weekly bite-sized ideas and notes that matter

Your weekly notes / #5

Ready for your powernotes? (Monday, 1 November, 2021)

Nov 1

Hello and happy Monday !

Another week has gone by, and today is the 1st of November 🌨️. Air is crispier, wind blows harder, and it’s getting colder and colder. But all is fine, as long as you have a hot cup of coffee, tea or chocolate by your side, getting ready to enjoy your powernotes. 🙂

Every monday, we have technology, culture and philosophy notes for you :

TECH 👨‍💻

The world’s fastest email, that is supposed to make you feel like you have superpowers : Superhuman.
You can now transfer files through the help of sound waves. Ozzilate.
Here’s everything that Microsoft announced at it’s Surface 2021 event.
Just a little smart tool to take better Twitter screenshots: Pikaso.
Here are The World’s 20 Most Popular Facebook Pages.

CULTURE 🧬

In our world of constant movement and distraction, it's incredible to learn the art of stillness. Watch this great TEDtalk by Pico lyer. Sometimes we all feel overwhelmed by the demands for our world. This video really helps.
Have you ever heard about Oodaaq Island? It’s the Northernmost Island in the World, and it was discovered by accident.
If you have a curious brain, THIS is an interesting podcast.
A stunning collection of photos showing dogs flying. Well, not like birds, but check it out.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a newsletter. Click here if you want to join.

PHILOSOPHY 📜

Here's an interesting read about The Religious Nature of Stoicism.
A scientist and a monk compare notes on meditation, therapy, and their effects on the brain. Neuroscience Has a Lot To Learn from Buddhism.
A blog that explores the life, work and legacy of Carl Jung.
Einstein Shunned Phones in Favor of Solitude and Quiet Reflection. Read the article.
Here's an interesting video about The Psychology of Solitude.

Each week, we have two books for you to discover. In bite-sized fashion.

Here is the first book : How to Stop Time by Matt Haig.

Here are five notes from the book:

To talk about memories is to live them a little.
A problem with living in the twenty-first century..... we are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have only been to ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photo shopped and filtered.
The key to happiness wasn't being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.
Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.
I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.

The second book of the week is: Happy by Derren Brown.

Here are five notes from the book:

Don’t become so annoyed by someone that you become a source of annoyance to others.
If your walls are severely cracked, no amount of wallpaper will solve the problem.
Everything you need is easy to procure, while the things you desire but don’t need are more difficult to obtain.
Permit nothing to grow to you that may give you agony when it is torn away.
Faced with a choice of doing a job for the money or doing a job for the fun of it, take the fun one whenever you can. You’ll rarely enjoy the work you do for money.

Each week, we present three quotes from great thinkers, great minds, and great people that live or have lived in this world. We all have something to learn from each other.

Renowned philosopher and thinker Bertrand Russell on human desire:

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

American poet A. Van Jordan on the elemental science of reality:

You don’t believe in math? Try to figure the velocity of Earth’s orbit around the Sun to land a man on the Moon without it. You don’t believe in God? Try to use math to calculate what the eye does every second of any given moment. If Big Blue tried to work that differential equation in our lifetime, it couldn’t. Mysteries inside mysteries in our own bodies of which we can’t make sense, another world waiting for a religion or calculus to explain. Look into any mirror; it’s like sitting in a theater watching a silent movie, but you’re the one pantomiming your story. You think you have this world figured out, but you can’t tell which hand you’re using and using and using. And why do we try?

Environmental advocate Rosalie Edge about our neglect and indifference towards nature:

Thousands of people who had within them a yearning toward nature, a deep-seated need to preserve its beauty, had been in very truth asleep. I know, for I was one of them.

We all need a fresh breath of nature. Here are this week’s portraits of nature:

We read a lot of stuff from all over the web. Here are this week’s interesting articles :

🟪 Let's talk about sex - in space. It's naturally part of every human space exploration but remains taboo. Here's what we do and don't know about cosmic sex.

🟩 How we doubled our life expectancy in the last 100 years. And why we can't assume that these technological advancements are inevitable.

🟨 The mystery of life cannot be solved by science. Reductionism is a successful way to explain the universe, but it cannot replace experience. This is part of the mystery of life.