CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: 5 things you didn't know about M.C. Escher

Image via Fast Company.

"Even if you don’t know much about the man, you know M.C. Escher’s work. References to his mind-bending imagery can be spotted in films like Interstellar and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. His penchant for mazes and impossible reality has inspired many a video game designer, and his prints adorn the covers of '60s rock albums. Yet he has never been fully embraced by the art world.
"[Escher] has to be one of the top 10 most recognized artists of the 20th century, but MoMA and Tate would never give him a show, he’s never had a show of any size in France," said Patrick Elliot, chief curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. "That was part of the interest for me, the paradox of his work being incredibly famous, but no one knows his name." In a new exhibit, The Amazing World of M.C. Escher, the museum sheds light on the life of a man who, despite producing some of the most popular images in modern art, remains an enigma." Find out four things you might not know about M.C. Escher in Fast Company. E.T.P. 5'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

This is a nice Fast Company article sent by our friend Jorge in which Jane Porter talks about Piers Steel's book The Procrastination Equation, a book that we mention in our small manifesto. It is always nice to read people that is trying to rescue the term and the practice of procrastination, for Piers is all about taking a structured approach to achieve productive procrastination, for us, as you well know, is all about meaningfulness.

"Every time you decide to work, the payoff gets evaluated twice: once by the limbic system and a second time by the prefrontal cortex," according to Steel. In other words, it's a battle of impulse against rationality. But while the term "productive procrastination" used by Steel, is a contentious one amongst scholars in the field, some of whom strongly believe there can be nothing productive about procrastination. But there's no question that of the many ways we can waste time, some are far better for us than others." Read the full article in Fast Company and find out the 5 best ways to procrastinate according to Steel, the 6th best, you already know it ;) . E.T.P. 4'

Photo via Vice.

Michael Grothaus of Vice asked a privacy lawyer what facebook's new Term and Conditions will mean for you. The article is concerned "not only with new additions to the Facebook Terms of Service, but the complete Terms of Service, which include some old terms unchanged by Facebook at this time. One new feature is the ability for Facebook to track your location. This ability is contingent on a user's consent." Read full article in Vice. E.T.P. 5'

 

Image via Wired.

Following the new avant garde design of the new Norwegian notes Travis Purrington, student at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland wants to use money to celebrate science instead of presidents. "What if we used money “as an educational tool?” Purrington wonders. “And not to reinforce such a patriotic bond with the country, but more of a global bond with mankind.” For his master’s thesis, Purrington (who is an American, from Idaho) gave US currency a top-to-bottom, front-to-back overhaul." Purrington proposes to celebrate science, I think that we should also celebrate art, but in any case we are heading in a good direction. Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 3'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo via Fast Company.

Liz Taurasi writes in Fast Company: Flying Cars Predicted In Two Years: What Then? "Massachusetts-based company Terrafugia, which makes a car-plane hybrid called the Transition. Scheduled to debut in 2016 at an estimated cost of $279,000, the Transition is a street-legal car with wings that fold out to make an FAA-approved airplane." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 7'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

Great article by Eric Jaffe in Fast Cmpany about what makes one consumer design cool and others meh: The Science of Cool. "Take a look at the two water bottles above. The one on the left is pretty much your standard water bottle design: tall, clear, probably crinkly. The one on the right feels a bit less conventional, with its sleek aluminum shell shaped like an Erlenmeyer flask. In a survey of which is cooler, the bottle on the right would win right away, though both bottles serve the very same function. So what is it, exactly, that makes one design cooler than another? The difference is surprisingly tough to articulate. You might say it's because the bottle on the right is unconventional. But a water bottle shaped like a kangaroo would be unconventional, too, and you wouldn't necessarily consider it cool. There's more to it than just being different." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 5'

Photo via Fast Company.

And of course, our anniversary edition had to have an Internet celebrity cat news: "Tabatha Bundesen was a waitress at Red Lobster when her brother first posted a photo of her cat, Tarder Sauce, on Reddit. Soon the cat had become a meme. A couple of months later, she had an agent. Then she had a book deal, a beverage brand, a line of merchandise, and a Christmas movie on Lifetime.. “I am Grumpy Cat’s human,” Bundesen says when I ask her if she owns the cat." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 4'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Illustration via Fast Company.

