Tag: short-and-straight

Do not track me. Do get it.

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

I’m a Google Chrome user and there are some add-ons on the browser that should really become part of it. The first one is AdBlock Plus and the other is DoNotTrackMe.

Yes there are people who survive on online adverts. I’m a journalist, I know. But AdBlock Plus allows for non-intrusive ads. This is the future of online advertising and the add-on is only accelerating us getting there.

And DoNotTrackMe essentially does what its name suggests: it stops tracking codes from gathering information about you. There are tens of trackers that want to know various bits of information about you to “customise your online experience”. Those trackers do no good and perhaps just slow down loading pages.

DoNotTrackMe also has an added advantage: it hides all the social button figures (the buttons remain in case you want to use them). How many times do you judge an article based on how many people have liked it or tweeted it and not on your judgement? It has become a sort of unspoken currency for writers. I think that’s terrible. Apart from deciding for myself what I want to and not want to read, I read what my friends recommend. If I don’t like it then I stop taking that particular friend’s advice. I’ve been using DoNotTrackMe for over three months now, and find it really helpful.

Invention is a product of inventorying

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

This is so far the most convincing reason for why it is important to commit a lot of (useful) things to memory.

Joshua Foer explains:

Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to drawn on. Not just an inventory but an indexed inventory: to find the right information at the right time.

This is what the art of memory was ultimately useful for.

From Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein

Einstein was wrong about time…

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

…or, more precisely, the humourists who tried to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity were wrong.

This is what you commonly hear:

When you sit next to a pretty girl for one hour, and it feels like a minute. As opposed to when you sit on a hot stove for one minute, and it feels like an hour. That is relativity.

That’s got nothing to do with the concept of relativity of time as defined by physics. But it’s an example used to explain that time is not constant. The example is used because it turns out that events in our lives do have an effect on our perception of time.

And still that example is not quite that good because it turns out that time with a pretty girl can actually feel like one hour if what you feel is novel enough. Joshua Foer explains:

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

An experiment where a subject spent two months in an underground cave without access to a clock, calender, or sun helped scientists come to this conclusion. Inside the cave the subject lost perception of time because of his monotonous existence. When he was removed from the cave two months after, according to his self-kept diary he had been inside only for a month.

From Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein