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Monday, February 13, 2023

8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year

S1

8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year

And then last year I surprised myself by reading 50 books. This year I’m on pace for 100. I’ve never felt more creatively alive in all areas of my life. I feel more interesting, I feel like a better father, and my writing output has dramatically increased. Amplifying my reading rate has been the domino that’s tipped over a slew of others.

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S40
10 Steps to Creating a Data-Driven Culture

For many companies, a strong, data-driven culture remains elusive, and data are rarely the universal basis for decision making. Why is it so hard? Our work in a range of industries indicates that the biggest obstacles to creating data-based businesses aren’t technical; they’re cultural. We’ve distilled 10 data commandments to help create and sustain a culture with data at its core: Data-driven culture starts at the (very) top; choose metrics with care – and cunning; don’t pigeonhole your data scientists within silos; fix basic data access issues quickly; quantify uncertainty; make proofs of concept simple and robust; offer specialized training where needed; use analytics to help employees  as well as customers; be willing to trade flexibility in programming languages for consistency in the short-term; and get in the habit of explaining analytical choices.

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S11
Peloton Bike+ review: The encapsulation of Peloton's mission and dilemma

A few years ago, Peloton's stationary exercise bikes experienced a meteoric ascension into the public conversation, with demand rising well beyond the company’s ability to deliver. But this success was directly followed by nosediving sales, stymied interest, and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue loss as the world began recovering from the global pandemic and people headed back to gyms.

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S2
How one virus can block another

Three years into the pandemic, Covid-19 is still going strong, causing wave after wave as case numbers soar, subside, then ascend again. But this past autumn saw something new – or rather, something old: the return of the flu. Plus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) – a virus that makes few headlines in normal years – ignited in its own surge, creating a "tripledemic".

The surges in these old foes were particularly striking because flu and RSV all but disappeared during the first two winters of the pandemic. Even more surprising, one particular version of the flu may have gone extinct during the early Covid-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization's surveillance programme has not definitively detected the B/Yamagata flu strain since March 2020. (Read more from BBC Future about how viruses go extinct.)

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S9
What makes for a "great" sex life?

The unhappiest time in a sex therapist’s office is around Valentine’s Day, says Dr. Peggy Kleinplatz, a professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of Ottawa. “It’s the day where I see the most miserable couples, the most distressed couples,” she says.

High pressure and expectations can prove an explosive combination for people already struggling with their sex lives. Sex, it turns out, isn’t as easy or simple as popular culture might lead us to believe.

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S8
Is there life on our Solar System's icy moons? Extreme places on Earth may hold clues

In their attempt to understand how life might thrive on other planets, astrobiologists often travel to the most extreme and inhospitable places on Earth. And when it comes to simulating environmental conditions on icy moons like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, Antarctica is about the closest analog we can get.

A new paper led by Alessandro Napoli from the University of Rome, Italy, highlights the rich microbial diversity near Concordia Station, a French-Italian research facility on the Antarctic Plateau, more than 3,000 meters above sea level. Here the average yearly temperature is only -50oC (-58oF), and winter temperatures can drop down to -80oC.

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S5
How Supergenes Beat the Odds—and Fuel Evolution

Thousands of miles from home in the steamy Amazon rain forest in the mid-1800s, the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates had a problem. More than one, really; there were thumb-size biting insects, the ever-present threat of malaria, venomous snakes, and mold and mildew that threatened to overtake his precious specimens before they could be shipped back to England. But the nagging scientific problem that bothered him involved butterflies.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop­ments and trends in mathe­matics and the physical and life sciences.

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S35
Give Yourself a Happiness Boost With These 6 Science-backed Tips

It’s one thing to know what makes people happy, but quite another to live a happy life oneself. I didn’t get a true taste of happiness until I quit my decade-long career as a happiness academic, packed all I’d need for many months onto a bicycle, and began meandering my way around the world to Bhutan.

For those unfamiliar with Bhutan, it’s a small Himalayan kingdom famed for basing all its national policy decisions on happiness.

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S10
"Brain-eating" amoeba beaten by old European drug

A decades-old drug used to treat urinary tract infections (UTIs) appears to have saved the life of a man infected by the “brain-eating” amoeba — and his case highlights the tremendous potential of a new type of genetic sequencing technology.

The patient: In 2021, a 54-year-old man was admitted to a Northern California hospital following a seizure. After an MRI revealed a mass in his brain, he was transferred to the UCSF Medical Center, where the mass was biopsied. 

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S36
30 Years Ago, a Classic Time-loop Comedy Rewrote the Rules of Sci-Fi

Few movies achieve the level of instant recognition offered by Groundhog Day. Since its premiere 30 years ago, it’s been regarded as the gold standard of the time loop movie. If we were to explore the movies, TV shows, and parodies it inspired, we’d be here all day.

