Inside the MIT Media Lab

Clive Cookson writing for the Financial Times delivers a great profile of the MIT Media Lab:

For 25 years or so after it opened in 1985, Media Lab focused on multimedia computing and communications – the interfaces between people and electronics – and it came up with important new technologies such as the electronic ink used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. Such research continues to thrive but Media Lab is spreading its academic wings to address broader social issues, says Joi Ito, who became director in 2011 after an unconventional career as an internet entrepreneur and social activist in the US and Japan.

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“We want to be anti-disciplinary – which means filling in the white space between disciplines,” he says. “City Science is a great example of something that brings together work from many fields across the lab. When you bring in kids who are interested in architecture, design, transport, energy, urban gardening, mobility and big data, you get a different way of looking at things.”

Higher education is almost always about honing your skills and research into one specific area. Media Lab is about the opposite, the juxtaposition of skills.

 
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Get that tune out of your head

Richard Grey, Science Correspondent, The Telegraph:

They are the songs you cannot get out of your head. Now scientists may have found a way to help anyone plagued by those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop.

Researchers claim the best way to stopping the phenomenon, sometimes known as earworms – where snippets of a catchy song inexplicably play like a broken record in your brain – is to solve some tricky anagrams.

This can force the intrusive music out of your working memory, they say, allowing it to be replaced with other more amenable thoughts.

But they also warn not to try anything too difficult as those irritating melodies may wiggle their way back into your consciousness.

For those unwilling to carry around a book of anagrams, a good novel may also do the trick.

Recently the 1812 Overture took over my mind. I have no idea how it got there, all I know is that for the rest of the day I had the last five minutes (cannons and all) playing on a constant loop in my head while I was trying to work. If only I had known that a quick game of scrabble would have taken care of it.

 
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How Pixar Used Moore's Law to Predict the Future

Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith in Wired: 

We know what Moore’s Law is and how it works, but not many people reflect on why it exists. Yes, there are often physical barriers to innovation. But there’s no imminent physical barrier to the realization of a bit: A bit is merely presence or absence of something, say a voltage, which means it can get exponentially smaller. So with no physical limitation, Moore’s Law reflects the top rate at which humans can innovate. If we could proceed faster, we would.

There are no shortcuts at the edge of discovery and invention.

 
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Second Sleep

"Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn't artificial light -- and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows -- people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. ... [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr's study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers -- not to mention your average physician -- have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong."  

I've been obsessed with sleep since a young age, mostly because I can't remember when was the last time I got what felt like a restful, solid night of good sleep.

Recently I read Dreamland by David K. Randall and ran into this passage. This is an experience I can relate to. I often joke that I don't go to sleep but that instead I take two or three naps a night with reading intermissions.

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