Look What I Found #1

Introduction

Over the past several months I have become somewhat ‘addicted’ to listening to podcasts on a number of different subjects. I particularly enjoy listening to what are often referred to as long-form podcasts. I’m not sure exactly when a short-form podcast becomes a long-form podcast but I am going to assume it is at the 20 minute mark.

One such podcast that I often find myself listening to is the Tim Ferris Podcast as I quite like his interviewing style, but also because he has some really great guests on his show talking about topics that I find rather interesting.

Something that Tim promotes on his podcast is his 5 Bullet Friday email list that he puts out every Friday that has a list of five things that he has either watched/bought/used/discovered that he feels he needs to share with his subscribers. It is a great list and I have already discovered a few gems even though I have only been subscribed for a couple of weeks.

For a number of years I used to post to Social Media, Facebook in particular, quite a lot. It would range from articles I had read, podcasts listened to, or any other interesting info I had come across. A number of friends had said that they enjoyed reading what I had posted which is partly what spurred me on to keep doing it. Unfortunately, I have become somewhat disillusioned with much of Social Media over the past few months and as such have almost stopped posting to Facebook in my personal capacity. Posts from my website, much like this one, still make their way to my Facebook page but gone are the spur of the moment posts I used to share.

That got me thinking. Perhaps I could curate a weekly list of the things I had found and enjoyed reading/using/watching. Now, Tim probably does it the right way in that he makes you subscribe to his list, but I have tried curating a email database and I am hopeless at it. So, I have decided to try and put out a weekly blog post highlighting the things that I have found and that I thought others would be interested in as well.

So here goes nothing – post number 1! Whilst there will be photography related items from time to time this is in no way exclusively about photography. Rather, it is just stuff that I fond interesting and thought others might as well.

Found on Youtube

This one is for all the videographers out there. This looks seriously cool and will be a huge asset to vloggers, Videographers, or pretty much anyone shooting video.

I’m not really sure how easy it was to do this in the past, but judging by how some are hyping it up I would assume it was largely the exclusive domain of large production companies. Now, anyone with a Creative Cloud subscription will essentially be able to to these edits pretty quickly.

Check out the above video for quite a dramatised look at the content aware fill in Adobe Premier. Or, go straight to the Adobe site for more info: https://adobe.ly/2GmcTB7

Podcasts

I mentioned above that I have become disillusioned with Social Media over the past several months. Much of it I couldn’t explain – I just had this feeling. Well, after listening to the below podcast between Sam Harris and Roger McNamee a lot of what was troubling me made a lot more sense.

#152 – The Trouble With Facebook

There is the risk that because I was starting to feel uneasy about the Social Media situation that I have a sort of confirmation bias towards anything portraying it in a negative light. I will try and see what I can find that has a more positive outlook. If I do I will be sure to post it here in the coming weeks.

Pre-release edit: I found this article which is quite interesting and highlights one of the good things that companies like Facebook are able to do. Processing this amount of data as quickly as they did could only really have been done by a few governments and the .com behemoths.

Books

I’m not a big reader of books as being able to sit still in one place long enough to get through a chapter, let alone a whole book, has always been a challenge to me. This book I found so interesting that I battled to put it down:

Scattered Minds – Dr. Gabor Mate

Here is the excerpt from the Amazon.com:

Scattered Minds explodes the myth of attention deficit disorder as genetically based – and offers real hope and advice for children and adults who live with the condition.

Gabor Maté is a revered physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry and psychology – and himself has ADD. With wisdom gained through years of medical practice and research, Scattered Mindsis a must-read for parents – and for anyone interested how experiences in infancy shape the biology and psychology of the human brain.

Scattered Minds:
– Demonstrates that ADD is not an inherited illness, but a reversible impairment and developmental delay
– Explains that in ADD, circuits in the brain whose job is emotional self-regulation and attention control fail to develop in infancy – and why
– Shows how ‘distractibility’ is the psychological product of life experience
– Allows parents to understand what makes their ADD children tick, and adults with ADD to gain insights into their emotions and behaviours
– Expresses optimism about neurological development even in adulthood
– Presents a programme of how to promote this development in both children and adults

It is an excellent read for those wanting to learn more about AD(H)D, both the conventional wisdom as well as Dr. Maté’s own hypothesis about it being caused by early childhood trauma and/or stress.

Wikileaks

As of yesterday many of you would probably have heard that Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, was removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy by British police after his Ecuadorian citizenship, that was granted in 2017, was revoked.

To be honest there is so much going on here, and it has been going on for so long, that I really didn’t know, and still don’t to a large extent, what to make of everything.

This New York Times article is a pretty good read giving an overview of events both recent and those going back to 2010: https://nyti.ms/2VEgvTZ (The article is behind a paywall, but you can create a free account that will give you access)

One interesting thing about this is how Mr. Assange seems to have both supporters and detractors on both sides of the political aisle – something quite rare in 2019!

Just for a laugh

I saw this one on Twitter and had to share it. It kind of goes along with the social media theme of some of the above 🙂

That is it for this weeks edition of Look What I Found. Hopefully you found some/all of the above interesting.

If there any articles/videos/products/services that you found recently that you think is worth sharing, then please share it in the comments below so I can also check it out.

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