If you somehow need a refresher, Bill Murray is cynical, disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors, who’s once again grudgingly heading out on his annual Groundhog Day assignment to report live at the ceremony in Punxsutawney. Phil openly despises what he sees as a cutesy tradition in an equally saccharine town, which puts him at odds with his charming producer, Rita (Andie McDowell). Phil, of course, soon finds himself trapped in a mysterious time loop, forcing him to relive his most hated holiday over and over again.

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S7
The Wild Logistics of Rihanna's Super Bowl Halftime Show

When you’re the person (at least partially) responsible for Left Shark, you have to think about every possible way Super Bowl audiences watch halftime shows. That’s one of the many things Bruce Rodgers has learned over the 16 years he’s spent as production designer for the mid-game performance during American football’s biggest night. “Never again,” Rodgers laughs when asked if he considered including blue fish dancers for Rihanna’s Super Bowl LVII performance.

Instead, the superstar made her comeback performance (it’s Rihanna’s first since the 2018 Grammys) atop seven platforms suspended anywhere from 15 to 60 feet above the field. And while the LED-lit platforms, which were arranged in different positions as the singer moved through hits ranging from “Bitch Better Have My Money” to “Rude Boy,” looked cool as hell, they also served a very practical purpose: They kept her off the grass. 

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S39
How to Get Your To-Do List Done When You're Always in Meetings

You keep waiting for the “perfect time” to sit down and knock out your work presentation in one go, but at the end of the day you realize you spent your time in meetings. You may never get your perfect time or ideal day, so start working within the reality that meetings happen — and that you can get important stuff done in between them. Try to break down the big task into bite-sized ones you can fit in between your meetings. You can also try scheduling in your project work time by blocking off a couple hours at a time and trying to stick to that schedule. Once you have that time, you can prioritize which projects you want to work on and in what order. Don’t let meetings keep you from getting those projects done. There’s plenty of time, if you can strategize and prepare for it.

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S1
8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year

And then last year I surprised myself by reading 50 books. This year I’m on pace for 100. I’ve never felt more creatively alive in all areas of my life. I feel more interesting, I feel like a better father, and my writing output has dramatically increased. Amplifying my reading rate has been the domino that’s tipped over a slew of others.

Continued here




S6
The Best Running Gear for Your Long and Chilly Winter

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED

I have given up on persuading people to take up running outside in winter. Gyms are fine! And if pulling on multiple layers of clothing and lights to run outside in the grim, freezing dark isn't something that calls to you, a few well-meaning words probably won't do the trick. 

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S38
To Sound Like a Leader, Think About What You Say, and How and When You Say It

Whether you are an associate manager or a senior executive, what you say, how you say it, when you say it, to whom you say it, and whether you say it within the proper context are critical components of your strategic leadership potential. This “executive voice” is less about your performance and more about your strategic instincts and your awareness of the signals you send in daily interactions and communications. Developing an executive voice can mean the difference between success and failure in your communication and leadership style. You can show up more strategically in meetings by doing your homework and by taking the lead in analyzing difficult situations. Bring solutions, not just problems. And stay calm in the pressure cooker. People with an effective executive voice aren’t easily rattled. They provide levelheaded leadership even when — in fact, particularly when — everyone around them is losing their composure. By making the necessary adjustments to your approach to participation, you can start showing up more strategically in every setting you encounter at work.

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S3
iRobot's Combo j7+ Has a Robot Arm and No Sense of Direction

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED

Last summer, iRobot—Roomba’s parent company—announced that they had finally agreed to be acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion. That news spawned a flurry of alarmed articles (including our own) that the megacorp now had access to data on the layout and possessions inside millions of peoples’ homes. Last December, iRobot reported to investors that it had 75 percent of the United States market in robot vacuums.

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S24
101 Very Simple Habits That Will Improve Your Life Today (Part 2)

No. 48: "Share a really cool and helpful list on social media."

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S13
Can Giorgia Meloni Govern Italy?

A founding European Union member adjusts to its new leader, whose rise breaks a postwar taboo.

Italy’s first far-right leader since World War II—and the first woman ever to lead the country—is small, blond, fierce, street-smart, working-class, and Gen X. Raised by a single mother in Rome after her father took off for a new life in the Canary Islands when she was a toddler, Giorgia Meloni came of age in far-right youth movements. Now 46, she has been a professional politician since she was a teenager.

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S4
How to Make Sure You're Not Accidentally Sharing Your Location

Your devices and apps really, really want to know where you are—whether it's to tell you the weather, recommend some restaurants you might like, or better target advertising at you. Managing what you're sharing and what you're not sharing, and when, can quickly get confusing.

