elite athletes and sleep
Ro.bert
Here’s your weekly dose of treats 💌
A weekly list of goodies curated by Robert.
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🎶 Something to listen to while reading
fiery stuff I’ve been ingesting 🔥
1. The effects of background music on word-processed writing
For all those college students who listen to music while they write on a computer, the advice from this study is clear. One’s writing ¯uency is likely to be disrupted by both vocal and instrumental music. And quality will be especially poor if one also has relatively poor memory skill and limited musical training. A reliable reduction in fluency, about 60 words an hour, is likely to be caused by unattended background music. Sixty words an hour does not sound like much, but since ¯uency is related to quality and to the ability to manage simultaneous subprocesses of writing, any decrements could prove important.
2. Cloud storage has revolutionized tech and freed us from endless plastic disks cluttering up our drawers. But cloud storage isn’t always easy to manage. Playbook is an amazingly helpful tool that organizes cloud storage visually, letting you search, sort, and collaborate using files. You can apply for early access now and get 4 TB for free.
3. Elite Athletes Don’t Sleep As Much As You Think
175 elite athletes from Australian national teams were surveyed, and said they got 8.3 hours of sleep per night. When study monitored with wristbands, actual was 6.7 hours per night.
4. OpenAI’s Codex is the machine learning tool that powers GitHub’s Copilot. It uses natural language to generate code; you can use phrases like, “Add this image,” and the AI will generate the necessary code. It’s intended as a productivity tool for professional developers and a learning tool for newbies. You can apply to join the waitlist now.
“Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing.”
6. The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream
Building such a system was a huge engineering and machine learning challenge. The systems required to make drones land outside people’s homes were heavy and Amazon’s drones ballooned to about 27 kilograms, according to Andreas Raptopoulos, CEO of drone company Matternet, which is heavier than the threshold used by some authorities to classify a small drone. Entering that higher weight category comes with a variety of extra regulations, including higher safety requirements to protect people on the ground from potential collisions. “The hard bit is the last two metres off the ground. It’s astonishing what machine learning can do, but it’s also astonishing what it gets wrong,” says professor Arthur Richards, head of aerial robotics at the Bristol Robotics Lab.
7. Your Facebook Account Was Hacked. Getting Help May Take Weeks — Or $299
Brandon Sherman of Nevada City, Calif., followed a tip he found on Reddit to get his hacked account back. “I ultimately broke down and bought a $300 Oculus Quest 2,” he said. Oculus is a virtual reality company owned by Facebook but with its own customer support system. Sherman contacted Oculus with his headset’s serial number and heard back right away. He plans to return the unopened device, and while he’s glad the strategy worked, he doesn’t think it’s fair.
8. Typography Tutorial - 10 rules to help you rule type
When starting out, it is best to learn the fundamentals of good design: hierarchy (primary, secondary and tierchiary reads), flow (how a person “reads” the layout by following the movement of their attention), legibility (in Western culture, type is read top to bottom, left to right so it’s important to arrange type accordingly), grouping (organizing blocks of type in intelligent and logical groups) and interest, achieved through contrast (scale, texture, color, density, negative space).
9. New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered
Think of quarks as the LEGO bricks of the subatomic world, mixing and matching in various combinations to form more complicated structures.
The discovery brings us one step closer to a better understanding of the complicated underlying rules that govern how these exotic particles are combined, and it paves the way for a future discovery of even heavier exotic hadrons—perhaps a tetraquark that replaces the two charm quarks with two bottom quarks (dubbed Tbb), which would have an even longer lifetime.
10. Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
If you wanted to start a university department from scratch, and attract as many superstar researchers as possible, what’s the most attractive perk you could offer?
How about just not needing an email address?
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The Art of the Short Attention Span: The Most Underrated Skill
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Visual Theory
Here’s the evolution of one of my side projects — Visual Theory. I am re-learning how to see.
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Thank you for reading!
How’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment? I respond to every email I get—consider sending me a message and telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been up in your world.
— Robert