BoredReading

Grab and go

a month ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Every retailer knows that the items that sell the best are at eye level or at the cash register. Some people are hungry, rushed, distracted and lazy....

The Dylatov Pass Incident: Has One of the Biggest Soviet Mysteries Been Solved?

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Most of us would go out of our way not to set foot anywhere near a place the local natives refer to as “Dead Mountain.” That didn’t stop the Dyatlov...

Ready to be…

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Disappointed Delighted Amazed Offended Ripped off Grateful Loved Sometimes we get what we expect.

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language...

Squeaky wheels

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

One strategy is to spend time finding the one wheel and address it. The better approach is to realize that if there’s one wheel that’s squeaking, it’s...

An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again....

The Weekly World News version of the future

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

What if someone is just making stuff up? Years ago, I worked with the supermarket tabloid to make an ironic, shouty, somewhat funny book that has...

William Faulkner Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spectacular Letter (1924)

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Working a dull civil service job ill-suited to your talents does not make you a writer, but plenty of famous writers have worked such jobs. Nathaniel...

Jigsaw Block Printing on Fabric

2 months ago

from Handprinted - Blog in creative

Block printing onto fabric is such a fun way to create your own designs. Jigsaw printing allows you to carve just one block to print a multi-coloured...

Books (and more)

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Brad Feld has been contributing to and leading the tech community for more than thirty years. His books have always been inspiring and useful, but his...

The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time: From Botticelli and Bosch to Bacon and Basquiat

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paintings of all time. Naturally, those...

Which inbox?

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

It’s easier than ever to fall into an inbox mindset. There are things to do, and we do them. Inbox zero is the unattainable goal that fills our days....

Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fascinating Look at His Report Cards

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Albert Einstein was a precocious child. At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At...

What do we do when it breaks?

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

The unexpected happens. Systems fail, humans are unpredictable, interfaces aren’t perfect… The customer service professional demonstrates their...

A Life Laid Bare

2 months ago

from Neocha – Culture & Creativity in Asia in creative

Paying attention to attention

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

There are people and organizations that are working overtime to redirect and manipulate your attention. The question is: Are they more aware and...

Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses: Explore Courses on Justice, American Government, Literature, Religion, CompSci & More

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Image by Rizka, via Wikimedia Commons In South Korea, where I live, there may be no brand as respected as Habodeu. Children dream of it; adults...

Hallucinations and human work

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

“AI is brilliant and it can do everything.” “AI hallucinates sometimes and it can’t be trusted.” “AI is a trick, a clever way to induce people to...

Will Machines Ever Truly Think? Richard Feynman Contemplates the Future of Artificial Intelligence (1985)

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Though its answer has grown more complicated in recent years, the question of whether computers will ever truly think has been around for quite some...

Meet The Maker: Louis Andrews

2 months ago

from Handprinted - Blog in creative

I’m Louis Andrews, multidisciplinary artist with a primary focus on tattooing and printmaking. After a brief stint studying painting at Camberwell I...

Just the right length

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Pop songs are 200 seconds long because the mechanical properties of 78 and 45 rpm records can deliver one song with decent fidelity of that length....

Ridley Scott’s Cinematic TV Commercials: An 80-Minute Compilation Spanning 1968–2023

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

“In the future, e‑mail will make the written word a thing of the past,” declares the narration of a 1999 television commercial for Orange, the French...

Paddling upstream

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

We notice the current most when we’re headed against it. It’s easy to take our advantage for granted when we’re headed the other way and it’s helping...

The World’s Oldest Homework: A Look at Babylonian Math Homework from 4,000 Years Ago

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Homework has lately become unfashionable, at least according to what I’ve heard from teachers in certain parts of the United States. That may...

Worthless noise isn’t information

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Data becomes information when at least one of two related things are true: If you’re not getting one of these things, then the data is simply noise. A...

How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting Process, Breathing New Life Into His Music

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

On his 84th birthday this past Saturday, Bob Dylan played a show. That was in keeping with not only his still-serious touring schedule, but also his...

The 1:1 method

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

The reason that most memos, speeches and edicts fall flat is simple: we get stuck on the idea that we’re talking to a crowd. When we’re speaking or...