It's also possible that you have inconsistencies in the various location histories logged by your devices: Times when you thought you'd switched off and blocked location sharing but you're still being tracked, or vice versa.

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S15
Go Ahead and Ban My Book

To those who seek to stop young people from reading The Handmaid’s Tale: Good luck with that. It’ll only make them want to read it more.

It’s shunning time in Madison County, Virginia, where the school board recently banished my novel The Handmaid’s Tale from the shelves of the high-school library. I have been rendered “unacceptable.” Governor Glenn Youngkin enabled such censorship last year when he signed legislation allowing parents to veto teaching materials they perceive as sexually explicit.

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S26
African researchers are ready to share more work openly - now policy must make it possible

Librarians are the curators of creativity. They collect success stories and share it with the world. Traditionally, the success was from published authors, which libraries shared with the local community. More recently, the model has been flipped: libraries have started to collect from the local community to share with everyone.

Adoption is steadily under way, evidenced by the number of open access policies, the growth of open science standards and policies or the number of times it has been searched in Google over the past few years, but Africa has been slower to take up the change. A change on such a large scale requires that certain things are in place: policies, willingness to implement them, and the infrastructure to make implementation possible.

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S33
Are Hot Tubs Dangerous? A Microbiologist Reveals the Filthy Truth

For many centuries we have bathed in communal waters. Sometimes for cleanliness but more often for pleasure. Indeed, in ancient Greece, baths were taken in freshwater, or sometimes the sea — which was thought of as a sacred place dedicated to local gods and so was considered an act of worship.

But it was the Romans who created state-sponsored aqueducts to allow for large-scale public baths. These were mainly used for relaxation but also for more private pleasures, too. Yes, the public baths were often where Romans did the dirty deed — sometimes with their bath attendant slaves.

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S25
Goffin's cockatoo named third species that carries toolsets around in preparation for future tasks

From pocket knives to smart phones, humans keep inventing ever-more-sophisticated tools. However, the notion that tool use is an exclusively human trait was shattered in the 1960s when Jane Goodall observed our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, retrieving termites from holes with stripped twigs.

Tool use among non-human animals is hotly debated. It’s often thought a big brain is needed to understand the properties of objects, how to finely manipulate them, and how to teach this to other members of a species.

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S30
Chinese Spy Balloon: Why the 18th-Century Tech Still Flies

The old-fashioned surveillance technique isn’t common these days, but it has certain advantages.

The U.S. military shot down what U.S. officials called a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, 2023. Officials said that the U.S. Navy planned to recover the debris, which is in shallow water.

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S17
Photos: Superb Owl Sunday VII

A special Sunday event: our seventh annual photo collection celebrating such magnificent birds of prey. Not Eagles (nor Chiefs), these nocturnal hunters hail from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America and are depicted here in photos from recent years. If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely), I invite you to have a look.

A snowy owl lands at sunset in a field in central Minnesota. #

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S21


S31
5 Years Ago, SpaceX Launched Its Silliest Payload Yet And It's Still in Orbit

The space-faring Tesla roadster set a speed record unlikely to ever fall to another car, even another Tesla.

For the first test flight of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on February 6, 2018, SpaceX — and Tesla — CEO Elon Musk decided to launch the “silliest” test payload imaginable: his own car. The midnight cherry-hued Tesla roadster reached around 26,000 miles per hour, sufficient speed to escape Earth’s gravity and outpace any ground speed record imaginable.

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S23
5 Powerful Strategies to Help You Deal With Toxic People

It can be hard to stand up for yourself. These tips might make it easier.

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S34
These Inexpensive Home Upgrades Are So Clever You'll Wish They Were Invented Sooner

Upgrading your home can be incredibly expensive, especially if you’re looking to hire a professional to do the work for you. But if you’re trying to stick to a budget or simply don’t have the funds for a new backsplash, not a problem: There are tons of inexpensive home upgrades out there that won’t break the bank, and I’ve even compiled the best ones into a list for you to check out below.

From stylish floating shelves to modern outlet covers, these upgrades are so clever you’ll wish they were invented sooner. And since many of them are incredibly easy to install, you shouldn’t have any trouble giving your home a gorgeous makeover within the span of an afternoon. So what are you waiting for? The peel-and-stick backsplash I’ve included isn’t going to be around forever — especially considering how reasonable the price is. Keep scrolling for more.

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S14
The Super Bowl Is an Economic Indicator

How the big game’s ads explain the crypto bubble, the price yo-yo, and the revenge of the touch-grass economy

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it every week.

