• “How can they be so good?”: The strange story of Skype
  The story of Skype and how a couple of people made a lot of money before Ebay and Microsoft “ruined it”.
• Container shipping: the secretive industry crucial to our existence
  An extract from a book about this shipping industry. I find it fascinating how shipping just works and we get our goods from overseas. I wish there was an entire article on the economics of shipping.

  There are 20 million containers crossing the world now, quiet blank boxes. Before containers, transport costs ate as much as 25 per cent of the value of whatever was being shipped. With the extreme efficiencies that intermodality brought, costs were reduced to a pittance. A sweater can now travel 3,000 miles for 2.5 cents; it costs a cent to send a can of beer. Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent 10,000 miles to China to be filleted.

• The Social Life of Genes
  Although your genes describe who you are, apparently your environment can cause your genes to express themselves differently. It’s no longer a question of nature vs nuture, but how your social environment affects your nature.

  “We typically think of stress as being a risk factor for disease,” said Cole. “And it is, somewhat. But if you actually measure stress, using our best available instruments, it can’t hold a candle to social isolation. Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.”

  This helps explain, for instance, why many people who work in high-stress but rewarding jobs don’t seem to suffer ill effects, while others, particularly those isolated and in poverty, wind up accruing lists of stress-related diagnoses—obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis, heart failure, stroke.

• The Pleasure and Pain of Speed
  The brain likes speed, and technology is glad to oblige. So is increasing the speed of our lives actually bad for us?

  Referring to the theorist Walter Benjamin, Rosa argues that the greater the number of “lived events per unit of time,” the less likely it is these are to transform into “experiences.” Benjamin argued that we tried to capture these moments with physical souvenirs, including photographs, which could later be accessed in an attempt to reinvoke memories. Of course, this process has accelerated, and the physical souvenir is now as quaint as the physical photograph. In Instagram, we have even developed a kind of souvenir of the present: An endless photography of moments suggests that we do not trust that they will actually become moments, as if we were photographing not to know that the event happened, but that it is happening.

• In the Name Of Love
  A goal of many people is to “Do What You Love” (DWYL), but it turns out that that advice is actually bad for the human race!

  One consequence of this isolation is the division that DWYL creates among workers, largely along class lines. Work becomes divided into two opposing classes: that which is lovable (creative, intellectual, socially prestigious) and that which is not (repetitive, unintellectual, undistinguished). Those in the lovable work camp are vastly more privileged in terms of wealth, social status, education, society’s racial biases, and political clout, while comprising a small minority of the workforce.

  For those forced into unlovable work, it’s a different story. Under the DWYL credo, labor that is done out of motives or needs other than love (which is, in fact, most labor) is not only demeaned but erased. As in Jobs’ Stanford speech, unlovable but socially necessary work is banished from the spectrum of consciousness altogether.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: genetics, pocket