Month: July 2012

Aerographite: The New Lightest Material in the World

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A team of German scientists from the Technical University of Hamburg and University of Kiel has developed a new carbon-nanotube-based material called Aerographite that’s the lightest material in the world. It’s density is only 0.2mg per cubic centimeter. To put that into perspective: styrofoam is 75 times denser.

Aerographite is made of mostly air–99.99 percent, to be exact–along with carbon nanotubes. The scientists created the material by growing an interlinking chain of carbon nanotubes onto a zinc oxide template:

To create the material, researchers started with a zinc oxide in powder form and heated it up to 900 degrees Celsius, which transformed it into a crystalline form. From this material the scientists made a kind of pill. In it, the zinc-oxide formed micro and nano structues, called tetrapods. These interweave and construct a stable entity of particles that form the porous pill. The tetrapods produced the network that is the basis for Aerographite. In a next step, the pill is positioned into the reactor for chemical vapour deposition at TUHH and heated up to 760 degrees Celsius. 

The lightest material I’ve ever held is aerogel, which I described in this post. By comparison, aerographite is at least ten times less dense than aerogel.

The Fake Sounds at the Olympic Games

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We marvel at the video quality of sports events, but often the sound engineering goes unnoticed. Alexis Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic, considers the sound quality at the Olympic Games. Dennis Baxter, an audio engineer at the Olympic Games for twenty years, says in the BBC documentary, The Sound of Sport:

“In Atlanta, one of my biggest problems was rowing. Rowing is a two-kilometer course. They have 4 chaseboats following the rowers and they have a helicopter. That’s what they need to deliver the visual coverage of it,” Baxter explains. “But the chaseboats and the helicopter just completely wash out the sound. No matter how good the microphones are, you cannot capture and reach and isolate sound the way you do visually. But people have expectations. If you see the rowers, they have a sound they are expecting. So what do we do?”

Well, they made up the rowing noises and played them during the broadcast of the event, like a particularly strange electronic music show. 

“That afternoon we went out on a canoe with a couple of rowers recorded stereo samples of the different type of effects that would be somewhat typical of an event,” Baxter recalls. “And then we loaded those recordings into a sampler and played them back to cover the shots of the boats.”

The real sound, of course, would have included engine noises and a helicopter whirring overhead. The fake sound seemed normal, just oars sliding into water. In a sense, the real sound was as much of a human creation as the fake sound, and probably a lot less pleasant to listen to.

I like Madrigal’s coinage of “sonic fiction”:

So, in order to make a broadcast appear real, the soundtrack has to be faked, or to put it perhaps more accurately, synthesized. We have a word for what they’re doing: This is sonic fiction. They are making up the sound to get at the truth of a sport.

News at End of the Day: Evening Edition

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The team behind Mule Design has unveiled a new project: Evening Edition. It’s your first (or last) stop at the end of the day to catch up on unmissable news:

Now, we’re all constantly awash in a torrent of news-like “updates”, in between fake celebrity death tweets, divorce notices on Facebook and new-puppy tumblrs. How is anyone supposed to sift through all of that to get to the important stuff?

To help answer that, we built Evening Edition. It’s a summary of the day’s news, written by an actual journalist, with links to the best reporting in the world, published once a day. It’s optimized for your phone or iPad so you can read it on the train home or on the couch. It can be the starting point for a deep-dive or just enough so you sound erudite at your next cocktail party. What it’s not, and what it will never be, is another chirp of noise constantly guilting you into checking it. It’s breaking news for the slow web.

Bonus: it looks great on your phone or tablet.

On Lying and Eye Movement

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Can you tell a liar from the way his eyes move when he tells a lie? A new study suggests otherwise:

When right-handed people move their eyes up and to the left in response to a question, they are picturing a real memory. When their eyes go up and to the right, the theory goes, they are accessing the creative centers of the brain and visualizing an imagined event — therefore concocting a lie. The theory, dating back to the 1970s, is widely repeated and frequently taught in neuro-linguistic training courses. But it has never been thoroughly substantiated, and new research suggests it is little more than pseudoscience.

In a controlled study published in the journal PLoS One, British researchers monitored the eye movements of 32 right-handed people as they told lies and truths about recent events to an interviewer. The scientists found that there was no pattern of eye movement that predicted lying. In a second experiment, 50 people were asked to look for signs of lying among interviewees. Although half were taught to look for eye movements, they fared no better at lie detection than an untrained control group.

Myth busted, it seems.

