Great post showing how air pollution is detrimental to intelligence.
Chess players make more mistakes on polluted days: “We find that an increase of 10 µg/m³ raises the probability of making an error by 1.5 percentage points, and increases the magnitude of the errors by 9.4%.
Interesting article about the “cashmere king”, who, over 40 years, built the business that bears his name from nothing.
His company doesn’t allow any emails after 17:30 among many other interesting ideas about how a business should be run.
Those who come to me and say, “You know, I work 15 hours a day,” I say, “I am not interested.” I am interested in the quality of working hours, not the quantity. The brain of the human being. Do you think that during the first five hours of the day you are the same as you are in the last five hours? No way. You’re tired, and if you’re tired, you stop listening, and the decisions you make are risky.
We previously mentioned this really interesting list.
The 2019 version is out and is equally awesome. 52 gems.
Highlights:
Spotify pays by the song. Two three minute songs are twice as profitable as one six minute song. So songs are getting shorter.
Nigeria spends more on petrol subsidies than on health, or education, or defence.
The goal of walking 10,000 steps per day may have originated when a Japanese pedometer manufacturer noticed that the 万 symbol (which means 10,000) looks a little like someone walking. The actual health merits of that number ‘have never been validated by research.’
Asking ‘What questions to do you have for me?’ can be dramatically more effective than ‘Any questions?’ at the end of a talk.
All references and related articles found in the link. h/t Fluxx Studio Notes.
Spotify are making a big bet on content in podcasts.
This article chronicles what they have been up to – recruiting some heavy hitters like the Obamas.
They will need to convince the market that the cash burn will pay off … ala Netflix.
“Just like TV has moved from offline to now online, we’re doing the same to radio,” Ek says. “When you look at the amount of time that people consume audio, it’s about the same in the U.S. as people spend watching video. But the audio industry is less than one-tenth of the size of the whole video industry. The question one needs to ask oneself, are your eyes worth 10 times as much as your ears? My view is that they aren’t and that is going to be even more valuable in the future.”