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S18
She Helped Unlock the Science of the Covid Vaccine

Kizzmekia Corbett helped lead a team of scientists contributing to one of the most stunning achievements in the history of immunizations: a highly effective, easily manufactured vaccine against Covid-19.

Kizzmekia Corbett was at the vanguard of the race for a vaccine against Covid-19. Above, she is in her office at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. Credit...Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

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S22
4 Bad Habits That Keep Toxic Bosses From Becoming Good Leaders

For starters, toxic bosses demand that things go their way all the time.

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S28
NASA Might Finally Solve the Million-Degree Mystery of the Sun's Corona

The Sun is full of mysteries. A close look at a new collage of light from NASA might help answer at least one pesky question about our local star.

In a new colored image of the Sun, which NASA released on Thursday, are three shades of colors. The two most obvious are green and red. They portray wavelengths of light the Sun emits across its entire face. But in a few corners are splotches of blue. These represent small events that could be elevating the temperature of the Sun’s outer atmosphere to more than a million degrees.

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S32
You Need to Play the Trippiest ‘90s Fever Dream on Nintendo Switch ASAP

Hours dominate our lives. They’re how we measure our days, our labor and our speed. It’s our most popular unit of time (sorry baktun) because of how easy it is for us to conceptualize. Despite our nostalgic pining we must always live in the present, and because of this the natural human body clock senses hours with ease. It’s how we measure our video games, too. Playtimes are always described in hours, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. What if a game measured playtimes in seconds? What would happen?

WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames would happen. A trippy, absurdist foray into an inadvertently existential examination of “what is video game?” the vaunted GameBoy Advance title just dropped on Nintendo Switch Expansion Pass. It is unlike anything you’ve ever played, an arcade-style experience years ahead of its time.

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S12
The FBI's most controversial surveillance tool is under threat

An existential fight over the US government’s ability to spy on its own citizens is brewing in Congress. And as this fight unfolds, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s biggest foes on Capitol Hill are no longer reformers merely interested in reining in its authority. Many lawmakers, elevated to new heights of power by the recent election, are working to dramatically curtail the methods by which the FBI investigates crime.

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S16
The Netflix Royal Drama You Might Not Know About

Helen Lewis’s culture picks include a period drama on “the Habsburg Meghan Markle,” a “majestically petty” Clive James poem, and a certain royal memoir.

Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

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S29
'The Last of Us' Episode 5 Rewrites One Heartbreaking Video Game Scene

With the exception of its standout third episode, HBO’s The Last of Us has stuck remarkably close to its source material.

Even its fourth and fifth episodes, which feature an original villain named Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), stay true to the heartbreaking final beats of the game’s infamous summer chapter. Unfortunately, that means the TV show sends both Henry (Lamar Johnson) and his younger brother, Sam (Keivonn Montreal Woodard), out in heartbreaking fashion.

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S27
Hayley Williams, Without a Guidebook

This month, Paramore—a buoyant and nimble pop-rock band fronted by the thirty-four-year-old singer and songwriter Hayley Williams—released “This Is Why,” its sixth album, and the first since 2017’s “After Laughter.” Though Paramore is still considered a pillar of the early-two-thousands pop-punk scene—a now mostly bygone era of neon-streaked hair, exuberant riffs, white belts, urgent and plaintive lyrics, and Vans in varying stages of purposeful disintegration—the band has spent much of the past decade making dynamic, tender rock music that’s rooted in rhythm and blues and feels at odds with the wounded grousing of its former colleagues.

Paramore officially formed in 2004, in Franklin, Tennessee, but the major labels started scouting Williams—hungrily—when she was just fourteen. (It was Williams who insisted that she wanted to be in a band, rather than embarking on a solo career.) Since then, Paramore has undergone several lineup changes, some tumultuous, and went on an indefinite hiatus in 2017. Williams released two aching but ferocious solo records during this time: “Petals for Armor,” in 2020, and “Flowers for Vases/Descansos,” in 2021. The band has since re-formed and is enjoying a curious surge in popularity, due in part to a revival of interest in the bands that people now in their early thirties worshipped when they were young. Its current lineup includes Williams, the drummer Zac Farro, and the guitarist Taylor York.

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S19
The Creative Accident: Visionary Ceramicist Edith Heath on Serendipity, the Antidote to Obsolescence, and the Five Pillars of Timelessness

“No one is fated or doomed to love anyone,” the philosopher-poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “the accidents happen.”

What is true of interpersonal love is also true of our labors of love — creative accidents are a mighty instrument of art, often steering entire trajectories of expression and endeavor in directions we could not have willed.

That is what the visionary ceramicist Edith Heath (May 24, 1911–December 27, 2005) explores in a previously unpublished lecture titled “The Creative Accident.”

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