imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary to bring about war, albeit in the hope that Britain would stay out. >>
It's Bliss: behind the iconic Windows XP photo - CNET
Did you know that the iconic landscape photo that adorns Windows XP desktops is a real photo taken by National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear at California in 1996? The photo, titled Bliss, was later purchased by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. Windows XP may be on its last throes, but the wallpaper, I'm sure, would be unforgettable just like the operating system!
"I think it's going to be around forever," he [Charles] says. "When you are 90 years old, somewhere a photograph like Bliss will appear and you will say 'I remember that. When we had computers on our desk, that was on the screen'. Anywhere on this planet right now, if you stop somebody on the street and you show somebody that photograph, they're going to say 'I've seen that somewhere, I recognise that'." >>
Goodnight. Sleep Clean. - The New York Times
A good night's sleep is not only for taking rest, but also to clean the brain of toxic by-products that were accumulated during the day when you were awake. In a time when we are spending lesser and lesser amounts of time sleeping due to longer working hours, shifts and the likes, could this sleep deprivation accelerate neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers's and Parkinson's? Or is it possible for us to stay awake and still induce the brain to kick-start its clean-up activities? That would mean "we never have to sleep at all!"
It’s a pernicious cycle. We work longer hours, become more stressed, sleep less, impair our brain’s ability to clean up after all that hard work, and become even less able to sleep soundly. And if we reach for a sleeping pill to help us along? While work on the effects of sleeping aids on the glymphatic system remains to be done, the sleep researchers I spoke with agree that there’s no evidence that aided sleep is as effective as natural sleep. >>
How Gmail Happened: The Inside Story of Its Launch 10 Years Ago - Time
From this year's Google Maps Pokemon challenge to Google Magic Hand, search kingpin Google has had a lot of April Fools' pranks up its sleeves since they started the tradition in 2000. But when it decided to launch its own email service back in April 1, 2004, many thought it to be a hoax. Boasting of an unheard of 1GB storage space, the project was also Google's first foray outside web search. Google Email has doubtless revolutionized email, and also brought along with it, the ugly user privacy wars. Time documents the entire history in this interesting article.
One remarkable thing about Gmail that wasn’t obvious in 2004: Its creators built it to last. The current incarnations of Outlook.com and Yahoo Mail have nothing to do with the email services Microsoft and Yahoo offered 10 years ago. But Gmail–despite having added features more or less continuously and gone through some significant redesigns–is still Gmail. >>
Is this all humans are? Diminutive monsters of death and destruction? - The Guardian
Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History posits the idea that human beings have been the biggest agents of change and are the most prolific overkillers in the history of life on our planet. And it seems that our killing spree began almost two million years ago, right from the beginning of our arrival. While the impacts are being slowly felt across in the present Anthropocene, we, humans, are in no mood to stop, writes George Monbiot in this compelling piece:
Almost everywhere we went, humankind erased a world of wonders, changing the way the biosphere functions. For instance, modern humans arrived in Europe and Australia at about the same time – between 40 and 50,000 years ago – with similar consequences. In Europe, where animals had learned to fear previous versions of the bipedal ape, the extinctions happened slowly. Within some 10 or 15,000 years, the continent had lost its straight-tusked elephants, forest rhinos, hippos, hyenas and monstrous scimitar cats.
In Australia, where no hominim had set foot before modern humans arrived, the collapse was almost instant. The rhinoceros-sized wombat, the ten-foot kangaroo, the marsupial lion, the monitor lizard larger than a Nile crocodile, the giant marsupial tapir, the horned tortoise as big as a car – all went, in ecological terms, overnight.
Is this all we are? A diminutive monster that can leave no door closed, no hiding place intact, that is now doing to the great beasts of the sea what we did so long ago to the great beasts of the land? Or can we stop? Can we use our ingenuity, which for two million years has turned so inventively to destruction, to defy our evolutionary history? >>
Think the new climate report is scary? The food-pocalypse is already upon us - The Guardian
At the risk of sounding alarmist, let me go on and say that the landmark IPCC report on climate change is terrifying. The word 'risk' is mentioned more than 150 times in the entire 44 page summary, and yet, what's perplexing is the general reluctance to act on it. But these 'forecasts' about food and water supply constraints due to changing weather aren't something that are waiting to happen, in fact, they are already happening, writes Richard Schiffman.
It's not all however. Can climate change also incite violence? Rising sea levels, flooding, crop failures lead to food-price increases and famines, causing people to revolt and fight for their survival. The Arab Spring is a case in example, wherein the rise in wheat prices partly drove the revolution to the state it is now.
... There are few climate-change skeptics amongst those who grow the world's food – if any. Farmers don't have to read UN reports to know how radically their weather is changing. And consumers don't need academic studies or bullet points to know that food prices are steadily rising.
A report issued last week by the development group Oxfam warns that global warming may delay the fight against world hunger by decades and put an extra 50m people at risk. The world "is woefully unprepared" for the impacts on food, says Oxfam. Over 75% of global seed varieties have vanished over the last century, and spending on critical agricultural research and development is at an all-time low. >>
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