davidvaughan

Droitwich, UK, is a bit revealing.

That idea across there. Just look at it.

That is technically impressive, Hassaan, and thanks for sharing.

One recommendation: I wouldn't have the demo avatar saying things like "really cool setup you have there, and a great view out of your window". At that point, it feels intrusive.

As for what I'd build... Mentors/instructors for learning. If you could hook up with a service like mathacademy, you'd win edtech. Maybe some creatures instead of human avatars would appeal to younger people.

The writer suggests that a page about a moth is unlikely to provide an opportunity for pushing contentious views.

The edits show there was disagreement earlier this year about the wingspan of the Scrobipalpula crustaria.

Is it 11-13mm or 10-13mm?

People feel strongly about these things.

Do I detect some Aussie tongue in cheek here...

"Mr Renwick was quick to protest his innocence. “You’ve got the wrong feller,” he told reporters."

The adult person under investigation has been named by the media. There is also a 16-year-old, who is too young to be publicly identified.

The novice is less likely to learn from a direct reading of Plato's Republic than to absorb Socrates's arguments and ingest enormous amounts of food for thought.

The novice will then have the capacity to think more seriously about current or historical political questions and devise better responses or approaches to them (better for the novice and better for our societies).

Always go to the masters first - the Platos, the Keynes, the Freuds... They're by far the best exponents of their own thinking.

Csikszentmihalyi says that attention "is an energy under our control, to do with as we please".

If only it were true that we have attention under our control. There are so many things we can pay attention to, and so many people whose job it is to distract us, that we can rarely direct it as we want. And biologically, we're set up to be distracted by threats and unexpected phenomena.

That's not to say we don't pay attention. As he points out elsewhere, Csikszentmihalyi identified 'flow', which is when we get into a nice state of focus on something positive.

Luckily, we're finding out more about how to pay attention to things we want to pay attention to. Prioritising, dividing tasks into chunks, getting enough sleep, choosing what we attend to more wisely are all helpful.

For many people, sleep seems to be the #1 productivity booster. Certainly, the research seems to suggest focus suffers significantly thanks to lack of sleep - not to mention IQ.

Needless to say there seem to be exceptions - Margaret Thatcher famously coped with 4 hours a night. It's been suggested that some people's ADRB1 expression continues while they're awake, which means they need less sleep. However, less sleep is also associated with dementia late in life.