Every Wednesday I share five things I've liked and think you might like too. Here are this week’s Five Things…

1. An Instagram account where album art meets classical art.

2. The worrying effects of social media on our mental health. My takeaway: Using social media for real conversations, building communities and sharing your work is a positive thing, whilst using social media too much and to compare yourself to others is not good.

3. A wonderful project detailing the hidden treasures found along the banks of the river Amstel in Amsterdam during recent excavations for a new metro line. Here's an introduction to the project and here's what they found.

4. Better ways to learn. Space out your learning sessions, take notes, test yourself and get plenty of sleep!

5. What a tune. 🎶 Tame Impala - Let It Happen

That's all for this week. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and you'll get the next one delivered to your inbox.

The Round Tower, Copenhagen

Every Wednesday I share five things I've liked and think you might like too. Here are this week’s Five Things…

1. Brian Eno on children, play and art via a fun comic by Austin Kleon (the author of Steal Like An Artist).

2. Wiltshire has its very own Iron Man. Richard Browning has developed a flying suit consisting of a lightweight exoskeleton and six gas turbines that are strapped to the arms and back. According to Browning it has the potential to reach speeds of up to 450 kilometres an hour, though it hasn't been tested at speeds anywhere near that yet.

3. Learn to code for free! freeCodeCamp is a non-profit with approximately 2000 hours of free lessons and challenges. I've just restarted my quest to work through the course and so far I'm really enjoying the challenge!

4. Ableton have made a cool interactive website that teaches the basics of songwriting and beat making — a really great resource for anyone interested in learning how to make music.

5. This week's musical recommendation is Requiem For Dying Mothers, Part 2 by Stars Of The Lid. SOTL have been the soundtrack of my week as I work through the freeCodeCamp lessons. Their sound has (according to Wikipedia) been described as "divine, classical drone without the tedious intrusion of drums or vocals."

That's all for this week. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and you'll get the next one delivered to your inbox.

Adventurer

Every Wednesday I share five things I liked and think you might like too. Here are this week’s Five Things…

1. "If you spin these sculptures by artist John Edmark at a certain speed and light them with a strobe, they appear to animate in slowly trippy ways." — Surreal and more than a little trippy!
    
2. The owner of this record store and label won't take your credit card, doesn't use a computer and unplugs the phone if it rings too many times. The fascinating story of Mississippi Records.
    
3. One of my students sent me this video of a Romanian Monk playing the semantron, which (according to wikipedia) is "a percussion instrument used in monasteries to summon monastics to prayer". The monk's playing is really beautiful and hypnotic. As a musician, there is so much to learn from different cultures and their use of percussion and rhythm!
    
4. A great article on pop music's not-so-secret secret — "The songs are written industrially. . . often by committee and in bulk. Anything short of a likely hit is discarded. The constant iteration of tracks, all produced by the same formula, can result in accidental imitation—or, depending on the jury, purposeful replication."
    
5. Food scientists at Impossible Foods are on a mission to help the environment by winning over meat eaters and reducing our consumption of meat. The Impossible Burger is one of their attempts to do this. As a meat eater I'd be curious to give it a try!

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed it, sign up to receive the next Five Things in your inbox.

What he says (Sent from my iPhone)

Every Wednesday I share five things I liked and think you might like too. Here are this week’s five things…

1. A conversation with Alexander Shelley (conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra & music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa) on the architecture of music and the importance of art and culture to society. It's one of the best things I've listened to this year.
    
2. A learning hack backed by science? Yes please! — The Secret to Better Learning That Most People Don’t Know.
    
3. A great post on originality by Austin Kleon titled Steal Old Stuff — "When any art form or medium becomes primarily about people imitating the dominant form, we get stifling art. If you look at all of the great filmmakers, they’re all ripping someone off but it was someone 50 years ago."
    
4. A very useful cognitive bias cheat sheet (make sure you check out the 'diagrammatic poster' at the bottom of the post) — Because thinking is hard.
    
5. If you didn't know it already, Elon Musk and his company SpaceX are awesome. Last week they announced their plans for Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species. They seem to be very serious when they say they want to send humans to Mars. Redefines what it means to be ambitious!

That's all for this week. If you liked this, check out my previous Five Things posts or sign up to receive future posts in your inbox.