“All this technology is making us antisocial”.

Right.

Sherlock will return to BBC1 on New Year’s Day when the mystery will finally be resolved how the sleuth survived that plunge to his apparent certain death.

Yes! If you haven’t watched, please do.

National Geographic Photo Contest 2013, Part II, courtesy of Alan Taylor for In Focus. All are amazing, follow the source link.

Why first-person shooters are so enjoyable

It’s not simply the first-person perspective, the three-dimensionality, the violence, or the escape. These are features of many video games today. But the first-person shooter combines them in a distinct way: a virtual environment that maximizes a player’s potential to attain a state that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”—a condition of absolute presence and happiness.

Indeed:

“Flow,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, “is the kind of feeling after which one nostalgically says: ‘that was fun,’ or ‘that was enjoyable.’ ” Put another way, it’s when the rest of the world simply falls away. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is mostly likely to occur during play, whether it’s a gambling bout, a chess match, or a hike in the mountains. Attaining it requires a good match between someone’s skills and the challenges that she faces, an environment where personal identity becomes subsumed in the game and the player attains a strong feeling of control. Flow eventually becomes self-reinforcing: the feeling itself inspires you to keep returning to the activity that caused it.

All these years I’ve waited for someone to scientifically explain why Halo was such an awesome game, and they did it.

Fidel Castro shares at least one belief with the majority of Americans: He is convinced that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was not the work of a lone gunman, but was the culmination of a broad conspiracy.

Jeffrey Goldberg form The Atlantic went to Cuba and paid a visit to Fidel. Interesting conversation.

The Story of the Bass.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

There’s evidence you can will yourself to wake on time, too. Sleep scientists at Germany’s University of Lubeck asked 15 volunteers to sleep in their lab for three nights. One night, the group was told they’d be woken at 6 a.m., while on other nights the group was told they’d be woken at 9 a.m.. But the researchers lied-they woke the volunteers at 6 a.m anyway.

And the results were startling.

We wake up before our alarms quite precisely if we’re used to sleep and wake up at the same time. Quite interesting study.

Why Airline Food Sucks

Apart from the obvious reason that the food is not served fresh, there is a surprising aspect to the lack of flavour in airline food:

“When you travel at a high altitude, your sense of taste isn’t the same as it is in a restaurant,” says Peter Wilander, managing director of onboard services at Delta. The reasons for this primarily have to do with humidity … or, rather, a lack thereof.

Why is that?

The cabins of airplanes are pressurized with an extremely low humidity level of just 4%, largely to reduce the risk of internal corrosion; the only humidity in an airplane cabin comes from other people’s breath. The problem with low humidity, though, is it causes our sinuses to close. This is why you always feel as if you have a slight cold when you fly. Simultaneously, the low humidity dries your food out quicker than it happens on the ground.

Another reason is the expectations management; flying is boring (except if you are the pilot, probably). So you are waiting for food as a cure to boredom as well as hunger. Your expectations are too high for the reality and, as everyone knows: happiness = expectations – outcome.

When there’s nothing else to do but sit in a chair and look at the back of someone’s head, meals become something to look forward to. But their faults also become something to scrutinize. The result is that even the best airline meals have a hard time holding up to the critical eye of bored, stuffed-up passengers at 30,000 feet.

What will solve this problem?

Technology:

It is technology that is most likely to improve the experience of in-flight dining. New planes like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner feature improved cabin pressurization systems that not only make passengers feel healthier, but improve cabin humidity up to 15%. That’s a fourfold improvement in humidity that makes it all the more likely that your sinuses will stay open in-flight. Simply put? On newer planes like the 787, food will just taste better.

Fascinating article over at FastCo design.

Humans need roughly one hour of sleep for every two hours they are awake, and the body innately knows when this ratio becomes out of whack.

Very interesting compilation of articles and research about sleep over at Farnam Street.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Sx34swEG0

Coin looks like a promising idea: store all your credit cards into one.

But it is not free of shortcomings, mainly its dependency on a smartphone.

As Christopher Mims pointed out for Quartz:

It sounds like a great idea… until you realize that the price of replacing a handful of plastic credit cards with a single one is that your ability to pay for anything becomes entirely dependent on the battery life of your smartphone. That’s for security reasons: If it loses contact with your phone for a user-specified period of time, from one to 10 minutes, Coin deactivates itself.

They will probably come up with some kind of solution for this problem at some point. Something else would be how Coin will ever going to be able to circumvent the regulatory maze of mobile payments outside of the US.

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)