Walter Kirn: Confessions of an Ex-Mormon

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Walter Kirn, the National Correspondent at The New Republic, writes a poignant story of becoming a Mormon and then renouncing the religion. The fresh American start promised by the Church of Latter Day Saints “didn’t turn out like that”:

My stated excuse for sneaking away from Mormonism was skepticism about its doctrines, but I’d learned that most Mormons don’t grasp all the teachings of Joseph Smith—nor do they credit all the ones they do grasp. After the bus trip to Eden, holy Missouri never came up again in conversation. As for the future temple in Independence, I found out that the spot where Smith said it would rise belonged to a Mormon splinter sect with a U.S. membership of about 1,000. The “sacred underwear”? It was underwear. Everyone wears it, so why not make it sacred? Why not make everything sacred? It is, in some ways. And most sacred of all are people, not wondrous stories, whose job is to help people feel their sacredness. Sometimes the stories don’t work, or they stop working. Forget about them; find others. Revise. Refocus. A church is the people in it, and their errors. The errors they make while striving to get things right.

But I didn’t have the patience, or the humility. I wasn’t a son of stubborn pioneers. I was the son of the lawyer on the plane who’d suffered the breakdown I thought I could avoid. I left the Church as abruptly as I’d entered it. No formalities, no apologies, no goodbyes.

Highly recommend reading in its entirety. If you’re wondering what else Walter Kirn is also known for: writing the book Up in the Air, which inspired a film of the same name starring George Clooney. It’s an excellent film.

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(via @Longreads)

Georgia Tech Joins Coursera

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My alma mater, Georgia Tech, is one of twelve new universities that has joined the Coursera team. Coursera is a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. In their own words: “We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.”

Take a look at the course offerings from Georgia Tech. The Computational Photography course taught by Professor Irfan Essa looks intriguing:

This course is aimed at teaching you the basics of how computation has impacted the entire workflow of photography, from how images are captured, manipulated and collaborated on and shared.  At the core of it photography means, drawing with light and how light can be captured to form images/videos. In this class you will learn about how the optics, and the sensor within a camera are generalized, as well as the lighting and other aspects of the environment are generalized to capture novel images. We will also cover post and pre processing techniques to manipulate and improve images. Finally, we will consider the power of the web and the Internet for both analyzing and sharing images, as well as the impact of mobile smart phone cameras. This class builds on concepts from well known disciplines like computer vision, computer graphics, and image processing. Look forward to participate in this class.

Sign me up!

The Weird and the Misfits

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This message of embracing your weirdness, of being a misfit, is reverberating with a stronger frequency in my life these days. Here is Alex McCaw:

By definition, the system isn’t set up to cater for misfits. While I am by no means comparable to those famous alumni on my school wall, I am also a misfit. Misfits don’t blend into the artificial world of enforced hierarchies, such as those in high school, and are often happier forging their own paths. By the time I was seventeen, I had already dropped out of two schools and decided enough was enough. The system wasn’t for me. I packed up my bags and moved to London. I knew what I was passionate about, and I wasn’t afraid to admit it. I wanted to spend the rest of my life programming.

Chris Sacca recently gave the commencement speech to a crowd of newly graduated students. He talked about being a misfit, about standing out and embracing what you really are. As he says, your GPA only matters to people who can’t find any other reason to find you interesting.

The most important piece of advice I can give you on the path to happiness, is not just be yourself, but be your weird self. It takes too much energy to be other than your weird self. We spend so much of our lives living up to the expectations of others.

It’s our collection of screw ups, stories and idiosyncrasies, that make us weird and interesting. Weirdness is why we adore our friends. Weirdness is what binds us to our colleges. Weirdness is what sets us apart and gets us hired. Be your unapologetic weird selves.

Where else have I heard this message? At World Domination Summit this year, Chris Brogan said: “You will succeed the weirder you get.”

On Making Friends After College

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This piece in The New York Times on making friends after college resonated with me deeply. Personally, I have found that I have lost connections with some of the people I bonded in college. More importnatly, I’ve found it exceedingly challenging to make friends after college (and graduate school).

Our story is not unusual. In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.

As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.

No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now.

The three conditions on why making friends becomes difficult as one enters their 30s:

As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.

Good read in its entirety.

What are some things you’ve done to make friends after college? I am really curious.

Cal Newport on Building a Remarkable Career

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Last weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit. It’s a brilliant “un-conference” but together by Chris Guillebeau, whose blog and adventures I’ve been following for many years.

