From Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen:

When you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there is no longer a human being whose job is to show you around. You are handed an iPad, you put in little earbuds, and the iPad tells you what to do – turn left; turn right; walk forward. In each room, a photograph of where you are appears on the screen, while a narrator describes it. So as we walked around we were surrounded by blank-faced people, looking almost all the time at their screens. As we walked, I felt more and more tense. When we got to the jungle room – Elvis’s favourite place in the mansion – the iPad was chattering away when a middle-aged man standing next to me turned to say something to his wife. In front of us, I could see the large fake plants that Elvis had bought to turn this room into his own artificial jungle. “Honey,” he said, “this is amazing. Look.” He waved the iPad in her direction, and began to move his finger across it. “If you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right.”

His wife stared, smiled, and began to swipe at her own iPad. I leaned forward. “But, sir,” I said, “there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the jungle room. You can see it unmediated. Here. Look.” I waved my hand, and the fake green leaves rustled a little. Their eyes returned to their screens. “Look!” I said. “Don’t you see? We’re actually there. There’s no need for your screen. We are in the jungle room.” They hurried away. I turned to [teenager], ready to laugh about it all – but he was in a corner, holding his phone under his jacket, flicking through Snapchat. [...] I realised as I sat with [teenager] that, as with so much anger, my rage towards him was really anger towards myself. His inability to focus was something I felt happening to me too. I was losing my ability to be present, and I hated it. "I know something’s wrong," Adam said, holding his phone tightly in his hand. "But I have no idea how to fix it." Then he went back to texting.

I realised then that I needed to understand what was really happening to him and to so many of us. That moment turned out to be the start of a journey that transformed how I think about attention. I travelled all over the world in the next three years, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, interviewing the leading experts in the world about focus. What I learned persuaded me that we are not now facing simply a normal anxiety about attention, of the kind every generation goes through as it ages. We are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live. I learned there are twelve factors that have been proven to reduce people’s ability to pay attention and that many of these factors have been rising in the past few decades – sometimes dramatically.

The article is an interesting read (though it does not list those twelve factors). It's an excerpt from a forthcoming book, which I presume does.

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Edited to add (2022-01-09): I've now seen some challenges to the research in this book, including that the CMU study was not peer-reviewed and that some other studies have not been reported accurately.

Our government is out of control; that's been true for some time but it's gotten worse. The murder of George Floyd is appalling. That he's one of many is appalling. That many police are trained to do such violence, and are supported in it, is appalling. That our government responds with more unprovoked violence and escalation is appalling. I keep using that word, and I feel like I should have better words and more coherent thoughts, and I don't.

But I have this talk that you should listen to -- under 20 minutes, and Trevor Noah has some insightful things to say about the many dominoes that have fallen to get us here and societal contracts and more.

What is society? Society is a contract that we sign as human beings. We agree on common rules, common ideals, and common practices that are going to define us as a group. And the contract is only as strong as the people who are abiding by it.

Some stuff has been accumulating in browser tabs. Some of it lost relevance because I waited too long (oops). Here's the rest.

This article explains the Intel problem that's going to slow your computer down soon. I don't know much about how kernels work and I understood it. I do have some computer-science background, though, so if somebody who doesn't wants to let me know if this is accessible or incoherent, please do. In terms of effects of the bug, you're going to get an OS update soon and then things will be slower because the real fix is to replace hardware, but you probably want to take the update anyway.

This infographic gives some current advice to avoid being spear-phished. It has one tip that was new to me but makes a lot of sense: if you have any doubt about an attachment but are going to open it anyway, drop it into Google Drive and open it in your browser. If it's malicious it'll attack Google's servers instead of your computer, and they have better defenses.

Sandra and Woo: what the public hears vs. what a software developer hears.

This account of one hospital's triage process for major incidents blew me away. I shared the link with someone I know in the medical profession and he said "oh, Sunrise -- they have their (stuff) together" -- they have a reputation, it appears. Link courtesy of metahacker and hakamadare.

I was one of the subject-matter experts interviewed for this study on Stack Overflow's documentation project. Horyun was an intern and was great to work with.

From siderea, the two worlds, or rubber-duck programming and modes of thinking.

The phatic and the anti-inductive doesn't summarize well, but I found it interesting. Also, I learned some new words. "Phatic" means talking for the sake of talking -- so small-talk, but not just that. Social lubricant fits in here too.

Rands on listening for managers.

From the same source as the "phatic" post, a story about zombies made me laugh a lot.

From Twitter:
Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender says "Do you all want something to drink?"
The first logician says "I don't know."
The second logician says "I don't know."
The third logician says "Yes."

I want to ask you, Internet, to please stop taking all of this [supposed evidence] at face value. Please stop taking things like lists of names stolen from a company as a reason to abuse others — online or offline. When you see a story about someone doing something you think is either wrong or even just lame, it’s not a reason for you to abuse, stalk or attack someone you don’t know.

From gardenfey comes this fun video about what motivates us. The presentation is engaging; I didn't mind at all that it's ten minutes long.

shewhomust posted this item about spoilers and meta-spoilers. Heh.

Big numbers can be hard to understand without some localization. With that in mind, try this visualization of the gulf oil spill, linked by siderea.

And speaking of interesting visualizations, dagonell posted this depiction of Earth, from tallest mountain to deepest ocean trench.

Also from dagonell: every country is the best at something, though, as he points out, some fare better than others.

This visualization isn't about the planet; it's about the changes in Facebook privacy over time.

Not a visualization: How to keep someone with you forever through the power of sick systems. Linked by lots of people; I first saw it from metahacker. I have not lived that kind of abuse, for which I am very thankful, but this tracks with what I've heard.

And on the lighter (err) side: a light saber strong enough to burn flesh -- for sale for $200. Wow. And yikes. Link from astroprisoner.

metahacker

Pumpkins in prison, a photo by ticklethepear. (Though it looks like they might be able to break out if they really had to.)

dagonell wrote that we show our humanity most in how we treat the weak, such as this aid for an ailing penguin. Neat!

From a locked post (I'll happily credit you if you like): Shopping while Black: a social experiment.

From a coworker: this wedding gift won't open until it's in the right location. Only 50 tries. Fun!

What cats would say to you if they could talk (GraphJam).

I enjoy Bill Walsh's writings on language and copy-editing, such as common punctuation problems. And sometimes he makes me laugh, as in this work of a punctuation vigilante.

(Aside: RSS feeds to LJ seem to be broken again.)