substack link A couple of years ago I went to a talk by a neurobiologist named Andrew Huberman that was, I think, broadly about mindfulness. But he said something as kind of a casual aside thatâs stuck with me ever since: Humans, like predatory mammals, have eyes on the fronts of their heads in order to be able to focus on a single point (prey while hunting). That focus raises stress hormones like cortisol in the brain, and thatâs why predators need to spend so much time recharging. Itâs why if you go on a safari and drive past a pride of lions theyâre probably all asleep, and itâs why my cat is currently taking her second nap of the day after spending an hour staring at the hall closet.
Huberman [said that] you can imagine how much those stress hormones get ratcheted up when weâre spending so much time focusing on tiny devices in our hands. Weâre literally hunting for information. And we still have a lot of âwildâ in our brains. I think that when we talk about âwildernessâ and how itâs being lost in our modern era, we have to look inward as well as outward.
article bullshit: a spectrum of superfluous, cluttered, unnecessary and deceptive content. you know what it looks like when you see it - it clogs up the web. everywhere when information is cheap, attention becomes expensive! we're all trying to maximize singla to noise, so people will eventually gravitate towards generally useful products. create genuinely well thought out products that add signal, not noise, and genuinely benefit people rather than abusing them
modern nomograms two-dimensional graphic calculating devices; allow very fast computation and provide immediate visual feedback to help navigate the spatial meaning of the numbers they're working with. The most available of these are services like desmos, allowing users to easily isualize and graph relationships
article idea: because running code uses energy, writing inefficient code is morally wrong