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In this technology leaning edition of Align Center, we look at small town business, a poem about trees, and an analysis of gender roles in fiction. Then we have an insightful observation from Google Design and a story from Canada’s dark history for the long read. Listen to a confession from an accidental voyeur, and then find out what I’m digging of late.<\/p>\n
In 1985, Doug Funk purchased a pharmacy in Concordia, Kansas, a town of 5,000. And for 30 years, business was good, with the business employing a dozen people at it’s peak. But as retirement approached, Funk struggled to get get a fair offer on the business. Not only would it be unsatisfying financially for him, but the community would lose out on a vital business. Then Funk heard about RedTire, a non-traditional business broker offering a free service to help match businesses with prospective owners willing to move to small towns. It could be a model for rural areas everywhere. The way trees “slowly and quietly cycle through the seasons ‘as though nothing had happened’ while our individual and collective lives whirl madly around them.” As Spring settles in, enjoy this short post worthy of contemplation, followed by a poem from Pulitzer winning poet W.S. Merwin New health foods boasting “sweetened with monk fruit” or “enhanced with moringa” are being released so often, it’s causing a visceral reaction in me at every mention of “superfood”. Yes, many foods considered “super” have crept their way into my pantry, but one I’m surprised has been slower to catch on in the bigger world is the a\u00e7ai berry. Brazilians and Hawaiian’s have been enjoying a\u00e7ai bowls for much longer than that new poke shop downtown has been open, so why hasn’t this blueberry-like crop caught fire the way other South American exports like quinoa and maca have? It turns out it has to do with supply chain and a former football captain from Colorado. Using a Wikipedia dataset of 100,000 plot summaries, a data scientist analyzed the verbs immediately after “he” and “she” to examine gender roles in fictional works. Though not meant to be a rigorous survey (plot descriptions were most likely written by males \u2014 90% in fact according to Wikipedia’s own page on gender bias<\/a>), the analysis reveals gender roles in aggressor-victim relationships and investigates whether the saying “poison is a woman’s weapon” has any weight in fiction. When I first installed SnapChat, I didn’t “get it”. The app didn’t even last a month before I deleted, so you’d be correct to say I never “got it”. Now I’ve added SnapChat, along with vampire movies and One Direction, to my growing list of “things young people like”. Leave it to Google to educate me about the difference between once passive apps like Facebook that treat your finger like a computer mouse, and the new breed of interactive apps like SnapChat and VSCO built entirely around gestures and direct manipulation. An eye-opening read from Google Design for non-digital natives. Photography game farms, where captive animals are staged in natural settings at an hourly rate, have been around longer than we’d like to think. They’ve fooled magazine editors and even judges for the London Natural History Museum’s Photography of the Year award. This troubling expos\u00e9 bounced around the Internet echo chambers last week. A tough read because you just don’t want it to be true. Diagnosed with autism at age three, Stephen Wiltshire landed his first commission after his eight birthday \u2014 from the British Prime Minister. Featured in several documentaries on savants, Wiltshire has become one of Britain’s most well-known artists with a four to eight month waiting list for commissioned work. His latest project took him on a 40-minute helicopter ride over Mexico City to live sketch a panoramic view of the metropolis on a 13-foot wide canvas. For fifteen years, a bright, inconsequential window across the street looked into a living room obscured by curtains. But when two young, beautiful, new tenants moved in, the curtains didn’t stay, and the room was suddenly repurposed as a bedroom. With their bed pushed up against the window, the couple unknowingly shared their life and death with an accidental voyeur. See what emotions bubble up as you listen to this award-winning episode from Love + Radio. The title of this recipe caught my eye \u2014 it sums up my fear every time I stroll past the tall, purple, leafy green stalks next to the kale at the market. This recipe is so simple \u2014 I’ve made swiss chard to be more difficult in my head \u2014 and it’s right up there with kale for nutrition value, as the CDC ranked the beet relative third overall in nutrition density<\/a>. Fact: chard comes in three main varieties: green (Swiss), red and rainbow. All you need is garlic, lemon, crushed red peppers, salt, and one minute of prep. “I could never be white, but it seemed I wasn\u2019t really Indian, either. Who was I?”