🎉 something new.

hi & welcome to sam’s brain drain, a weekly collection of thumb-stopping things to tap, read, & watch. i hope you enjoy.

Jun 24, 2019

estimated reading time: 3m, 40s.

😌 hi, i’m sam!

i turned 23 last week. my life has done a complete 180° turn in the past few months. i’m extremely lucky (& grateful) to now be working at a fintech company that i’ve dreamt of working for (for almost four years). i’m conscious, however, that i need to maintain a creative outlet.

💡 this got me thinking.

i come across things that i love every week & i always try to share them with those closest to me.

this gets tricky when i want to share something with a larger group of people.

so i’ve created sam’s brain drain, a weekly collection of thumb-stopping things to tap, read, & watch. i’m super stoked to welcome you to the first edition!

temptingly tappable:

🌍 ‘show your stripes’:

show your stripes visualises 100+ years of climate change in the country where you live. each stripe represents the temperature in that country averaged over a year.

here are the temperature stripes for ireland from 1901-2018:

🚮 ‘useless’:

useless is london's first website dedicated to showcasing the capital's zero-waste shops. incredible interactive design, incredible message.

🥤 ‘milkshake’:

milkshake is a new app that is in early-access on ios. it allows you to create a super simple website that allows you to have a web presence beyond instagram. think easy templates & aesthetic layouts, all editable from the app. as a sidenote, i currently use cardd to accomplish just that, but this looks even easier to use.

brain candy:

💬 “i wish you bad luck”:

supreme court justice john roberts' unconventional speech to his son's graduating class is incredibly powerful:

now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. i will not do that, and i’ll tell you why. from time to time in the years to come, i hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. i hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. sorry to say, but i hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted.
…
i hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and i hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. whether i wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. and whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

continue reading.

🎩 the end of history illusion:

we all think that we have changed a lot in our past, but we don’t think we will change much going forward which gives rise to this illusion:

we underestimate how much we change, which leads to funny scientific findings. if you ask people how much they would pay to see their current favourite band ten years from now, the average answer is $129. but if you ask how much that same person would pay to see their favourite band from 10 years ago, the answer is $80.

continue reading.

🚿 why we have our best thoughts in the shower:

do things suddenly become clear when you’re in the shower? that might just be the case for all of us:

when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. while this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights. ‘that’s why so many insights happen during warm showers,’ bhattacharya says. ‘for many people, it’s the most relaxing part of the day.’
it’s not until we’re being massaged by warm water, unable to check our e-mail, that we’re finally able to hear the quiet voices in the backs of our heads telling us about the insight. the answers have been their all along–we just weren’t listening.”

continue reading.

📚 word of the week:

“verdancy”:

greenness, especially the greenness of plants & vegetation (from latin viridāre, “to make or become green”). also, innocence of mind, freshness of appearance.