Pickings logbook
(…) During the pre-smartphone era of iPods and other portable music devices, a small study of college students found that those who were heavy users of headphones experienced higher levels of social isolation and loneliness. More than 15 years later, in 2021, a survey conducted by the audio technology
In this project I measure the consumption of electricity, water and gas in my home. Also control the main devices that consume it. But, for privacy, I do not rely on any cloud service to do that. I built a system that is fully self-contained, so that my data
More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy, more than recent bombardment by Israel and the U.S. — Iran’s greatest current existential crisis is what hydrologists are calling its rapidly approaching “water bankruptcy.”  It is a crisis that has a sad origin, they
In 2004, a portion of an IRC log was submitted to Bash, a website which records humorous or odd IM or IRC conversations. In it, a user by the name of AzureDiamond was tricked into giving away his password, which was hunter2. The exact date of upload is unknown, but
Have you noticed that bubbles in conventional beers go up, but that they apparently go down in stout beers? This goes against conventional wisdom, but is quite simply explained in the end: there is a convection due to the shape of the glass. Larger at the top leads to an
Near-miss collisions between high-energy lead nuclei at the LHC generate intense electromagnetic fields that can knock out protons and transform lead into fleeting quantities of gold nuclei. (…) Extremely high-energy collisions between lead nuclei at the LHC can create quark–gluon plasma (…). However, in the
(…) I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. "We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's the problem?" I asked.
If you get caught breaking the rules, it’s not going to go well with the boss, right? Wrong. Research by AOM scholars shows that in many cases, supervisors are likely to reward people who intentionally break rules. (…) When we think about people breaking the rules, we often
Two old stories from a veteran pilot that used so fly the mythical SR-71 fighter plane . The first is about seizing an improbable opportunity to silence braggers on the radio, with elegance. The second relates how a demo than ran close to a catastrophe was greatly praised. Delivered with
(…) An important step in getting to that state is realizing that attention is precious. Humans have a finite amount of capacity for sweating details. My friend Andrew wears the same brand of black shirt every day. He thinks that if he conserves the brainpower it would take to pick
This study examines the impact of ChatGPT, a large language model, on online communities that contribute to public knowledge shared on the Internet. We found that ChatGPT has led to a 25% drop in activity on Stack Overflow, a key reference website where programmers share knowledge and solve problems. This
John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play
(…) Pursuing high-quality leisure is not only relaxing but helps you build up your life by creating a more resilient identity for yourself. This is a checklist of things to do when you want to relax instead of mindlessly consuming entertainment like social media, Netflix, video games. (…) Distracted?
(…) When a relationship has very little trust, you tend to interpret everything someone says in the worst possible light, or you may hear hostility, contempt, or dismissiveness where none exists. On the other side of the exchange, the conversation becomes a minefield, where it feels like everything you say
Loneliness is detrimental to well-being and is often accompanied by self-reported feelings of not being understood by other people. What contributes to such feelings in lonely people? We used functional MRI of 66 first-year university students to unobtrusively measure the relative alignment of people’s mental