Hello friends,

good morning. ☕ While you prepare or drink your coffee, you can read this tweet from Ryan Breslow, founder and CEO of Bolt : 12 mindset rules he developed in the last years.

And while you sip from your second coffee, enjoy this week’s powernotes. Let’s start.

This week’s tech, culture and philosophy notes :

TECH 👨‍💻

1. The best feature of iOS15 operating system is Record App Activity. It allows you to see all data that is being shared by the apps you have installed on your phone. You can track the apps that are spying on you. To turn the feature on, simply go to Settings > Privacy and then scroll down to Record App Activity and turn it “on.” Interested in all the features? Here’s the full list of features from the official Apple website.

2. Holograms with a sense of touch are being created at Glasgow University. My first thought: in what ways can we use them? Read more.

3. Take a look at Microsoft’s most powerful surface laptop ever. Here.

4. A nice little website with the evolution of the scrollbar. Did you know the scrollbar has a history of 40 years?

5. Here’s a cool tool that lets you share files with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires : Wormhole.

CULTURE 🧬

1. Here are some diet recipes that you will surely love.

2. Experience the world from your home. With virtual vacation.

3. Find bilingual baby names at Mixedname.

4. If you love Star Trek, this site is for you : StarTrek Design. You will find lots of objects and cool stuff from the Star Trek universe.

5. Photographer Levon Biss reveals bizarre seeds and plants from around the world. Check it out.

PHILOSOPHY 📜

1. A highly recommended philosophy book : How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life by Massimo Pigliucci. Here’s also the audiobook.

2. A great 7 minute read, find out why moths fly into flames and what it has to do with the end of humanity. Moth vs Flame: Reason, Instinct and Humanity’s Struggle to Survive.

3. An interesting philosophical and psychological video : What is the Meaning of Life?

4. One of the most popular philosophical concepts in history : Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

5. Read this nice piece of writing: Confucius on why we need rituals.

We have another two interesting books this week. The first one is about France, it’s people and culture. But it’s more than that, maybe reading the notes will help form an idea about it. The book: Au Contraire: Figuring Out the French by Gilles Asselin and Ruth Mastron.

Here are five notes from the book:

1. Look beyond what we are given to see. Look for the subtle, invisible connections.

2. The rooster wakes up the entire village at dawn, attracts attention from others, and never retreats from his defiant and domineering attitude toward the rest of the coop. French roosters like to remind everyone that France has awakened the entire world to the beauty and grace of its civilization, culture, and language.

3. Paris is not just the capital but virtually the center of the French universe. It is the nation’s political, literary, historic, economic, artistic, financial, and cultural heart.

4. French people are experts at creating islands of psychological privacy in crowded public areas. Desire to keep one’s personal affairs private.

5. The French are so deeply pessimistic that some talk about taking vacations in the United States for a “breath of American optimism.”

Our second book this week is: The Snowman by Jo Nesbo.

1. For justice is a blunt knife, both as a philosophy and as a judge.

2. Evil is not a thing. It cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.

3. I´ve read that it´s the smell some carnivores use to find their prey. Imagine the trembling victim trying to hide, but knowing that the smell of its own fear will kill it.

4. We aren’t where it happens. We are what happens.

5. When the tough nuts crack, they crack in style.

British philosopher Galen Strawson on free will:

Almost all human beings believe that they are free to choose what to do in such a way that they can be truly, genuinely responsible for their actions in the strongest possible sense—responsible period, responsible without any qualification, ultimately responsible, in a word—and so ultimately morally responsible when moral matters are at issue. Free will is the thing you have to have if you’re going to be responsible in this all-or-nothing way. That’s what I mean by free will. That’s what I think we haven’t got and can’t have.

Actress Helen Mirren on self-doubt:

It would be wrong to think that you’re always right and correct and perfect and brilliant. Self-doubt is the thing that drives you to try to improve yourself.

Choreographer and dancer Ziya Azazi on human nature:

Human nature is a really good mirror of the universe. We can be very bad or we can be like an angel, we can be like Gods or we can be devilish, we can be very beautiful or we can be very ugly. So therefore we are a mirror of everything.

We all need a fresh breath of nature.

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

🟪 Why These Children Fell into Endless Sleep. A neurologist makes an emotional visit to understand “resignation syndrome.”

🟩 How to Say “No” After Saying “Yes”. Six tips to help you go about saying no after you’ve already said yes with tact and professionalism.

🟨 The problem of Marital Loneliness. Conversation is only one example of the various arenas in which we routinely fail to connect; broadly, he’s considerate and unromantic, whereas I’m romantic and inconsiderate.

This week’s finds that we want to share with you :

🟣 A collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems. Untools.

🟢 If you could not visit the famous Louvre Museum in Paris, and always wanted to…you can explore it’s collections online : Louvre art collections. There are more than 480 thousand works.

🟡 For those of you that feel an urge to learn and learn and learn. 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s edition. And we hope you also learned some useful things while going through your powernotes.

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Have a wonderful week, enjoy every day, and try to smile as much as possible. Until next monday 👋