Interesting articles, videos and other tidbits from around the web.
Julie Zhuo:
I like to think of a manager’s job as learning, designing, or teaching frameworks, where every framework is a shortcut for achieving a desired outcome in a given situation. Like a well-known childhood game, it’s fun to collect them all, whether from books, talking to other people, or personal experience.
She shares her favorite frameworks and concludes:
If you give a Martian an answer, you’ll satisfy it for a minute. But if you teach it a framework for getting answers, then you’ll give it its best chance of success in achieving Pistatort-Caliber (translation: A+) on its Tetra InterGalWarp Ewol. And really, who wouldn’t want that for our adorable little green friend?
Alice Robb:
It’s surprising, though, that people who are actually fluent in two languages also feel their personality shifting as they switch between languages. Yet researchers have confirmed this: Between 2001 and 2003, linguists Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko asked over a thousand bilinguals whether they “feel like a different person” when they speak different langauges. Nearly two-thirds said they did.
My English self is definitely different from my German one.
As CEO of Meebo, Seth Sternberg, now Product Director for the Google+ Platform, went from full control to no control. Neither worked well.
But then it clicked. I came upon a way of managing product where the founder maintains product direction, even at quite a detailed level, without disempowering. It turns out it’s all about cadence of feedback and expectations.
His solution shares similarities to the Pixar Braintrust.
Joyce Chu from Malaysia sings about not being Korean.
Melissa Dahl:
Research has shown that women’s libidos tend to nose-dive when they’re in a long-term relationship, but the same isn’t true for men. However, we might have been misinterpreting the meaning of this finding, suggest the authors, Dr. Aaron E. Carroll and Dr. Rachel C. Vreeman, both of the Indiana University School of Medicine. “While some would say that this means the women have an easier time being monogamous because their sex drive has gone down, sex experts would say that this is not the healthy state for these women,” they write. “The women are losing their desire to initiate sex or to have sex with their partners, which does not reflect sexual health.”
I need to get this book.
Here’s a strategy that you might consider trying: Prepare some tools which can, at the moment you’re ready, put all those tabs exactly where you need them so you can close those tabs. If most of those tabs are really your to-do list, line them up in one window and then get them into your actual to-do list. I’ve found that if your tools are easy to use, you’ll be more likely to make it a part of your routine.
I love Justin’s Chrome to OmniFocus extension.
Interesting game from Minecraft creator Markus Persson.
It takes ten minutes to play and it teaches you a lot about your life.
Lobo:
Could be the light of the Asian moon
Could be a song an old Asian tune
Lovely dark haired ladies and the words they say
A late night sail on a moonlit bay
Could be the stars in the Asian sky
That got me flying and feelin’ so high
I never thought the hurt would heal so soon
Must be the light of the Asian moon
Jon Evans:
Foursquare, which started life as “the check-in app,” is ripping check-ins out of its eponymous app and moving them to its new ambient-social app called Swarm. […]
Which leaves it seeming more than a little unfocused. The main Foursquare app has essentially become a Yelp competitor. Swarm is now a side business, presumably because check-ins are no longer a growth industry, and haven’t been for some years now.
This pivot kept me scratching my head. I was probably one of the last geeks to start using Foursquare. I liked how I could tell the app where I am and what I like and it would then show me what to do.
With the split I have to check-in in Swarm and then jump to Foursquare to read more about the venue. What a waste of time.
My close friends are using neither Foursquare nor Swarm. They do not check-in to show where they are. Socializing has never been my use case for checking-in.
I stopped using Foursquare short after the split.
Stan Hayward:
So, what does it feel like to be old?
It’s a bit like this, with a cat that has luminous eyes and sleeps on its back.
From time to time something reminds you of the past.
You remember things.
Mostly nice things.
Stan has done quite a few things in his life.
Photographer Martin Schlüter spent numerous nights in the empty headquarters of the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) in Pullach. His images portray the soon to be abandoned offices. The BND will complete its relocation to Berlin in 2016.
Houses stacked like building blocks.
I came across “The Interlace” on my way to the Gillman Barracks and it was one of the most fascinating buildings I’ve seen.
Now architect Ole Scheeren won the Urban Habitat Award. Well deserved.
Michael Silverberg:
The University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Computational Design has built an ultra-thin exhibition hall that showcases the technical possibilities of computational design and robot-fabricated structures. It also looks like a giant peanut.
Check the post for more images.
Jenni Avins:
McGee writes that tomatoes originally came from a warm place—the deserts of South America’s west coast—and therefore shouldn’t be stored at arctic temperatures. A tomato subjected to a refrigerator’s cold climate stops producing its aroma-making enzymes and starts to lose its flavor.
Interesting.
Storehouse co-founder and ex-Apple designer Mark Kawano:
I think the biggest misconception is this belief that the reason Apple products turn out to be designed better, and have a better user experience, or are sexier, or whatever . . . is that they have the best design team in the world, or the best process in the world […]
It’s actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design. Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about the product so much better . . . much more than any individual designer or design team.
He shares some more insight into the design process at Apple.