One of the speakers at the conference was Cal Newport, who I’ve been following since my time at Georgia Tech. Cal has finished his PhD (and post-doc) studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

I attended Cal’s breakout session on Saturday afternoon and his main keynote on Sunday afternoon, and I wanted to present some takeaways from Cal’s talks.

“Follow Your Passion” Is Bad Advice

Cal Newport came into the conference professing that his argument might stir up some controversy at WDS, since it’s a bit unorthodox. The gist of his argument about building and leading a remarkable career: “the follow your passion” advice is not only bad, it is wrong. Newport’s claim can further be broken down:

Sitting down to figure out what you’re passionate about and then being disappointed when you try it and it doesn’t work out is a mistake. Instead of following your passion, you should pick something that is of interest to you you and that is going to give you interesting options. Once you get into this interest, build it into a craft with hard work and dedication. Once you are skilled in that arena, leverage your knowledge and skills to prioritize the things that matter to you in life. This is the foundation for what can be a remarkable life.

This isn’t just a hokey hypothesis put on by Newport. He has spent significant amount of his free time (the guy isn’t on Facebook, Twitter, or any social media: any effort that he doesn’t put into his work goes into this other interest of Newport’s, namely, how students think, behave, and choose their careers).

How To Develop a Remarkable Career

Cal Newport summarized the path to a remarkable career (and doing what you love):

1. Get good at something that is rare and valuable. 

2. After you get good, leverage yours skill for things that really matter to you (e.g. a lifestyle with more autonomy, freedom), allowing yourself to focus on the parts of that skill that truly matter, or convert that value into a part of your life you really care about. Understand that you cannot convert anything to what matters to you unless you have first developed necessary and valuable skills, because otherwise you’ve got nothing to leverage.

3. But it is only when you become really good at something and have the opportunity to leverage your skills that you will face the most resistance from outside forces (family, internal struggles, your boss). In other words, at the moment when you can take    the leap and do something extraordinary, you’ll have the greatest resistance to stay complacent (in status quo), continuing on your current path.

4. What you do for your work might be a lot less important than you think. The general traits you leverage are more important than the work itself, as counterintuitive as that might appear. Cal talked about a number of things that Steve Jobs could have done and been successful at, besides starting Apple Computer. In fact, Steve Jobs was successful in leading another company: Pixar.

Case Study: Bill McKibben

To drill down to Cal’s hypothesis, Cal offered the example of one of his favorite authors: Bill McKibben. McKibben went to Harvard University, where he worked for the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. After a strong career at the paper (where he ended up becoming an editor), McKibben went on to write at The New Yorker. He spent six years working at The New Yorker, developing his career and honing his skills as a writer.

But then McKibben did something unexpected. Instead of taking a promotion at The New Yorker, he quit his job and moved to Adirondocak Mountains in upstate New York to write a book called End of Nature. The book became a critical success, cementing McKibben as one of the authorities on environmentalism. What’s important to realize here is that McKibben used his leverage that he developed pursuing his writing career to go out on his own. At perhaps the apex of his career, instead of choosing to continue on his path at The New Yorker, he had enough attention (and skill) to know that he can go out on his own and write this book. When he quit his job, he already had an “in” with various publishers and other notables in the publishing industry such that he could get a big advance and go out and write End of Nature. Had McKibben not paid his dues, so to speak, at The New Yorker and decided to write this book right out of Harvard, he would have probably been ignored. At the same time, McKibben faced massive resistance from those around him when he decided to go out on his own and spend time writing End of Nature.

Conclusion

The key to building a remarkable career isn’t following your passion, necessarily. It’s doing something interesting, developing valuable skills, and then leveraging your opportunities. On Saturday’s conclusion to his keynote, Cal offered this brilliant advice to the audience: Do as Steve Jobs did, not as he said.

Cal Newport has written about his experience speaking at World Domination Summit in this post.

If you are interested in this topic, then I recommend giving Cal Newport’s upcoming book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love a closer look. It comes out in September.

Italo Calvino on Classics

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What is a classic? In his collection of essays on classical literature titled Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino produces the following 14 definitions of a “classic”:

  1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’
  2. The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
  3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.
  4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
  5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.
  6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
  7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
  8. A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
  9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
  10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
  11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
  12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.
  13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
  14. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

To this day, one of my favorite books by Calvino remains Invisible Cities. If you’ve never read it, well… it’s a classic.

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(via Reddit Books)