001 — January 3, 2017

Nurturing Genius, Film is Not Dead, Fog Waves +

My wife and I welcomed in the new year with a road trip to Big Sur, CA. Oh the views.

Welcome to 2017 and the inaugural issue of whatspop. My aim is to post curated links every week about technology, culture, and the future.

I’ve got a dozen interesting things to share for the first issue. Let’s jump in.

Nurturing Genius — the science of educating kids today. Link

“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke Talent Identification Program, which collaborates with the Hopkins center. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1 percent tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs, and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” he says.

How I Built This: Yvon Chouinard, CEO Patagonia — psychology of business growth is important for companies of all sizes. It’s not about being a rocket ship — it’s about being a 100 year company. Link

Physical Grain — film is not dead. Love the pairing of short essays with analog photography. Link

DHH on Watches — couldn’t agree more. I’ll take an analog watch over a smart watch. Gosh, I miss my first generation Nike FuelBand.

The OA — an interesting new sci-fi show for Netflix. Scored by the writer’s brother, who is a former member of Vampire Weekend. Unlike other Netflix shows, I think this one is going to be a slow and weird burn.

The Heart Goes Last — Atwood became one of my favorite writers after Oryx and Crake. This isn’t quite at that level but it was a fun novel to tear through during the road trip. Link (Amazon)

Fog Waves — love these long exposures. A 5–10 stop ND filter and a shutter release cable should go quite a long way for those interested. We tried to do this on our road trip last week and failed as Mt. Tam isn’t especially foggy during the winter. We’ll have to come back this summer. Link

Noon Pacific — discovered this project that curates music playlists. Perfect for background work or just zoning out. What are some other good music discovery services? Link

Lagom — an alternative to PowerPoint for developers. The demo works on mobile as well. Clever use of the same origin policy for presentation mode. Features synchronized cursors and highlighting. Link

Ransomware Chronicle — 2016 was a bad year for ransomware. Will be interesting to see if any security companies can help make a dent. People that focus on restoring backups rarely test integrity, which doesn’t make this a bulletproof solution. I consider this zero-sum problem. Link

Coldplay Up and Up — probably the best video of 2016. The rotoscoping work is impressive. I’d love to see a behind the scenes for this video.

Alien Covenant — looking forward to the continuation of the Prometheus/Alien story. Looks like a return to form.

Glad to see Fassbot in action, again.

Thanks for reading issue 001. CES is happening now and the next few days should be interesting.

See you next week! 🐨