The Mission News: August 3, 2017
News to get you ready for what’s coming…
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your promotion. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life & Learning
Would you say it’s a good thing or a bad thing if preschoolers become obsessed with YouTube? If for learning, maybe good. If for purely entertainment, maybe bad. But either way, there’s an algorithm that’s making it happen. Hint, it has something to do with slime.
Health & Fitness
Love summer hot dogs at the ballpark or in the backyard? Oscar Meyer spent $10M trying to make a more health-conscious version.
Health isn’t just about the body, but also the way we feel. Because it impacts the performance of not just our mind, but also our body. So, rethinking our emotional intelligence is a worthwhile cause because it means you’re able to construct new emotional experiences based on how granular you perceive these things:
Likewise, people who exhibit high emotional granularity are emotion experts.
“Their brains can automatically construct emotional experiences with fine differences, like astonished, amazed, startled, dumbfounded, and shocked. For a person who exhibits more moderate emotional granularity, all of these words might belong to the same concept, “surprised.” And for someone who exhibits low emotional granularity, these words might all correspond to feeling worked up.”
Money & Investing
The big news from cryptocurrency land is that Bitcoin finally forked itself and delivered a new currency called Bitcoin Cash, but Coinbase isn’t playing along. Read on to figure out what it means for you, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Have you heard of those robo-advisor apps where a machine manages your stock investments? The big pitch being that a machine can do it better than a human? Well now one company, Betterment, is including human advice in the app because let’s face it, humans want to talk to humans, not machines, about their money.
Stories & Entertainment
Soundcloud was the social network for audio and free music. But it’s collapsing. This deep dive helps explain why.
Meanwhile Facebook’s strategy for suppressing fake news is, surprisingly, by burying it. The strategy is pushing what they call Related Articles around the same post. It’s been in testing for months and the idea is that lots of surrounding content from trusted news sources will help you determine the real deal from the lie.
Makers & Science
A biological teleporter to outer space, say what? A lab in San Diego called Synthetic Genomics has created a device that can make biological material, like a flu virus, from a digital file. We could theoretically send this device to other planets to seed life there without any human intervention. Terraforming or just terrorizing?
Ever hear about this thing called CRISPR gene editing and wonder how it works? This quick-hit video gets you up to speed.
Culture & Society
18 rules for how to make it in the art world by New York Mag.
The Evidence of Things Seen by Chris Barnard
Back in the real world, people once moved to different states when looking for work and greener pastures, but now that’s not happening. In fact, we’re in the least mobile version of America since WWII.
Air & Space
Nanoracks, a space startup, has completed a successful simulation with NASA for an airlock to be attached to the international space station. The beauty in this is in more space for, ahem, space experiments.
Collaboration & Politics
The diplomatic ties between the US and Russia may be worsening, if you believe their Prime Minister’s latest social media update:
“The legislation is ‘a declaration of fully-fledged economic war on Russia’ that could last for ‘decades,’ Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Facebook. The Trump administration ‘has shown its complete weakness’ by signing the law and ‘relations between Russia and the U.S. are going to be extremely tense,’ he said.”
Tech & Startups
Don’t call it a comeback. Travis Kalanick is attempting to get back into Uber after he was ousted by a few activist VCs on the Board. Of course there are the obvious references to Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and others, but only time will tell if HBO’s Silicon Valley makes it into more of a farce.
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