Curated music playlists

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I’m a big fan of curated playlists (Apple Music for me) and have been curious about how and by whom these lists are created. This longish article is the best look at this I’ve read to date.

“Spotify says 50% of its more than 100 million users globally are listening to its human-curated playlists (not counting those in the popular, algorithmically personalized “Discover Weekly”), which cumulatively generate more than a billion plays per week. According to an industry estimate, 1 out of every 5 plays across all streaming services today happens inside of a playlist.”

“Music fans […] can smell the difference between a service where much of the product is dictated by algorithms or charts and one that is guided by more knowledgeable but equally passionate versions of themselves.”

Secretive as always, “Apple declined to share how many of those users are going to its playlists and how often.”

Racism

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[From my series: Broad, Sweeping Generalizations Based On Little or No Knowledge]

The only book I recall reading on the sociology of racism is Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin (1961) but I’ve been thinking about racism and I have some assumptions and some questions.

Assumption: Forming opinions about someone based on the color of their skin is learned behavior. Someone (a parent, other children) has to “teach” a child that black people are lazy or red people are drunks or asians are good a math. (Is there any evidence that racism is hereditary?)

Q: Is racism a disease? (Or disease like) Is it a condition over which the person has no control? Like autism? Treatable but incurable. I don’t recall ever meeting someone who admitted to once having been racists in their thoughts and actions but changed. I would expect the “cure rate” to be on par with ebola. A few people do survive it.

Q: If one lives in a country where a significant number of people hold strong, negative opinions about their fellow countrymen based on the color of their skin, what do you do about that? Education? If you’re talking about educating young people, yeah, sure, that’s a good idea but if they’re getting a constant diet of “nigger” and “spic” from family and friends, I’m not sure education can have much effect. As for educating (re-educating?) adults? I’m skeptical.

Thought experiment: Let’s say someone develops a vaccine for racism. One injection that modifies a few neurons in the medulla whatchamacallit, eliminating the tendency to judge people based on color. Who would take this vaccine? Nobody. Our beliefs define us. A core part of identity. (All Buddhists may leave the room) We don’t want to change how we think and feel about things and people. Because we don’t think there is anything wrong with those thoughts and beliefs. You can keep your vaccine, thanks.

To further belabor my disease analogy, will racism only die when racists die, like a cholera epidemic? In the meantime we inoculate as many as we can?

A word or two about how I use Twitter

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Far and away my first source for news. I’ve been on Twitter since early 2007. The first place I look in the morning and last thing I check before hitting the hay.

The 140 character limit is still my favorite feature and I hope that never changes. I follow 145 people but am continuously pruning and tweaking that list. I follow a few friends but most of my favorite tweeters are authors, reporters and publications.

To the extent I am able to tell, I only follow people who appear to be composing their own tweets. I like links to useful and interesting stuff. I avoid anonymous accounts. Before adding an account, I take a look at their profile page and read some of their tweets. If they don’t tweet with some regularity, I don’t add. If their tweets are mean, racists or sexist… no add.

I keep hearing that Twitter is in trouble. If it ever goes away it will leave a big hole in the internet. For some of us. For a while at least. In conclusion, I’d say Twitter is only as good as the people you follow and the time you spend in curating that list.

The Ruthless War on Stuff

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I have a mental list of topics I try to avoid because — in my experience — they seem to make people a little (or a lot) crazy. Politics and Religion, of course. Apple products. And Marie Kondo, the best-selling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I read her little book and did exactly what it said I should do to “change my life.” But I try to keep what I learned to myself (like religion and politics and Steve Jobs). But this New York Times piece is too good not to share. A few excerpts:

“By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods — from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target — but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.”

The success of Ms. Kondo’s book (and system) gets a big dollop of derision and smirking: “A parody book called “The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a [expletive],” and another one called “The Joy of Leaving Your [expletive] All Over the Place.”

But the lady seems to walk the walk: “The only visible possessions in her hotel room for a two-week trip from Tokyo were her husband’s laptop and a small silver suitcase the size of a typical man’s briefcase.”

The “organizing industry” is big in the U.S. and some of the old hands are quick to dismiss Kondo’s approach. Okay, a little more than just “dismiss”:

“Somehow the extra step of thanking the object or folding it a little differently enrages them. This rage hides behind the notion that things are different here in America, that our lives are more complicated and our stuff is more burdensome and our decisions are harder to make.”

A well-written article, whatever your thoughts on, or approach to, tidying up.

Silence

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In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.

I extremely fortunate in this regard. I have a lot of silence in my life. I live at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by woods. No screaming children in my life (at least none I can’t avoid). Barb doesn’t need me to entertain her so I can experience hours of silence if I choose. I don’t take this for granted. The flip side is I have less tolerance for noise than I once did. From the article below (This Is Your Brain On Silence):

“Two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses. […] The growth of new cells in the brain doesn’t always have health benefits. But in this case, Kirste says that the cells seemed to become functioning neurons.”

“There isn’t really such a thing as silence,” says Robert Zatorre, an expert on the neurology of sound. “In the absence of sound, the brain often tends to produce internal representations of sound.

“If you want to know yourself you have to be with yourself, and discuss with yourself, be able to talk with yourself.”

I do a good bit of this kind of introspection and, occasionally, wonder if it’s good for me. The article says yes. Shhh.

Kill Process

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killprocess“By day, Angie, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, is a data analyst at Tomo (think Facebook), the world’s largest social networking company; by night, she exploits her database access to profile domestic abusers and kill the worst of them. […] When Tomo introduces a deceptive new product that preys on users’ fears to drive up its own revenue, Angie sees Tomo for what it really is–another evil abuser. Using her coding and hacking expertise, she decides to destroy Tomo by building a new social network that is completely distributed, compartmentalized, and unstoppable. If she succeeds, it will be the end of all centralized power in the Internet.”

Kill Process by William Hertling

This is one of the geekier/techy novels I’ve read in awhile. The author went to great pains to get the hacker stuff right. (Or right-ish)

How LSD affects consciousness

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Researchers have published the first images showing the effects of LSD on the human brain, as part of a series of studies that are examining how the drug causes its characteristic hallucinogenic effects. (More at Nature)

“Within some important brain networks, such as the neuronal networks that normally fire together when the brain is at rest, which is sometimes called the ‘default mode’ network, we saw reduced blood flow — something we’ve also seen with psilocybin — and that neurons that normally fire together lost synchronization. That correlated with our volunteers reporting a disintegration of their sense of self, or ego. This known effect is called ‘ego dissolution’: the sense that you are less a singular entity, and more melded with people and things around you.”