Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #392

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, Pandemonio, and ResolveTO, Author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

Octopuses and cuttlefish through alien eyes – Quartz – YouTube. “Since it’s the holidays, I thought I’d take some time off from the deep thinking and social morality stuff, and share a couple of videos I found fascinating. The first is about sea creatures. It turns out that we don’t see what many of them see, because we don’t have the right lighting and frequencies. But a team of researchers has found ways to reveal what undersea creatures perceive through a special camera process. It’s pretty cool. I love how tech extends our senses.” (Alistair for Hugh).
Teaching Artificial Intelligence to Run (NIPS 2017) – CrowdAI – YouTube. “You’ve seen lots of examples of how algorithms can learn by doing something over and over again. Even Google‘s best AI is bad at its first billion or so games of chess–it just plays games fast, relentlessly, and in parallel, with perfect recall. Getting an algorithm to learn about the real world (for example, having an AI figure out how to run) takes a lot of trial and error, and is hard to do physically. But a simulation is just the thing; here are the winners of the NIPS 2017 contest, showing algorithms that learned to run just based on the physical structure of the human body.” (Alistair for Mitch).
The Sucker, the Sucker! – London Review of Books. “Whenever I see an article about octopi, I submit it here. Octopi are so amazing.” (Hugh for Alistair).
Why you hate contemporary architecture – Current Affairs. “Again, the title says it all.” (Hugh for Mitch).
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds – The New Yorker. “We want to blame fake news for all of our problems when it comes to stuff like the facts. Maybe it’s not the news. Maybe it’s us? In this intriguing piece, we start to learn a little bit more about how our minds work… and why facts don’t always jive with what we believe. Sadly” (Mitch for Alistair).
Requiem for the Mall – Popular Mechanic. “Amazon. Blame Amazon. All the woes of retail can be blamed on Amazon. Right? Wrong? The true North Star of retail is the shopping mall. Why do we go to the shopping mall? Well, in this super-fascinating read, you will uncover that our reason for going to the mall has changed dramatically over the years, and we’re pointing the blame (possibly) to many of the wrong reasons why shopping malls are not what they once were. I’m a huge mall rat, so this continues to be a topic that depresses me. I do so love the smell of commerce in the morning.” (Mitch for Hugh).