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

1. I know you've been thinking this too... Where are all the aliens?
    
2. Do you want to be more creative? Try pretending you're someone else: "Creativity is not an individual trait, but a 'malleable product of context and perspective.' Everyone can be creative, as long as they feel like creative people".
    
3. Self-healing clothes? Self- healing electronics? How about a self-healing Wolverine-like artificial skin? Researchers at the University of California, Riverside might have a fabric to make just the thing.
    
4. I really like this advice from Charlie Munger: "I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you." Are you a learning machine?
    
5. In the past week I've booked tickets to see two of my favourite musicians play shows in London. So this week's musical recommendation is a track by each of them. St Vincent performing Black Rainbows and Nils Frahm performing Toilet Brushes - More. Can't wait to see them both live again!

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

1. Fun fact: zebra jumping spiders have a "thing" for green laser pointers and can see the moon.
    
2. The School Of Life asks "are you getting enough sleep?"
    
3. Beethoven and the difference between genius and talent: "Genius has to be founded on major talent, but it adds a freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning and growing, a depth and breadth of thought and spirit, an ability to make use of not only your strengths but also your weaknesses, an ability to astonish not only your audience but yourself."
    
4. Bill Gates ponders "What If People Run Out of Things to Do?" in his review of Yuval Noah Harari's new book Homo Deus. His last book Sapiens is excellent so I'm looking forward to reading his newest one.
    
5. This week's musical recommendation is Gaunt by Kiasmos. I just booked tickets to see them play Erased Tapes' ten year anniversary show later in the year and I can't wait!

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Cromer 2

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

1. A great post on how to learn more effectively: Let Go of the Learning Baggage.
    
2. Vantablack is very black: "Vantablack is a substance made of vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays and is the blackest artificial substance known, absorbing up to 99.965% of radiation in the visible spectrum."
    
3. A cool time-lapse video of the Milky Way shot from an airplane cockpit.
    
4. An interesting interview on How Creativity Drives Human Evolution with the author and anthropologist Augustín Fuentes. — "What's distinctive about humans is that we can imagine something and then make it real."
    
5. This week's musical recommendation is So It Goes by the ambient musician and composer Greg Haines. If you like this, check out his albums "Where We Were" and "Moments Eluding".

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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!

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