A 3D Model Reveals What the Parthenon and Its Interior Looked Like 2,500 Years Ago

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Standing atop the Acropolis in Athens as it has for nearly 2,500 years now, the Parthenon remains an impressive sight indeed. Not that those two and a...

1,000 fans (which sort?)

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Not all customers are fans. And not all fans are the sort of customers you can thrive with. Cadres of supporters often migrate into one of two camps…...

Leo Tolstoy’s Family Recipe for Mac and Cheese

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

In 1874, Stepan Andreevich Bers published The Cookbook and gave it as a gift to his sister, countess Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya, the wife of the great...

Clarke’s Law (part 2)

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

All sufficiently advanced technology is now widespread. Batman used to have gadgets that gave him an advantage over his adversaries. And Henry Ford...

The “Dark Relics” of Christianity: Preserved Skulls, Blood & Other Grim Artifacts

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Christianity often manifests in popular culture through celebrations like Christmas and Easter, or icons like lambs and fish. Less often do you see it...

“How do I get the most of out my people?”

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Alas, this is the wrong question for a leader or manager to ask. It’s more productive to wonder, “how do we create the conditions for our people to...

How Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd & Jethro Tull Financed the Making Monty Python and the Holy Grail

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn’t a big-budget spectacle, and nobody knew that better than the Pythons themselves. Necessity being the mother of...

The most important decision

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

“What should I do next?” Not next year or for the rest of my life. Right now. The apparently trivial choice–whether or not to open an email, make a...

1980s Metalhead Kids Are Alright: Scientific Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjusted Adults

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

In the 1980s, The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an organization co-founded by Tipper Gore and the wives of several other Washington power...

“They’re not paying me enough to care”

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

This is an understandable sentiment. As jobs push people to be automatons and often offer little in the way of respect, it’s easy to quietly quit. But...

Watch Pablo Picasso’s Creative Process Unfold in Real-Time: Rare Footage Shows Him Creating Drawings of Faces, Bulls & Chickens

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Pablo Picasso was born not long before the invention of the motion picture. With a different set of inclinations, he might have become one of the most...

The Impact Matrix: Moving to the golden quadrant

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Tactics are tempting. We can lean into them, invest, build our skills and count on results. Strategies are more elusive. And a mismatch between...

The World Record for the Shortest Math Article: 2 Words

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

In 2004, John Conway and Alexander Soifer, both working on mathematics at Princeton University, submitted to the American Mathematical Monthly what...

Meet the Maker: Ian O' Halloran

2 months ago

from Handprinted - Blog in creative

My name is Ian O’Halloran. I am a professional Artist and Printmaker living and working in the Sussex Weald near Herstmonceux (UK). I am and always...

Embracing the Rotten Tomato gap

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

The site gives movies two scores on a scale from 1 to 100: One is from critics, and the other is from typical viewers who are taking the time to chime...

The PhD Theses of Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein & Others, Explained with Illustrations

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Raise your children with a love of science, and there’s a decent chance they’ll grow up wanting to be like Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert...

Effort and value

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

We expend effort. We create value. It’s easy to get confused about which one we’re going to ultimately be compensated for.

How Civilizations Built on Top of Each Other: Discover What Lies Beneath Rome, Troy & Other Cities

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

The idea of discovering a lost ancient city underground has long captured the human imagination. But why are the abandoned built environments of those...

Energy and systems complexity

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Wild animals forage. They spend calories and take risks to acquire food. If the required work and risk expended are more than the food they acquire,...

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Evolved Over 70 Years and Changed America

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

In the new Architectural Digest video above, Michael Wyetzner talks about a fair few buildings we’ve featured over the years here on Open Culture: the...

Infinity is not a number

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Little kids get confused about this… just add a few more to a very big number, and you have infinity. Actually, infinity is a feeling and a concept...

How Our Depiction of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actually Looked Like

2 months ago

from Open Culture in creative

Whether or not you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God, you probably envision him (or, if you prefer, Him) in much the same way as most everyone...

Activation is not a secret

2 months ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

…but it’s often overlooked. A farmer might yearn for twice as much land. But it’s far more efficient to double the yield on the land he already has....