Oh hey 2013, where did you come from. 2012 went fast, really fast. I think this must mean I am getting old old. My mother always said that time goes faster the older you get. Do you remember desperately waiting for October half term after your SIX week summer break. It felt like forever. But now whole days, sometimes weeks are swallowed up over email ping pong and a persistent hangover. A hangover never bad enough to stop you working hard and one that’s starting to feel like the dress you always put on the day of that meeting.

But now half term is here before I even realise its over two months since the Olympics ended. Working in a museum where every family in south west London descends every half term I get a sharp reminder that Christmas is on the way and shit I’ve become that person that keeps talking about how fast time is going. Sigh. Anyway on to 2013 and some challenges, maybe goals (never resolutions) that will be showing up on here. Hopefully.

Firstly I read a lot. I love working in the Communications team because the press team get all the weekend papers on a Monday and I get to rescue all my favourite weekend supplements. I know pretty much every one and I can tell you that the Times Saturday is still the best for stories that I would never have read otherwise. Three long articles in every issue and a column from Caitlan Moran. Love.

Anyway my point. I’ve realised that a lot of what I read (especially online) I’m reading because someone I admire just tweeted it or it was on this blog post and now I must read it etc etc. And a lot of the time I don’t actually read it, or process it. I’ve forgotten what it even was by the time I’m shutting down my computer for the day. So this year, more actual reading and perhaps a mini reflection on the best thing I read that day or week, so I have to remind myself what it was, why I read it and why I liked it. There’s also Paris Marathon, another triathlon but its the reading thing that’s been bothering me. In 2013 I’m going to learn to read again.

“I’m repeatedly telling people that the VICE generation are at some point going to have to decide whether they want to pay for what I think are the best things in life. If you download all the good films for free, nobody can afford to make films any more. If you download music it’s pretty hard to create music. With journalism, if you don’t want to pay for it you won’t get it. You’ll get opinion, you’ll get blogs, but you won’t get edited, tested, interesting, well-written journalism because people want to get paid for that.”

– Ian Hislop discussing the state of the British Media
on tumblr: http://thegemb1.tumblr.com/post/37716815950

guardian:

Tavi Gevinson: the fashion blogger becoming the voice of a generation

Tavi Gevinson found fame as an 11-year-old blogger. Five years later, her online teen magazine attracts a global audience including a fanclub of grown-up women

Photograph: Cactus Tree.

on tumblr: http://thegemb1.tumblr.com/post/37568860324

“Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life. We’ve taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure.” Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

Just finished Born to Run. The book has been in the pile of to read for a long time. Cannot believe how long such an inspiring book sat next to my bed.

He says he’d give the Web a B-plus, even an A-minus, that on balance it is a force for good. Yet an “accident of fate” has compromised its goodness. And that accident is intertwined with–perhaps, perversely, even caused by–his decision back in 1992 to take the road less traveled. The question that fascinates people who have heard of Berners-Lee–Why isn’t he rich?–may turn out to have the same answer as the question that fascinates him: Why isn’t the World Wide Web better than it is?

THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE WEB

Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010. A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.

Via Reuters

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day…. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

The Busy Trap by Tim Kreider

Jessica Stanley and Victoria Hannan used their time at Cannes Lions to find out why we work in advertising, why do we care about it and why any of it matters. Below is what Iain Tait, Executive Creative Director, Google Creative Lab, New York had to say.

Iain can’t believe he ever worked in advertising. He jokes that anyone who feels like they’re stuck in it should just leave. He worries that people in advertising find their inspiration only from other ads. He wants people to look outside the industry, to investigate the how and why, to collaborate. He says agency culture is not conducive to collaboration. The industry is full of confusion: people want to do good work, they want to make things that are useful. But they don’t know how. They make things that smell like innovation, but they’re always missing the all-important big idea. The secret? Bring together a great story and great technology.

HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that “just baked” sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general public were clueless that these changes were taking place.

Why our food is making us fat

“We inhabit an interesting time in the history of humanity, where a small number of people, numbering not more than a few hundred, but really more like a few dozen, mainly living in cities like San Francisco and New York, mainly male, and mainly between the ages of 22 and 35, are having a hugely outsized effect on the rest of our species.

Through the software they design and introduce to the world, these engineers transform the daily routines of hundreds of millions of people. Previously, this kind of mass transformation of human behavior was the sole domain of war, famine, disease, and religion, but now it happens more quietly, through the software we use every day, which affects how we spend our time, and what we do, think, and feel.

The designers of this software call themselves “software engineers”, but they are really more like social engineers.”

A very interesting and thought provoking article for anyone working online Modern Medicine, Jonathan Harris