Interesting articles, videos and other tidbits from around the web.
Christian Rudder about the result of one of several experiments, they conducted at OkCupid:
So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.
I love OkTrends. It’s great that’s it’s back to live with new content. Check out the old posts as well.
In commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War, the Martin-Gropius-Bau is presenting an exhibition entitled The World c. 1914. Colour Photography Before the Great War, which features nearly forgotten colour photographs and films commissioned by the French banker Albert Kahn (1860-1940) before the First World War.
I would like to see this exhibition. It keeps fascinating me how little has changed in the last one hundred years. We wear other clothes, have more gadgets but the basic things of everyday life are still the same. You see pictures of people just like you and me. And they’ve been gone for decades. Color photography gets us a bit closer to this bygone world.
See more pictures at Spiegel Online.
Mauricio Estrella:
My password became the indicator. My password reminded me that I shouldn’t let myself be victim of my recent break up, and that I’m strong enough to do something about it.
My password became: “Forgive@h3r”
My password expired today. Let the new one change my life.
David E. Weekly is also done with Foursquare:
So after 3,044 check-ins and 68 badges, your user #11471 is throwing in the towel. Goodbye.
I only have 792 check-ins and 33 badges but I couldn’t agree more.
Sebastian Anthony:
Some intrepid biologists at the University of Southern California (USC) have discovered bacteria that survives on nothing but electricity — rather than food, they eat and excrete pure electrons.
Fascinating.
Volcanic eruptions created a new island near Nishino-shima. Both islands joined late last year. They are now firmly linked.
Brinton Parker tried three different levels of makeup on Tinder. She concludes:
Despite my reservations about the entire concept, however, the guys on Tinder surprised me. More men flocked to a bare-faced girl than a heavily made-up one, yet they seemed most aggressively interested in a face adorned in average levels of makeup.
Check the article for images and more information.
Google and Adobe teamed up to create an open source font for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK).
Google shares some more information on its blog. Check out how different the same character can look in the different countries.
Like most urban drivers, Nikki Sylianteng was sick of getting tickets. During her time in Los Angeles, the now Brooklyn-based designer paid the city far more than she would’ve liked to. So she began thinking about how she might be able to solve this problem through design.
I like it.
Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder shows the life in North Korea.
Former assistant secretary of the Treasury Emil Henry thinks that Mitt Romney should run for president again in 2016. He would be the first failed candidate to get another chance since Richard Nixon in 1968.
Ten stories of great customer service. Number nine touched me most.
Peter Bradshaw:
Kyoko (Jun Yoshinaga) is a confident, intelligent 16-year-old girl who is falling in love with the diffident, moody boy next door: Kaito (Nijiro Murakami). Kaito’s parents are divorced: his dad, a tattooist, lives in Tokyo and his mum works in a restaurant. Kyoko is dealing with something even more painful: her mother, a delicate and beautiful woman, is dying, perhaps of cancer, although the film is a little too otherworldly to acknowledge the exact illness, the exact medical care or the ugly, un-Zen physical toll it can take.
Set against this fraught situation is a shocking event: a dead body is washed up on the beach. Despite the film’s title, the water is far from still – there are tropical storms and the waves and currents are dangerous. The dead man turns out to have a connection with Kaito’s mother, and realising this forces him to re-evaluate his relationship with his parents and with Kyoko herself who cannot understand why he is so shy and reluctant to make love to her.
A beautiful movie about love, life and death.
According to the “10,000-hours rule”, it takes 10,000 hours to master any skill.
Maria Popova has read Daniel Goleman’s “Focus”, in which he takes a closer look at this rule.
She quotes:
Amateurs are content at some point to let their efforts become bottom-up operations. After about fifty hours of training — whether in skiing or driving — people get to that “good-enough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they’ve learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible.
The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain’s urge to automatize routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what’s not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, or focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau.