🍪 W34 - 🍳 The Number-One Ingredient to Live a Healthy Life

What you need to be healthy, how Netflix tricks you and why you should share your earbuds.

Sep 01, 2021

Hi,

and welcome to this week’s edition of the weekly bite, focusing on quality rather than quantity, making it shorter and easier to digest.

In this edition:

The Number-1 Ingredient to Live a Healthy Life
The Clickbaitification of Netflix
Augmented Reality Is Coming for Your Ears, Too
And some additional 🍞 Crumbs & 🧠 Brain game

Happy reading.

Regards,

Steven

Btw, building an audience for this newsletter requires effort, so by sharing this newsletter you can enlighten others and help me grow. Thanks in advance for your help.

Share Weekly bite

Grab a coffee, take a bite.

4 min to chew through this one.

① 🍳 The Number-1 Ingredient to Live a Healthy Life

What is the secret to living a long, meaningful, healthy life? Several studies have been conducted and it seems 1 factor for long-term well-being consistently stands out above the others.

Research in the 1920s and 1930s found that both children and adults who were embedded in strong social networks were more likely to find meaning and purpose.

Another study that started in 1937 by Harvard’s health services director Arlie Bock and was continued by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist George Vaillant surveyed subjects for many years discovered that the most critical factor for successful ageing for these men in their 70s and 80s was the quality of their social relationships during middle age.

“That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

The current Harvard Study of Adult Development director, Robert Waldinger, reinforced this statement in his TEDx talk that has over 20 million views.

“Social connections are really good for us, and loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to a community, are happier, they’re physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.”

So what can you do to start developing compassionate, meaningful, and sustainable relationships?

It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family member who you haven’t spoken to in years.

Recognize that putting yourself out there and reaching out to someone new or old in your life, even if you’ve gone through some challenges together, is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Source: Psychology Today - 5 min read

② 📺 The Clickbaitification of Netflix

Obviously, Netflix as a streaming service want you to watch their tv shows and movies, and to do so, they are constantly experimenting with items on your suggestion list and how to make them more appealing. Because, through their research, they say that you only consider a title for 1.8 seconds, and if you don’t find anything by 1.5 minutes, you’re gone.

So take a look at the new Clickbait show and how it’s presented on my girlfriends’ and my account.

This shows that depending on your viewing behaviour, you get to see different tv or movie banners.

In other words, depending on what you like, items and banners are adapted to match your likes so you click on them.

But in some cases, these adaptations are a completed miss and clear clickbait: luring you into clicking on the item, and then delivering something else than what you wanted or expected.

Take The Big Lebowski for example, a comedy/crime movie by the brothers Coen presented in a way as if it would be an action movie.

This auto-adaptation might just be the machine-learning algorithm that’s just figuring out what you like because clickbait works—at least when users first encounter it, but the real question is what Netflix will do about its algorithms discovering humans’ basest instincts?

While in 2019, you just had to see something for 2 minutes for it to be watched or liked, it seems that nowadays the emphasis is more towards stickiness, that you at least need to get through 80% before it’s put on your liked/watched list.

And that’s good! This is the kind of policy that will, hopefully, nip Netflix’s clickbait bloom in the bud.

Source: Slate - 5 min read

③ 🎧 Augmented Reality Is Coming for Your Ears, Too

While youngsters might share their earbuds, I’m not really in favour of sharing mine or using one of somebody else. Why on earth would you wedge another person’s waxy nub into your external auditory meatus?

But as it seems, entrepreneur Jonathan Wegener wants you to do this, to share an experience.

In 2010, he did a “participatory audio experience” in New York, that delivered coordinated movement instructions to thousands of people wearing headphones.

A voice whispering in your ear, a sense of camaraderie with strangers as you participate in the same public performance.

Following this experiment and the launch of Apple’s AirPods, he started building Pairplay, an iOS app that guides partners, friends, or kids through imagined scenarios within their own homes.

In PairPlay, a voice guides you and your partner through a scenario where you hear a different story through your earpiece than your partner. In one scenario, one of the participants is turned into a robot. In another one, both become secret agents.

The current version of this app is purely designed for entertainment, but it may bring possibilities for educational or professional use. Take for example a training course with office role-play.

Visual Augmented Reality is already well known, where objects or information is added on top of your phone screen (ex. Ikea, Google Maps,…), so it’s just a matter of time before audio AR will emerge.

In case you’re interested to give Pairplay a go, visit https://www.pairplayapp.com/ or download it from the Apple AppStore.

Source: Wired - 5 min read

🍞 Crumbs

🧠 Brain game

Do you know what book in the world is translated the most? (See below)

🔍 Refind

I found these articles via Refind, a site & app that provides a daily curation (5-10) of various topics. Go check it out.

Weekly bite