Ryan Bradley writes an interesting article in Fast Company: Understanding Facebook's Lost Generation of Teens: "Facebook is not cool. Everybody knows that, not just teens. "Coolness is done for us," Mark Zuckerberg said last year. This, more than anything, must be the reason teens are leaving, this lack of coolness. Facebook's chief financial officer, David Ebersman, said as much during a fourth quarter earnings call: The social network is not a cool hangout spot anymore, he said, which is why its user rates among young teens is dropping off. Some estimates have it at about a million teens a year, quitting Facebook entirely." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 7'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo via Wired.

Joseph Flaherty in Wired: "Japan is famous for its robotics industry which has developed everything from faceless industrial robots that power factories to cybernetic cats that provide companionship to the elderly. There’s also a subculture of scientists trying to create robots that could pass as humans and London-based photographer Luisa Whitton has captured their stories in a series called What About the Heart?" Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 6'

Photo via Fast Company.

Nathan Han, a 15-year-old from Boston fascinated by bioinformatics won the first prize of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for creating a computer program that can predict how harmful gene mutations related to cancer might be. Read full story by Ariel Schwartz in Fast Company. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

"In the past 50 years, the number of people working in manufacturing, government, and agriculture jobs have all gone down or flat-lined. As technology infiltrates parts of the labor market that it could never reach before, employment of people who do repetitive or task-oriented jobs has seen less need for human oversight or action. And your job could very likely be next." Thor Benson asks in Fast Company what will the economy look like when the robots take your job? Read article here. E.T.P: 5'

Photo via The New York Times.

"A model of Vincent van Gogh’s left ear — you know, the ear — is on display at a German museum.

 Created using 3D printers and genetic material from a living relative of van Gogh, the Dutch painter, it was shaped to be the exact size of his ear and is kept alive in a nourishing liquid.

It is the first major work from the German-born artist Diemut Strebe, who is based in Boston. Ms. Strebe, 47, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that she had spent three years working with a team of scientists to regrow the ear that van Gogh is said to have cut off in 1888." This is definitely a really original way of procrastination I would say. Read article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 2'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

A 3-D printer called the New Matter MOD-t was launched in Indiegogo a couple of days ago. It’s expected to cost $250, making it the most affordable 3-D printer to date. "It’s also being billed as one of the simplest 3-D printers: users buy and download designs for chess pieces or kitchen utensils or whatever they want to make in a storefront that crosses the App Store with Etsy. They can then edit these objects--changing size or adding texture--about as easily as adding an Instagram filter. The printer, engineered by inventor Steve Schell, is expected to be built with a third of the parts of its peers, allowing it to reach that $250 price point. The MOD-t is the first release of Frog Ventures." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 7'

Photo via The Atlantic.

What the Death of Homepages Means for the Future of News. Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic: "Why should the death of homepages give rise to news that's more about readers? Because homepages reflect the values of institutions, and Facebook and Twitter reflect the interest of individual readers. These digital grazers have shown again and again that they aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, self-help, awe, and outrage dressed up news. Digitally native publishers are pretty good at pumping this kind of stuff out. Hence quizzes, hence animals, hence 51 Photos That Show Women Fighting Sexism Awesomely. Even serious publishing companies know that self-help and entertainment often outperform outstanding reporting." Read full article in The Atlantic. E.T.P. 5'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

(Great) Illustration by Brock Davis via Fast Company.

Baratunde Thruston writes a very provocative piece in Fast Company in which he poses the question: What if brands stop trying to join the conversation and make products worth talking about? I personally think that both things are not mutually exclusive, social media not always is an attempt to compensate for bad, outdated or boring products, but hey, for a lot of brands out there do think that, so he has a very good point: "Brands are so desperate "to join the conversation" on social media that most only get as far as "I gotta do the social media!" and don't have a thoughtful way to determine what to do on the social media. They ask, "What's our Snapchat strategy?" without ever considering if they need one.

Can social media promotion work? Sure. I've employed it for myself and my clients. But we've reached a point in marketing where we seem to have forgotten our best "engagement strategy": the product itself. The actual thing you're trying to promote is itself its own vehicle for promotion. Whoa." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 6'

As we share a couple of weeks ago, "the MoMA Design Store in New York City collaborated with the crowdfunding site to sell Kickstarter-successful products in stores and online, from May 13 to June 16. It's a part of NYCxDESIGN, a city-wide celebration of all things design." Have a look at some of the projects in Mashable. E.T.P. 9'

Photo: Flickr user Eli Christman via Fast Company.

Himanshu Saxena propose three new job titles that can companies to deal with two of the main issues that seem to be severely afflicting corporations today: how to survive gracefully in this uncongenial business environment and how to sustain leadership amidst growing competition and disenchanted customers. Are you willing to hire a Chief Reimagination Officer, and Chief Paradigm Officer and a Chief Paradox Officer? Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 4'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Image via Le Petit Prince.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: "Of all the books written in French over the past century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Le Petit Prince” is surely the best loved in the most tongues. This is very strange, because the book’s meanings—its purpose and intent and moral—still seem far from transparent, even seventy-five-plus years after its first appearance. Indeed, the startling thing, looking again at the first reviews of the book, is that, far from being welcomed as a necessary and beautiful parable, it bewildered and puzzled its readers." Read full article in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 7'

Photo via 7Capas Tumblr.

Jeff Beer in FastCoCreate writes about society's change of perception of skate culture: "Thanks to Dogtown & Z-Boys, we all know that modern street skateboarding and its culture was born in California. But a new interactive project from the National Film Board of Canada reveals that a little known Canadian film was a pioneer in both skateboarding film and the development of Direct Cinema, a movement of the late '50s and early '60s that helped change the face of filmmaking." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 7'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via TIME Magazine.

Tony Haile writes in TIME: "If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again." Not an average reader? Read full article in TIME. E.T.P. 12'

Photo via Fast Company.

The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind The Secretive Lab's Closed Doors: Space elevators, teleportation, hoverboards, and driverless cars: The top-secret Google X innovation lab opens up about what it does--and how it thinks. Read the full article by Jon Gertner in Fast Company. E.T.P. 10'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Image via Dazed Digital.

As with most technology news this is as interesting as disturbing: "Google might be cracking down on drug sellers, but don't worry: the darknet has you covered for all your illicit search needs. A new search engine called Grams has popped up, and it promises to make it easier for you to find black market goods including drugs, guns, stolen credit card numbers and even fake £100 Tesco vouchers." Read full article in Dazed Digital. E.T.P. 5'

Image via Fast Company.

The jokesters at Someecards have created a series of brutally honest job titles to restore order to a world gone mad with euphemism. Each entry stares deep into the soul of a modern job title and reduces it down to the main task for which its bearer is responsible. "Head of IT," for instance, is now transformed into "Director of Turning Things Off and Back On," a tactic that even the least computer-savvy individuals have learned works most frequently. Read more brutally honest versions of job titles in Fast Company. E.T.P. 3'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo via Les InRocks.

Eleven years after The Ignorance (2003), Milan Kundera is back with the novel La Fête d'insingnifiance. Always ironic, but maybe with less grief, is how El País describes it. Le Monde says that is as light as a quail's feather, or maybe an angel one. Originally written in French, the novel will be available in Spanish in September. Read full article (in French) in Les InRocks (E.T.P. 4') and in Spanish in El País (E.T.P. 7'). Couldn't find an article in English, but I found a great interview conducted soon after Kundera’s most recent book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, had become an immediate best-seller, by Christian Salmon in The Paris Review. E.T.P. 15'

Photo via Co.Create.

Mad Men premieres tonight and its creator, Matthew Weiner speaks with Co Create about advertising, the loneliness of social media, the eternal nature of storytelling and the theme of crafting your own narrative. The end is nigh. Read full article in Co.Create. E.T.P. 7'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Mashable.

Todd Wasserman in Mashable: "Will your wrist be the next billboard? With new entries from Sony, Samsung and Motorola hitting the market, plus rumored interest from Apple, smartwatches appear to be the next emerging category in computing. Some 15% of consumers are currently using wearable technology, a category that includes fitness bands and smartwatches, according to a recent study by Nielsen." Read full article in Mashable. E.T.P. 5'

Photo via Fast Company.

According to Fast Company Duolingo is reinventing how to learn a language, and I have to say that I agree, I'm learning French et je suis très heureuse! (This is not a sponsored post, by the way, I wish it was haha!) "Duolingo, the free language learning app, is rapidly expanding by embracing crowdsourcing as a way to provide more language courses to its 12 million users. The company launched with six core languages--French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, and English--providing free language instruction using a simple graphic interface similar to Rosetta Stone, to users who can't afford the hefty price tag of language learning software programs. Although they wanted to add every single language on Earth, hiring experts for each new language wasn't a viable option. Since its launch in 2012, Duolingo has received requests for over 500 languages, including fictional ones like Klingon." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 5'

Photo via The Guardian.

Steven Poole cleverly writes in The Guardian: "The news that Facebook has splurged $2bn (£1.2bn) on buying Oculus Rift, the world's first really viable virtual reality headset, has set off waves of plaintive snark in the world of videogames. Virtual reality headsets were supposed to be about totally immersive space battles or sword fighting simulations, not about peer-through simulacra of distant relatives' new kitchen windows. I mean, it's bad enough when Facebook friends have children and instantly change their profile picture to a baby photo, as though having regressed to mewling and puking infancy themselves. Imagine seeing that appalling phenomenon in the future Faceworld." Read full article in The Guardian. E.T.P. 5'

SCIENCE

Photo: NASA via PolicyMic.

"Civilization was pretty great while it lasted, wasn't it? Too bad it's not going to for much longer. According to a new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we only have a few decades left before everything we know and hold dear collapses.
The report, written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center along with a team of natural and social scientists, explains that modern civilization is doomed. And there's not just one particular group to blame, but the entire fundamental structure and nature of our society". Read full article in PolicyMic. E.T.P 6'

Image via Fast Company.

"The question of who has accelerated climate change the most isn't that complicated. It was just a few dozen companies that extracted the majority of our oil, gas, and coal over the last 150 years, allowing the fuel to be burned, and the emissions to cause havoc in the atmosphere.
A recent paper by Richard Heede, from the Climate Accountability Institute, in Colorado, shows that just 90 companies produced two-thirds of the fossil fuels burned in the industrial era. That includes 50 investor-owned companies like Chevron and Exxon, 31 state-owned companies like Mexico's Pemex, and nine government-run entities from the ex-Soviet Union, China and other countries." E.T.P. 6'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Mashable.

Cloak is definitely the best app I've heard of in a lot of time. This is how is described in Mashable: A new app claims to be the social network for the anti-social. While most social media apps focus on helping you get closer to your friends, Cloak uses location data to make it easier for you to avoid your connections. The app pulls in location information from your social networks to show you where friends are so you can avoid accidentally bumping into people you don't want to see. Read full article in Mashable. E.T.P. 3'

Photo via Fast Company.

John Pavlus writes in Fast Company: "Ever wondered what George Lois, Daniel Libeskind, and Margaret McCurry have on their nightstands? Wonder no more, thanks to Pentagram's new website.
Some people think I treat Pentagram too fawningly around here. Well, can I help it if they keep doing great pieces of work? Here's another: Designers & Books, a spare, handsome website that lets you glance over the shoulder of your favorite A-list designers and see what books inspire them. With 50 designers, 678 books, and a few other bits and bobs to choose from, there's definitely something here for everybody." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 7'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo via Fast Company.

The future of reading. "On March 8, the New York Times unveiled a new app called NYT Now that signals a major shift in how publishers package the news. For $8 a month, NYT Now will offer users access to a limited number of stories, and those stories will be presented in a totally new way (for the Times, that is): as a series of cards, one per story, with an image and, at most, two bullet points summing up the news. "It's not a news summary app," is the first thing Cliff Levy, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner tapped to lead the NYT Now team, told me in a phone interview. I got a detailed description of how it works, how it looks, and what its aims are, and here's my takeaway: NYT Now is a news summary app. But thanks to its design, it may actually work as intended--and what's intended is to be as native to mobile as the newest version of NYTimes.com is to the web". Full article in Fast Company. E.T.P 9'

Kogonada is a South Korean filmmaker and regular contributor to Sight & Sound whose projects have been featured on NPR, The Atlantic, Canal+ and Der Spiegel, and have screened internationally. The pays a little homage to Wes Anderson and his beloved symmetry in this short: Wes Anderson // Centered. Have a look in his Vimeo. E.T.P. 2'30''

SCIENCE

Photo via NPR: A volunteer participates in LSD research in Viejas, Calif., in 1966.