. At the the age of three, Betty Ann Adams was taken from her mother and ushered on a plane to be raised by a new, white family in what’s now called the “Sixties Scoop” \u2014 a dark period in Canada’s history where an estimated 20,000 Indigenous children were removed from their families and placed with adoptive families adhering to “Euro-Canadian or Christian values”. I first discovered Ted Chiang after seeing “The Arrival”, the captivating film directed by Quebec native Denis Villeneuve, director of this fall’s Blade Runner 2049 (trailer released<\/a> yesterday) and Dune (yes, THAT Dune!). Chiang’s exquisitely crafted stories combine science, language, math, technology, religion and dystopian futurism to create genre-crossing stories reminiscent of Black Mirror. With eight profoundly human stories that elicit philosophical questions, the technical writer for Microsoft (yes, he has a day job) has gifted us the best short story collection in recent memory. And don’t just take my word for it, the collection’s recognitions include three Nebula awards and a Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy. What I’m digging lately:<\/p>\n “I think the value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior… I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.” \u2014 Elon Musk at TED2017<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Leonardo Da Vinci. Could you imagine being alive in the times of the greatest inventors in history?<\/p>\n Well you are, so pay attention. <\/p>\n Elon Musk, the South African-Canadian with a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics, left a PhD program at Stanford after two days to begin his entrepreneurial life with his brother. He (and many smart people he hired) would go on to challenge the most entrenched, regulated industries. Oh, and Musk created OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence company. Then last month he announced Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup with the modest goal to integrate the human brain with said AI. (There’s a great explanation over at WaitButWhy<\/a>), a worthy 2 hour read).<\/p>\n In a live interview at last week’s TED2017 in Vancouver, we get a better understand on the WHY. Inter-planetary travel is a controversial topic \u2014 why spend time, money and effort going to Mars when there is so much suffering in the world (which this week’s dig, 100&Change<\/a>, takes on in a different way). And this is what Chris Anderson, TED’s head curator, confronts Elon with in this excerpt from the end of the interview:<\/p>\n Chris: “People want to position this as an either or, that there are so many desperate things happening on the planet now from climate to poverty to, you know, you pick your issue. And this feels like a distraction. You shouldn’t be thinking about this. You should be solving what’s here and now. And to be fair, you’ve done a fair old bit to actually do that with your work on sustainable energy. But why not just do that?”<\/p>\n Elon Musk: “I look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities. It’s like a branching stream of probabilities, and there are actions that we can take that affect those probabilities or that accelerate one thing or slow down another thing. I may introduce something new to the probability stream. Sustainable energy will happen no matter what. If there was no Tesla, if Tesla never existed, it would have to happen out of necessity. It’s tautological. If you don’t have sustainable energy, it means you have unsustainable energy. Eventually you will run out, and the laws of economics will drive civilization towards sustainable energy, inevitably. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy, faster than it would otherwise occur.” See the full interview on TED.com (40min)<\/a><\/p>\n
\nyesmagazine.org (5min read)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nAn Elegy for Trees<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nonbeing.org (2min read)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nThe Superfood Gold Rush<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nnytimes.com (6min read)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nGender Roles and Verbs Across 100,000 Stories<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nvarianceexplained.org (6min read)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nNo Such Thing As Offline<\/a><\/h2>\n
\ndesign.google.com (8min read)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nFake News, Fake Wildlife Photos<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nqz.com (10min)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\nDrawing Elaborate Cityscapes From A Brief Glance <\/a><\/h2>\n
\nnationalgeographic.com (4min read + 1min video)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\u25e6 listen in<\/h1>\n
Love + Radio – The Living Room Voyeur<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nloveandradio.org (25min podcast)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\u25e6 eat well<\/h1>\n
Sauteed Swiss Chard (Don’t Be Afraid!!!)<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nfood.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\u25e6 read slow<\/h1>\n
Birth of a Family<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nTrying to fit into a white world while being shamed for her heritage, Betty would discover she had a sister. Seeking to reunite with her mother, grandfather and siblings would lead her on a long journey back to Uranium City, her birth town and the place she could best learn about herself. Her struggle as an outsider makes you pause the next time you hear the inadequate word, “tolerance”.
\nProduced by The National Film Board of Canada, the documentary movie Birth of a Family<\/a> is showing this week and is available for screenings.
\nthestarphoenix.com (19min read)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\u25e6 current read<\/h1>\n
Stories of Your Life and Others<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nStories of Your Life and Others (281p book)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\u25e6 dig this<\/h1>\n
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\u25e6 humble thought<\/h1>\n
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\u25e6 now.<\/h1>\n
\nIn chronological order:<\/p>\n\n