Football is destroying itself
(via Kottke) Grantland has two articles, one by Jonah Lehrer and one by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, about how concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may end the sport of football in the near future.
Remember “punch-drunk” boxers? It turns out they were literally pummeling their brains into an Alzheimer’s-like state of neuron death. Chronic exposure to concussions and subconcussive impacts tears apart the brain’s neurons and eventually causes it to destroy itself from the inside out. No one knows why or how, but it’s becoming clear that it’s trauma-induced brain damage, and it’s completely irreversible.
Why Science is Failing Us
Science is all about telling a story that fits a set of data points. These stories cut corners and ignore small pieces that don’t fit, because the complexity of explaining every bit puts you in a bind to figure out the whole gig, down to every last detail. The problem is, sometimes those small details matter a whole lot, and it’s why medicine (and, in my opinion, economics) is having a tough time understanding, much less improving, the modern world. (via paul)
Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things is a lovely read. The Kindle sample caught me right at the start, and it’s delightfully short and can be read in one sitting. Despite its brevity, it’s a well-written novel with the same flowing prose and long paragraphs, both interspersed with asides and ambiguous changes in subject, that make me miss David Foster Wallace. It’s only 120 pages, so buy a copy and just read it already.
The really tough problem of innovation is waste disposal.
via timoni:
“The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas.” That’s one of my favorite axioms and, in my experience, it is universally true. I have many ideas, every day, and some of them are very good. Mostly, though, they are bad.
— The Cooper Journal: Innovation is a waste disposal problem
Give Me Something To Read’s 2011 Highlights
Here are Give Me Something To Read’s highlights of the year. This list is comprised of my favourites and reader favourites, selected from articles posted here in 2011 (limited to those originally published in 2011). Open this post in your browser to make use of the Read Later button accompanying each link.
I’ve read over half of these, and every one was great. In case you’re nothing like me and have a totally empty Instapaper queue, this should fill it up with some very interesting writing.
This Week’s Reading
Jon Stewart and the dichotomy of accidentally becoming a serious news anchor while being a comedian.
There Is No Time in Waterloo: A McSweeney’s short story from their “Life in 2024” issue. Not science fiction, just “futurism-ish”. (I read this online and went to look up which issue it’s in; I recognized the cover from my own copy sitting on my nightstand.)
Mother Earth Mother Board: Neal Stephenson follows the world’s first circumnavigational fiber-optic cable on its journey around the globe, via sea floor and land passage. Written before his staggeringly long books (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, and Anathem), it’s too long to call it a “short-form” piece, but it is incredibly well-written and well-edited, so settle down with this on a Kindle and have fun.
Informal Foursquare Rules
Places you shouldn’t check in:
- Where you sleep. It’s no fun being mayor of your own flat: you live there. Let your friend that visits all the time earn it. (Important note: this includes the house of your significant other/fling/one night stand. It’s weird to be at a friend’s house and have their roommate’s friend-with-benefits check in (and even weirder when they’re mayor of the place). )
- Where you work. No one cares that you went to work today.
Place you should check in:
- Everywhere else.
“The governor’s plan slashes $3.1 billion from an estimated $58.8 billion state budget largely by cutting funding to city governments and services… The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel is slated to lose 51 percent. The Department of Education loses 10.2 percent. A local think tank estimates that 51,000 state jobs are at stake… [Kasich] won the 2010 election, barely, on a job creation platform. His budget is called “The Jobs Budget.”
The Single Best Thing You Can Do for Your Health - The Atlantic
This went around Twitter a few days ago, and deserves a link. I’ll sum it up simply, though the video is short, cute, and worth watching: “Can you limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23 1/2 hours a day? 30 minutes of walking makes a huge difference in your quality of life.”
I got a Fitbit a few months ago, and simply love it. Having a step count at the end of my day that says, “Yeah, you walked a bunch!”, or, “Well, maybe not today, but tomorrow” gives me a tiny but valuable bit of information about my daily activity levels that I’m constantly evaluating to stay healthy.
