A couple of years ago, during University, I wrote a paper on a “law” that was formulated in 1913 by the journalist Wolfgang Riepl. It basically says that new media never truly replace old media.
Radio didn’t replace newspapers.
The cinema didn’t replace the radio.
The TV didn’t replace the cinema.
Their roles might change, but they never truly disappear.
For a couple of hundred years, this - in a broad sense - appeared to be true.
But with digital media, a lot changes. Take for example, the telegraph. Once the backbone of fast news transportation, it is now just a shadow of itself:
Less then 20.000 telegrams are sent each year in the United States, down from 200 million in the 1920ies.
Austria doesn’t have a telegram service anymore, and this year, the french postal service sent its last telegram, before shutting down for good.
I think it’s fair to say that this at least is one example of Riepl’s Law failing.
And if you look closer, and into more detail, you suddenly find an enormous amount of media that is no longer alive. Bruce Sterling wrote a list on nettime in 1997, and I’m sure that list got a lot longer in the last 21 years.
You’d also have to add a bunch of tools, media and services published and then famously abandoned by Google. The Google Cemetary is an interesting collection of discontinued Google products, and why they were abandoned.
(Hat tip to Eranium for Google Cemetary)
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How a flawed study twisted our view on will power
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You’ve heard about the marshmallow test. Here’s a short recap:
Place a marshmallow in front of a child. Tell the child that if it doesn’t eat the marshmallow in the next 15 minutes, it can have it, and another one.
If it does it eat it, it just gets this one.
Leave the room. See what happens.
That’s one part. The other part is less famous, but was used as validation for the idea that the capability of delaying gratification (waiting for 15 minutes, and then enjoy not one, but two marshmallows) leads to greater success in live:
Those kids where tested on various “life parameters” like educational success, BMI, and the like, 10 years later.
And lo and behold: The kids who were able to wait for the second marshmallow significantly outperformed the kids who couldn’t.
Good things come to those who wait, indeed.
A lot of ideas came from this experiment. That willpower is like a muscle, in need of training. But also capable of exhaustion.
That self-reglementation and gratitude-delaying are important traits for success.
And I don’t even want to know how many TEDx talks have their conceptual roots in this experiment.
And now, this experiment has been repeated, but at a larger scale, and with more variables considered.
The result? The capability of delaying gratification is definitely nice to have, but no indicator for success whatsoever.
What really determines the future success or misfortune of little kids are:
Their own cognitive abilities.
Their background.
Their home environment.
Kids don’t thrive when they can resist temptation. They thrive when they are encouraged, protected, loved, and when their parents are good examples.
What does that mean for you? Practically the same, I’d assume.
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"You have to explain to the cheese where to break"
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When you start looking, you can find craft everywhere. For some reason, I watched a video about cheese, which reminded me of this Goldie of a YouTube video about how to - correctly - break a wheel of parmesan cheese.
The cheesemongers explanation why the cheese is broken and not cut reminds me of how you eat austrian dumplings:
You never ever cut them with a knife, but rather break them open with your fork and the knife (or your fork and a spoon in case of a sweet dumpling), because cutting it seals it off, destroying texture and taste.
That’s the difference between ornament and craft: Craft makes things better, ornament makes them more complicated.
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Did you know that GPS is owned and controlled by the US military?
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Fuel tank jettisoned by a Space Shuttle (Image by NASA)
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Well, technically, the US government, but in the form of the Department of Defense, and that counts as the military in my book.
15 Years ago, the EU decided to break out of this dependency and create its own satellite positioning system, called Galileo. And as everything in Europe is really sloooooooooooow, it will take another five years before the system is fully operational.
That’s the year the new chinese system Beidou is expected to go live as well, and things tend to heat up already.
Multiple vendors are already adding Beidou capabilities to their hardware, and Russia is said to revamp their cold-war era system GLONASS.
If that becomes competitive as well, we’ll have three or four systems for spacial positioning services.
Not only does that show that the era of global cooperation is coming to an end, it also shows the impact location-aware devices like smartphones and self-driving cars have.
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Reducing cow farts: Sounds like a joke, is a serious business
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Unrelated to this story but equally strange: Someone had the idea of capturing the methane for usage as car fuel. I dunno, but that fart backpack doesn’t look very comfortable
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Here’s a comparison to wrap your head around: The contribution of life stock to climate-change is roughly as big as that of the transportation industry.
Did that sink in?
So, when researchers say that they are able to reduce the animals’ methane production by 60%, that is actually a pretty big deal.
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I’m in Munich next Month!
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I’m at the OOP Conference in Munich on 24.1.1018, talking about my favorite topic: Errors and making mistakes.
Hit me up if you’re in Munich and let’s have some coffee!
Or come attend my talk if you always wanted to know what Master Yoda has to say about your personal error culture!
(Also, contact me if you need a discount for the conference ticket ...)
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Did it take a lot of will power to read through this edition of Let's be Fwends? I hope you didn't have to delay your need for gratification for long, because down here you just a get a text version of a "I read all that many words up there and all I got was a lousy T-Shirt" - T-Shirt. 👚
High-fives for funny T-Shirts!
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