Grant Gochnauer: Awesome Humans — Issue #195
Healthy Human
Are You Doing Microworkouts? Here’s Why You Should. — www.marksdailyapple.com
“The fitness industry is in the midst of a renaissance. Flawed and dated strategies like sedentary recovery practices or overly stressful HIIT workouts are being replaced with cutting-edge practices that offer more efficiency and return on investment. Today I’m covering one emerging fitness strategy: performing brief feats of strength in the routine course of a day. Let’s call them microworkouts.”
The bowls at Chipotle and Sweetgreen are supposed to be compostable. They contain cancer-linked “forever chemicals.” — newfoodeconomy.org
“Testing reveals that fiber bowls contain PFAS, a troubling class of chemicals with no known half-life. It gets worse from there.”
The Fundamental Link Between Body Weight and the Immune System — www.theatlantic.com
“Inflammation plays a critical role in determining how we digest food, and it’s only now starting to reveal itself.”
Is Autophagy the Secret to Life Extension? — medium.com
“Autophagy kills off the weakest, sickest cells — not just in your brain, but throughout your entire body. And it doesn’t just kill entire cells. More often, it kills sick or damaged organelles or strands of damaged DNA and RNA within cells. So what is autophagy? Fans of the Greek language may recognize that the name means “self-eating.” As scary as that sounds, it’s a good thing: autophagy is a process by which the body breaks down and recycles damaged components at the cellular and sub-cellular level.”
Human Builders
Why Every Company Needs a Chief Experience Officer — hbr.org
“Customer experience and employee experience are now two of the driving forces of business. Independently, each function leads to valuable relationships — with customers and employees — but when CX and EX are managed together, they create a unique, sustainable competitive advantage. Companies should consider integrating the two disciplines and installing a Chief Experience Officer to lead the combined effort across the entire organization.”
The 6 Decision-Making Frameworks That Help Startup Leaders Tackle Tough Calls — firstround.com
“Startup leaders make tough calls every day. We spoke with 6 top operators to gather the tactics and strategies they use to make smart decisions under pressure, garner trust with stakeholders and execute with conviction.”
Making Uncommon Knowledge Common — kwokchain.com
“If you’re reading this, you’ve likely used Zillow, Glassdoor, and Expedia before. It’s hard to look on the internet for anything related to real estate, jobs, or travel and NOT see one of Rich Barton’s companies. Their ubiquity is stunning. But it’s not coincidental. Rich Barton’s companies all became household names by following a common playbook. The Rich Barton Playbook is building Data Content Loops to disintermediate incumbents and dominate Search. And then using this traction to own demand in their industries. Or as he puts it “Power to the People””
Staying on the path to high performing teams. — lethain.com
“This approach to nurturing great organizations is the opposite of a quick fix. While slow, I’ve found it consistently leads to enduring, real improvement in the happiness and throughput of an organization. Most importantly, these improvements stick around long enough to compound, creating a durable excellence.”
How Biotech Startup Funding Will Change in the Next 10 Years — blog.ycombinator.com
“I’ve noticed that raising money for a biotech or other life science1 company in 2019 looks a lot like raising money for a tech company 10 years ago. Since then, fundamental forces caused fundraising for tech companies to change dramatically. I see those same forces that Paul Graham wrote about happening with biotech companies now. And I believe that they are going to change biotech fundraising very much the way they changed tech company fundraising.”
Future Humans
Researchers find way to measure blood pressure with a selfie video — www.engadget.com
“In the near future, you might not have to traipse to your doctor or pharmacy to determine your blood pressure. Researchers have figured out a way to accurately measure it with your phone’s camera.
A selfie video might be all you need to find out your blood pressure, per a study by researchers in Canada and China. University of Toronto developmental psychologist Kang Lee and his postdoctoral researcher Paul Zheng developed a technology called transdermal optical imaging (TOI).”
Should the Rich Be Allowed to Buy the Best Genes? — airmail.news
“I ponder how this promise of CRISPR might also be its peril, up there with the encoding of unequal opportunities. It took the laws of nature and of nature’s God more than 3.2 billion years to weave together three billion bases of DNA in a complex and occasionally imperfect way to permit all of the wondrous diversity within our species. Are we right to think we can now come along and, within a few decades, edit that genome to eliminate what we see as imperfections? Will we lose our diversity? Will we become less flavorful, like our tomatoes? Will that be good for our species?”
Alan Winfield’s Web Log: On the simulation (and energy costs) of human intelligence, the singularity and simulationism — alanwinfield.blogspot.com
“In this essay I have critically reflected on some of the predictions for human-equivalent AI (AGI); the paths to AGI (and especially via artificial evolution); the technological singularity, and the idea that we are ourselves simulations in a simulated universe (simulationism). The quest for human-equivalent AI clearly faces many challenges. One (perhaps stating the obvious) is that it is a very hard problem. Another, as I have argued in this essay, is that the energy costs are likely to limit progress.”
One More Thing
The Invention of Money — www.newyorker.com
“The quest for new forms of money hasn’t gone away. In June of this year, Facebook unveiled Libra, global currency that draws on the architecture of Bitcoin. The idea is that the value of the new money is derived not from the imprimatur of any state but from a combination of mathematics, global connectedness, and the trust that resides in the world’s biggest social network. That’s the plan, anyway. How safe is it? How do we know what libras or bitcoins are worth, or whether they’re worth anything? Satoshi Nakamoto’s acolytes would immediately turn those questions around and ask, How do you know what the cash in your pocket is worth?”
