In Deep Work, I tell the story of Ric Furrer, a general blacksmith who runs a forge in Door County, Wisconsin: a rural idyll near Lake Michigan’s Sturgeon Bay. He works in a converted barn whose doors he often keeps open to the surrounding farm fields to vent the heat, his hammer blows echoing for miles. He makes a living with architectural metal work, but he’s known for his rare mastery of ancient weapon forging techniques. I came across him in a 2012 Nova episode in which he recreates a viking sword using crucible steel (see above).
As someone who studies technology and culture, I’ve noticed that we’re perpetually caught off guard when an unusually useful new innovation spreads rapidly. We tend to quickly claim that this latest fast adoption is unprecedented.
Historically speaking, however, these quick expansions might be more common than you realize. I was recently re-reading one of my favorite history of technology titles,Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet. In it, Standage summarizes the astonishing rapidity with which the American telegraph network grew.
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve covered many different topics in my writing that all seem to roughly orbit ideas around productivity, technology, and meaning. … Read more
As longtime readers know, I’m a big advocate of time blocking as a productivity method. Running your day from a to-do list (or, God forbid, an email inbox) leads to sub-optimal returns on the energy invested. The superior method is to give every minute of your workday a job by actually blocking off your time and assigning specific work to the blocks. In my experience, a serious commitment to time blocking can roughly double your results. (For more details, see this article or Rule #4 of Deep Work.)
Anyway, this is all to say that I was excited when several readers pointed me toward a nice variation of time blocking implemented by Jeff Huang, a computer science professor at Brown University.
Former world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik helped build the Soviet’s dominant chess system. His pupils included Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik: all world … Read more
Today is March 14th, which to us math nerds is also known as Pi Day, in reference to the first three significant digits of the mathematical constant pi (3.14).
Part of what makes pi interesting is that it’s one of the most famous irrational numbers, meaning that it cannot be expressed as the fraction of two whole values (though 22/7 comes pretty close). In honor of Pi Day, I thought I would learn more about the history of irrational numbers, so I turned to one of my bookshelf favorites, The World of Mathematics: a four-volume history of math, edited by James R. Newman, and published in a handsome faux-leather box set in 1956. (I picked up my copy at a used book sale five years ago.)
The first volume contains an extended essay (originally a short book) titled “The Great Mathematicians,” written by Herbert Western Turnbull, the late Scottish algebraist. Turnbull dedicates much of the essay to great innovations from ancient Greek mathematics. It was Pythagoras (570 – 495 BC), he notes, who is most often credited for discovering that irrational numbers exist.
We know something of the proof that Pythagoras used due to a later account by Aristotle. The proof is elementary by modern standards (indeed, it’s a common example in undergraduate-level discrete mathematics courses). It goes something like this…
One of the more profound representations of the soul in the Western Canon is the Chariot Allegory from Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue: “[T]he charioteer of the … Read more
Last week, I wrote about a paper appearing in the American Economic Review that conducted a randomized trial to measure the personal impact of deactivating Facebook. A few days later, a different study was published, this one appearing in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, that also deployed a randomized trial to measure the impact of reduced Facebook use.
The authors of this new paper, a group of psychologists from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, in Germany, randomly split a group of roughly three hundred volunteers into an experiment and control group. The participants in the experiment group were asked to reduce their daily Facebook use, while the control group made no changes.
Personal impacts were measured with online surveys administered at regular intervals. To summarize the paper’s main findings:
