Time, traveling, and their unfortunate relatedness
Hello Uncommoners,
Here's your random dose of intrigue — a collection of content, ideas, and resources that I've recently found mind tingling. Consume, skim, or skip at your leisure. Enjoy.
PERSONAL:
I’ve now spent about 5 weeks traveling internationally. It’s not vacation, but rather, traveling while working — and to say it’s been a “busy” few weeks would be a gross understatement. Between different time zones and an boundless workload, the traveling and the time zone changes have not fared well with me this trip. Usually, I adapt rather quickly, but with my mind racing nearly 24 hours a day, the irony is that you never catch up with the rest that has been lost. A new meaning for the word “restlessness.”
Anyway, I stumbled upon the article below about time, traveling, and their unfortunate relatedness. I knew circadian rhythms were important, but I didn’t realize just significant they are. Without diving into science journals, this is one of the best, reasonably brief and to-the-point articles I’ve read on the topic:
The history and untold power of our internal clocks
“Jetlag’s groggy unpleasantness comes more from this uncoupling of clocks than from an earlier or later internal time, per se. It takes about a day per hour of time-change to reset the master clock, but it can take even longer to corral the organs into line with each other. The effects of circadian dysfunction can be disastrous in the long term – knock out the cellular clocks in just part of a mouse pancreas, for example, and diabetes quickly ensues.”
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QUOTED:
“There are more and more people piling on to the internet and the number of entities pumping out material keeps growing,” says Mikkelson, who turns out to be a wry, soft-spoken sleuth. “I’m not sure I’d call it a post-truth age but … there’s been an opening of the sluice-gate and everything is pouring through. The bilge keeps coming faster than you can pump.” – Via the Guardian
“… it’s one thing to replace manual labor with machines and move up the ladder to a service and intellectual property-based economy. But what does an economy look like that’s based on the automation of service and intellect?” (are we smart enough to control AI? Or perhaps more appropriately stated, “Are we smart enough to prepare to adequately prepare for it.”)
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INTERESTING READS:
In overvaluing confidence, we’ve forgotten the power of humility (Does humility increase one’s potential to innovate? This articles makes the case that it does)
Much like highways and tunnels, the internet is a vast global infrastructure made up of wires, cables, and machines. But what does it look like? And how does it work?
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FASCINATING FACTS:
“…a 40-year-old man in the top 1 percent can expect to live 14 years longer than his counterpart in the bottom 1 percent. Education may also make a difference: A college-educated 25-year-old can expect to live a decade longer than a high school dropout of the same age.” – Population Reference Bureau
“In 1972 a university-educated man aged 25-34 could expect to earn 22% more than a peer without a degree, according to the Urban Institute, a think-tank. Today that premium has risen to 70%.”
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FOR FUN:
Are we really living in the Matrix? You may have heard about the recent hot topic of whether or not “real life” is actually all happening in a computer simulation. The philosophical debate has been going for years, but the immediacy of the topic was heightened when Elon Musk said that is is a possibility a few weeks back. In response the public’s interest to the perplexing concept, BigThink enlisted Bill Nye’s brain to weigh in. His response is a bit morose, actually
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Hope you enjoyed this eclectic collection of brain food. Every UM newsletter is slightly unique and may include intriguing quotes, interesting reads, recommended resources, cool products, and other fun surprises.
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