Johannes Rummelhoff

I'm a Creative at MediaFront and Co-founder of The Refinement Club. Seeker of inspiration, knowledge and ideas. This is a feed of my thoughts and things that I find enlightening. Basically its a 21st century version of the commonplace book. Follow @johannesr

[words-of-emotion]

[kushandwizdom]

Words of Emotion

[johannesr]

"60 per cent of Gen Zers want jobs that had a social impact, compared with 31 per cent of Gen Ys. It deemed them “entrepreneurial” (72 per cent want to start their own businesses), community-oriented (26 per cent already volunteer) and prudent (56 per cent said they were savers, not spenders). Gen Z is also seen to be more tolerant than Gen Y of racial, sexual and generational diversity, and less likely to subscribe to traditional gender roles."

[johannesr]

Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?

The rise of ad-avoidance is a way of putting a higher price on the privilege of doing what ads do—make brands more valuable and convince us to spend money. Just as we don’t let every salesman into our home, there’re no reason to let every advertisement into our life.

[johannesr]

The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It | MIT Technology Review

The community that built the largest encyclopedia in history is shrinking, even as more people and Internet services depend on it than ever. Can it be revived, or is this the end of the Web’s idealistic era?

Of 5,200 Wikipedians from all language editions of the project, 50 percent contributed more than one hour a day, and 20 percent edited for three or more hours a day. 

Jimmy Wales, now just a regular Wikipedian but still influential with editors and the Wikimedia Foundation, dismisses suggestions that the project will get worse. But he believes it can’t get significantly better without an influx of new editors who have different interests and emphases. “When you look at the article on the USB standard, you see it is really amazing and core to our competency as a tech geek community, but look at an entry about somebody famous in sociology, or Elizabethan poets, and it is quite limited and short and could be improved,” he says. “That’s not likely to happen until we diversify the community.” 

As commercial websites have risen to prominence, online life has moved away from open, self-governed crowdsourcing communities like the one that runs Wikipedia, says Clay Shirky, a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Shirky was one of the biggest boosters of an idea, popular during the previous decade, that the Web encouraged strangers to come together and achieve things impossible for a conventional organization. Wikipedia is proof there was some truth to that notion. But today’s Web is dominated by sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where people maintain personal, egocentric feeds. Outside specific settings like massive multiplayer games, relatively few people mingle in shared virtual space. Instead, they use mobile devices that are unsuited to complex creative work and favor neatly self-­contained apps over messier, interconnected Web pages. Shirky, who is an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation, says people steeped in that model will struggle to understand how and why they should contribute to Wikipedia or any project like it. “Facebook is the largest participatory culture today, but their mode of participation is different,” he says. “It’s aggregating rather than collaborating.”

[johannesr]

The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America

In a 1925 speech at a conference for financial executives in New York, McKinsey offered the kind of pointed insight for which he is remembered: "Usually, I find that the executive who says he does not believe in an organization chart does not want to prepare one because he does not wish other people to know that he had not yet thought through his organization properly. For the same reason many men are opposed to budgets. They are unwilling for anyone to see how little they have thought about what they are going to do in future periods."

[bookmania]

As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (via bookmania)

[johannesr]

Ars est celare artem

Latin phrase of medieval origin: Art is to conceal art; art should appear natural rather than deliberately created.

[johannesr]

Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time

Absolutely mesmerizing. The origin story is even more unique:

Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered World War II. He was captured by the German army in June 1940 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany (now Zgorzelec, Poland). While in transit to the camp, Messiaen showed the clarinetist Henri Akoka, also a prisoner, the sketches for what would become Abîme des oiseaux. Two other professional musicians, violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Étienne Pasquier, were among his fellow prisoners, and after he managed to obtain some paper and a small pencil from a sympathetic guard, Messiaen wrote a short trio for them; this piece developed into the Quatuor for the same trio with himself at the piano.

…

The quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain, on January 15, 1941. The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards. Messiaen later recalled: "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension."

from Wikipedia

[johannesr]

Share it like Cicero: How Roman authors used social networking

Roman authors, then, wanted their books to be as widely copied by as many people as possible, and ideally wanted copies to end up being put on sale, even though the author himself would not benefit financially. Instead, Roman authors benefited from their books in other ways: they were a way to achieve fame, highlight or strengthen the author’s social connection with an influential patron, get a better job, and generally advance in Roman society. 

Quite interesting piece about how the Romans shared and promoted their books without regards of financial gain, but for spreading their thoughts and ideas and by that gain recognition by peers and climb the social ladder.

Something to think about for those who are afraid of people copying/pirating their work. 

[johannesr]

Nice visual representation of Bach's Goldberg Variations {Variatio 5. a 1 ovvero 2 Clav.}

[johannesr]

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

- Ernest Hemingway

[johannesr]

The Curse of Reading and Forgetting

…rereading may come from a false sense of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to bend over and check the thing’s pulse. But that, of course, is the stuff of reading—the going back, the poring over, the act of committing something from the experience, whether it be mood or fact, to memory. It is in the postmortem where we learn how a book really works.

[johannesr]

The $1.3B Quest to Build a Supercomputer Replica of a Human Brain

Neuroscientist Henry Markram says he can build a supercomputer replica of the human brain. Now he has $1.3 billion to prove it.

[johannesr]

Unless you believe there’s something magical about consciousness—and I don’t, I believe it’s the product of a very sophisticated architecture within the human brain—then you have to assume that at some point it can be simulated by a computer, or in other words, replicated. There are two ways one might accomplish an artificial human brain in the future. One of them is to reverse-engineer it, but I think it would be far easier to evolve a circuit or architecture that could become conscious. Perhaps in the next ten to 30 years we’ll be able to incorporate artificial consciousness into our machines.

[johannesr]

Arthur Rubinstein plays Mozart's Piano Concerto 17, 20, 21, 23 & 24.

[johannesr]

The newborn infant is confronted with massive noise, what William James called "a blooming, buzzing confusion," just a mess. If say, an ape or a kitten or a bird or whatever is presented with that noise, that's where it ends. However, the human infants, somehow, instantaneously and reflexively, picks out of the noise some scattered subpart which is language-related. That's the first step. Well, how is it doing that? It's not doing it by statistical analysis, because the ape can do roughly the same probabilistic analysis. It's looking for particular things. So psycholinguists, neurolinguists, and others are trying to discover the particular parts of the computational system and of the neurophysiology that are somehow tuned to particular aspects of the environment. Well, it turns out that there actually are neural circuits which are reacting to particular kinds of rhythm, which happen to show up in language, like syllable length and so on. And there's some evidence that that's one of the first things that the infant brain is seeking -- rhythmic structures.

[johannesr]

Would you win the hearts of others, you must not seem to vie with them, but to admire them. Give them every opportunity of displaying their own qualifications, and when you have indulged their vanity, they will praise you in turn and prefer you above others…Such is the vanity of mankind that minding what others say is a much surer way of pleasing them than talking well ourselves.

Benjamin Franklin

Found in Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life