“In the Age of Information, Specializing to Survive”

“At least since the heyday of ancient Greece and Rome, each generation has confronted the overwhelming struggle to search, sift and sort growing piles of information to make what is known useful. “Papyrus, print or petabyte — the history of feeling overwhelmed by information always seems to go back further than the latest technology.” said Seth Rudy, a professor of English literature at Rhodes College who explores this phenomenon in his new book, “Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge.” “The sense that there is too much to know has been felt for hundreds, even thousands, of years.”…

If the information age makes knowledge seem like a straitjacket, David Galenson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, notes that progress often hinges on those rare individuals who have escaped its bonds. Artists from Picasso to Bob Dylan and entrepreneurs including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs changed the world by finding “radically new ways of looking at old problems,” Mr. Galenson said. “They cut through all the accumulated stuff — forget what’s been done — to see something special, something new.”

It is why, Mr. Galenson added, the historian and physicist Stanley Goldberg said of Einstein, “It was almost as if he were wearing special glasses to make all that was irrelevant invisible."

For many who don’t share that kind of vision, the response to information overload is simple: Just search and forget (repeat as necessary).”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/education/in-the-age-of-information-specializing-to-survive.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

The rest of this isn’t totally worth reading, it’s sort of fluffy, but I think about this problem all the tie and I liked this summary.

"The mastermind behind the Toronto Tunnel is a hero for our time"

"Has any human ever been as self-actualized as "happy-go-lucky" 22-year-old construction worker Elton McDonald, who explained to the Toronto Sun that building the tunnel was "just something I always wanted to do"? (Who among us could even identify the urge to build a giant, room-size underground chamber in a local wood, much less actually carry it out? I feel no shame in admitting that I could not.)

But Elton McDonald knew. And Elton McDonald had the skill and confidence to make his dream a reality. "I knew I could do it," he told the Sun, describing himself as the "main digger" on the project. (Do we not all yearn, in these soulless modern times, to be the "main digger" on something? On anything? Do we not all secretly fear, deep inside, that we will never amount to more than an associate digger in someone else's tunnel?)"
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/5/8158321/toronto-tunnel-elton-mcdonald-hero

"Vera Peters"

"In earlier years, her work on Hodgkin’s disease had brought it down from a death sentence to a treatable disease. Unfortunately, according to her contemporary Dr. Charles Hayter, the international medical community did not appreciate her spot in the limelight, and more or less shunned her, saying “go back to Toronto and do your women’s work.”

So she did. And improved the lot of a great many breast cancer survivors in the process."
http://www.rejectedprincesses.com/blog/modern-worthies/vera-peters/

"Let’s Really Be Friends: A defense of online intimacy"

"Relationships that travel from the Internet to the nondigital world, or navigate a space somewhere in between, have retained that same patina of weirdness. The stigma associated with online friendship, that persistent doubt that “real” intimacy can only be created via physical encounter, has not faded. Even in this, the Age of Social Media, when virtual interaction populates almost every facet of daily existence, online friendships are still viewed with suspicion. But they shouldn’t be. The time has come to obliterate the false distinctions between digital ties and the ones that bind us in the physical world. Our lives on Twitter and Tumblr are today a real part of our real lives. Everyone is an Internet friend.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121183/your-internet-friends-are-real-defense-online-intimacy

"Why You Should Stop Eating Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner"

"breakfast isn't the only metabolically unimportant meal. In fact, it doesn't seem to matter much at all how and when you get your calories. In a 2010 study published in the British Journal of Nutrition, one group ate three meals a day while another ate six. (Total daily calorie counts were identical.) Researchers found no weight or hormonal differences between the groups. In 2014, University of Warwick researchers found no difference in metabolism between a group of women that ate two meals a day and another group that ate five...

Instead of obsessing about meal size and frequency, Ochner recommends something simpler: Don't eat when it's time for a meal; eat when you feel hungry. That, he says, is a lost art: In industrialized societies, where food is abundant, we eat because of social cues "or just because something smells good." If we can teach ourselves to pay attention to our own bodies instead of our environment, he says, "that might be the best diet of all.""
http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/against-meals-breakfast-lunch-dinner

"'I Regret Everything': Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life"

"I don't think I knew any of my father's friends, male friends, by their real name. I remember them only by their nicknames. Also there was an honesty sometimes — the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you "Shorty," and if you were angry they would call you "The Devil." I remember a man in the neighborhood who was called "Jim the Devil." Always those three words. "Have you seen Jim the Devil?" ...

It's a very personal identification; trying to move away maybe from the history of having no name, and then personalizing it. On one hand, to give you a name that's embarrassing in order to make you confront it, deal with it now, and then later on [to give you] more charming names, moving away from humiliating names."
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/20/400394947/i-regret-everything-toni-morrison-looks-back-on-her-personal-life?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150420

I didn't actually listen to the whole interview, but I plan to. I find this moment really interesting, it's really interesting to think about names.

"Why Killer Whales Go Through Menopause But Elephants Don’t"

"Animals almost always continue to reproduce until they die. There are just three exceptions that we know of: humans, short-finned pilot whales, and killer whales. In all three species, females lose the ability to have children, but continue living for decades after. That’s menopause. Female killer whales go through in their 30s or 40s. Why? Why sacrifice so many future chances to pass on your genes to the next generation?

One of the most compelling explanations is called the grandmother hypothesis. Proposed in 1966, it suggests that older females forgo the option to bear more children so they can support their existing ones. By helping their children and grandchildren to survive and thrive, they still ensure that their genes cascade down the generations...
By ploughing through the data, student Emma Foster showed that if a male orca’s mother died before his thirtieth birthday, he was three times more likely to die the next year. If she passed away after he turned thirty, he was eight times more likely to subsequently snuff it. And if mum had gone through menopause, his odds of dying went up by fourteentimes. The data were clear: mothers help their sons well into adulthood, and older mums are especially helpful."
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/05/why-killer-whales-go-through-menopause-but-elephants-dont/

Interesting. Also, though, can we stop talking about non-Western humans like they are not humans? "Among many hunter-gatherers, like the Ache of Paraguay or the Hadza of Tanzania, around half of women survive to 45, and continue living into their late 60s. Like killer whales, they live long after the stop reproducing. And like killer whales, the longer they live, the more they know."