The sixties are gone, but psychedelic research treatment continue. "In 1966, psychedelic drug advocate and former Harvard professor Timothy Leary appeared on the Merv Griffin Show. "I'm in the unfortunate situation of being about 20 years ahead of my time," Leary said. When asked how many times he'd taken LSD, he answered 311. The audience gasped.
Leary was fired for experimenting with psychedelics on undergraduates, and before long, LSD was classified as a Schedule I drug, meaning it had "no known medical use." Research on the medical uses of LSD and other psychedelics came to a halt. Today, psychedelic drug research is coming back, and scientists are picking up where Leary and other researchers left off, conducting experiments on therapeutic uses of these drugs. But the research still faces stigma, and funding is hard to get." Listen to this interesting program in NPR Website. E.T.P. 12'

 

Image via FastCoExist.

Your fat is why you're not as bright as you could be. Obesity doesn't make you less intelligent, but it might cloud your cognitive abilities. In a recent study, conducted by researchers at Georgia Regents University, the blood of obese mice had especially high levels of a chemical called interleukin 1, a substance born from fat cells that can cause inflammation. When the researchers later examined the obese mice brains, they found that interleukin 1 had passed the blood-brain barrier--something that normally should not be possible. The substance had seeped into the hippocampus, an area responsible for memory and learning. Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

Harvey Deutschendorf writes for Fast Company a nice article about one of the latest buzzword in business: Storytelling. "Not only is it commonly accepted that good storytelling beats other forms of communication hands down, there is scientific evidence that backs this up. When we receive information from a presentation on powerpoint the language parts of our brain that decodes words into meaning becomes activated. However, when we listen to a story a lot more happens. Not only does the language processing part become activated, but other parts are used to process the experience of the story for ourselves. For example, descriptions for foods would activate our sensory cortex. Hearing a story puts much more of our brain to work than simply listening to a presentation. Not only can we stimulate various areas of the brain, but if the listener relates to a story, their brain’s can become synchronized with the storyteller’s. Emotions that the storyteller is experiencing can be shared with the listener". Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 6'

Photo via PSFK.

So, finally here they are, Google Glasses will be used in a trial by Virgin staff to offer personalized service to passengers. "Virgin Atlantic concierge staff in the Upper Class lounge at London Heathrow wear Google Glass to provide a hyper personalized experience to all customers. Google Glass will enable the staff to immediately be able to identify a customer by name as well as see their flight details and preferences in food and drink. This experiment was created in response to findings in a Virgin Airlines survey that stated over half of travelers worldwide think flying is less glamorous or exciting than it was in the past." Read full article in PSFK. E.T.P. 2'

Photo via Wired.

"The Toy Fair is exactly what it sounds like. It’s been going on for 111 years, and it’s huge. This year, more than 1,150 toy companies squeezed into New York City’s Javits Convention Center to show off the new things kids will be clamoring for later this year. Toy traditionalists and forward-thinkers have much to get excited about: While apps, robots, and meme-based toys are all trending, plenty of old-school playthings are in the mix, too. " Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Image:Flickr user Dan DeLuca via Fast Company.

Fast Company published a list with the world's top 10 most innovative companies in advertising. Among them is GoPro, Volvo Trucks, and Samsung. According to FC by having a look at their strategies you can have a pretty good idea of how the future of advertising will look like. Read list in Fast Company. E.T.P. 6'

Photos La Muralla Roja via Fubiz.

Have a look at this amazing, colorful and very original architectonic project in Spain made by Ricardo Bofill in La Manzanera, Spain. The complex is called La Muralla Roja. More photos and info in Fubiz. E.T.P. 4'