Episode 40: Thinking Out Loud 104: Yours, Mine, and Ours – Thinking.FM

Sam Harrelson on March 21, 2016

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How many writing projects are you working on? Elisabeth and Merianna talk about their joint writing project, individual projects, and ghost writing projects and how to keep them all going at the same time. They also ask the question, “Can you make it as a loner writer?” No!

So, join Elisabeth and Merianna for the first ever Thinking Out Loud Writers’ Conference.

Mentioned:

What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?

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Episode 39: Thinking Religion 70: “And you never ask questions when God’s on your side” – Thinking.FM

Sam Harrelson on March 18, 2016

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Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss the religion of college football, Rip and Dip vs Common Cup vs Shot Glasses, Rubio’s odd theological farewell speech, the power of professing God’s Will, and why the Republican Party enabled Trump.

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Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

Sam Harrelson on March 18, 2016

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“Because now you have designers, who instead of being encouraged to come up with their own, new, crazy ideas, are being encouraged to do the things that have been proven by the data to deliver results. A lot of times, in thriving marketplaces, a lot of ideas come from the bottom up. You see new consumer behaviors, and then you go, “Oh my gosh, look at what these kids are doing.” But as you end up with more predictable, controlled consumers, you end up with a less innovative society.”

Source: Doug Rushkoff Says Companies Should Stop Growing | FiveThirtyEight

Don’t you wonder sometimes, ’bout sound and vision?

Be weird. Be different. Don’t let your own expressions be drowned out by “what has worked in the past” or be restricted by “the data.”

Round pegs, square holes and all that.

Episode 38: Thinking Out Loud 103: Feast or Famine – Thinking.FM

Sam Harrelson on March 15, 2016

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Will I be able to afford groceries this month? Elisabeth and Merianna talk about the peaks and valleys of the publishing and writing world and how it’s hard to predict what each month or each day is going to look like. How exciting!

Show Notes:

What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?


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Reverse Engineering Humanity

Sam Harrelson on March 15, 2016

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“We believe that a computer that can read and understand stories, can, if given enough example stories from a given culture, ‘reverse engineer’ the values tacitly held by the culture that produced them,” they write. “These values can be complete enough that they can align the values of an intelligent entity with humanity. In short, we hypothesise that an intelligent entity can learn what it means to be human by immersing itself in the stories it produces.”

Source: Robots could learn human values by reading stories, research suggests | Books | The Guardian

Our stories are important. Our ability to have, interpret, and produce intuition is seemingly something very human. However, we’re finding out that’s not necessarily the case.

Of Siri and Hesiod

Sam Harrelson on March 14, 2016

There’s a very subtle but very real history behind Siri (and Google Now and Amazon Echo’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana) having a female voice and persona…

“But because the creatures in these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature: about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness—a mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.”

Source: The Robots Are Winning! by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books

“Random” prime numbers and human projections

Sam Harrelson on March 14, 2016

“So just what has got mathematicians spooked? Apart from 2 and 5, all prime numbers end in 1, 3, 7 or 9 – they have to, else they would be divisible by 2 or 5 – and each of the four endings is equally likely. But while searching through the primes, the pair noticed that primes ending in 1 were less likely to be followed by another prime ending in 1. That shouldn’t happen if the primes were truly random –  consecutive primes shouldn’t care about their neighbour’s digits.”

Source: Mathematicians shocked to find pattern in “random” prime numbers | New Scientist

Math, philosophically, is spooky.

Does it “really” exist in the cosmos or is it (like most things we consider to be intrinsic to the universe) a human projection based on our finite nature?

Experience Designing

Sam Harrelson on March 14, 2016

“In the old days you were either cool and a bit flakey or on it and a nerd. What we need today is cool nerds. People and agencies that can fathom the deep jumbled soup of networked technologies and surf the rich broth of culture. And help their clients to do the same. Experience design is on the frontline of this reconciliation of left and right brain for organisations. The smartphone was the catalyst, yet is only one piece in the puzzle. What is certainly true is we’re no longer looking back and instead start to shape our industry to better serve our  clients and customers in this new world.”

Source: The forgotten language of experience design | Marketing Magazine

True whether you’re marketing a product, a church on social media, or an idea in a classroom.

Redundancy is not helpful

Sam Harrelson on March 14, 2016

“Each additional link places an extra load on users’ working memory because it causes people to have to remember whether they have seen the link before or it is a new link. Are the two links the same or different? Users often wonder if there is a difference that they missed. In usability studies, we often observe participants pause and ponder which they should click. The more courageous users click on both links only to be disappointed when they discover that the links lead to the same page. Repetitive links often set user up to fail.”

Source: The Same Link Twice on the Same Page. Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?

Very true.

Episode 37: Thinking Religion 69: Act Like You’ve Been There Before – Thinking.FM

Sam Harrelson on March 11, 2016

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Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss messaging apps and the future of the web, how Acts 2 connects with presidential debates, Trump’s nativism, world religion and acts of classification, and star bellied sneetches.

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