News is bad for you.

The Guardian, a newspaper, has bravely published an article on how news is actually bad for us. Not investigative journalism, but the fast sensationalist media bombarding us with “bite-sized” bullets of news that’s designed to interrupt and mislead and in the end leave us desensitized and in chronic stress.

From the article:

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads.

Now go read a book or take a walk, nothing bad will happen to you because you missed the news, something good might instead.

Luke Wroblewski on reusing interaction patterns.

From a fastcodesign.com post on Polar, a “this or that” voting app by Wroblewski:

But the point, Wroblewski says, is that users still do have to learn it—so once you’ve gotten the user past that energy barrier, you might as well let them keep using what they’ve learned as often as possible.

We reuse our core interaction for logging in, for tips and help dialogs, for responding to error messages and more,” Wroblewski explains. “The idea is to use this pattern all over the app, to get people to features and functions that would otherwise be hidden several layers deep.”

Why Om Malik doesn’t like Facebook Home

Om Malik:

And most importantly it is Facebook, a company that is known to have played loose-and-easy with consumer privacy and data since its very inception, asking for forgiveness whenever we caught them with its hand in the cookie jar. I don’t think we can be that forgiving or reactive with Facebook on mobile.

The downplayed privacy issues with Facebook Home are scary to say the least.

Khoi Vinh on magic and mobile apps

No one wants to type more on a multi-touch phone or tablet if they don’t have to, so when they see an app demonstrate that typing can be eliminated entirely, it’s an eye-opening moment, for sure. But is it magic? Almost. To simplify is huge, but what matters just as much is the end result, what the user gets out of the simplification. If the simplified process produces satisfactory results, great. But it’s magic when the software generates a disproportionately meaningful output from that minimized input.

(via subtraction.com)

The Making of John Mayer’s “Born & Raised” Artwork

Beautiful film of how traditional sign-writer David A. Smith created the album and single artwork as well as two reverse glass panels for John Mayer’s new record.

It’s almost DST o’clock

It’s that time of year again - time to turn the clock. Naturally, the internet is up in arms about it with those against DST petitioning the white house to do away with it and those for it telling the former to suck it up. I myself am in the former camp, because I live at roughly +59° 25’ 47.91” by +24° 46’ 57.91”, or Estonia. Here, winters are mostly dark and summers the polar opposite. So turning the clock an hour back and forth twice a year doesn’t help much in that regard. It does however mess with your sleeping rhythm.

According to www.timeanddate.com, we get almost 19 hours of daylight in summer and about 6 hours in winter. In winter the sky is generally more clouded, reducing the amount of light during these six meager hours even more - according to http://meteo.physic.ut.ee/?lang=en, the amount of light in June reaches up to 8000-9000 lx, on a good day in December around 2500 lx. That’s really not very much light at all.

The little extra daylight that we’re told we get in winter falls between 8:30 am in the morning and 5 pm when the majority of people are at work, leaving little time to enjoy it. And 20 days later the sun sets already before 4 pm, so by the time your sleep schedule has adjusted, it’s dark again. And that sucks.

Nice work from AnyDo

AnyDo, the to-do list app for Android and iPhone just got a lot nicer. Aside from the handy new day planner in the app, their Chrome extension surprised me very pleasantly today with a feature I’ve been missing for a long time. It integrates with Gmail and lets you link reminders to e-mails, like so:

And, at the bottom of the e-mail thread there’s an option to add a reminder to follow-up, like so: