Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #313

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

• Is Your Startup Idea Already Taken? – BuzzFeed. “Plenty of advisors tell founders to pitch their companies as ’A for B’ (echoing the famous, possibly apocryphal, ‘Aliens is Jaws in space’ pitch story). The reasoning is, that if you pick two concepts people understand, they can put them together in their brains and make a delicious mental blend. But with AirBnB, Uber, and a few other giants occupying most of the mental models, you get a lot of ’it’s Uber for dog-walking’ startups. So many, that the always imaginative Michelle Rial made a handy chart. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek testament to startup saturation. Sadly, it’s also a useful checklist.“ (Alistair for Hugh).
• Patience – 4k timelapse movie – Paul Richardson – YouTube. “Given how much sadness there’s been in the world this past week, I thought I’d share some more upbeat content. For starters: This guy spent 7 hours per second of video, totalling 30 TB of storage, to make a video just over two minutes long that merges timelapse shots across Europe. It’s pretty remarkable.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• A rare, risky mission is underway to rescue sick scientists from the South Pole – The Washington Post. “Imagine flying a small twin prop plane, in total darkness, for 10 hours straight (with only 13 hours of fuel if something goes wrong), into the center of an (almost) unihabited continent, where the average temperature is -76F. You are the only plane flying on the entire continent. Good luck.” (Hugh for Alistair). 
• Time perception – Wikipedia. “How, why, when do we perceive time differently? What makes one thing seem ’long’ and another ‘short,’ even if they are the same duration?” (Hugh for Mitch).
• What Happens If Society Is Too Slow to Absorb Technological Change? – SingularityHUB. “The title of this article says it all, and should be enough to get you reading, thinking and… really scared. Think about it this way: technology is probably really, really good for us. The problem is, that we need human beings to keep pace, figure it out and use it in the best manner possible. This isn’t about whether or not artificial intelligence is good. This is all about what we’re going to do with it, and how smart we will be about the implementation and marketing of it to the masses.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• How to Preserve Cultural Memory in the Digital Age – The World Post. “Honestly, I can’t remember your phone number or email address. Honestly, I don’t have to. I have a smartphone and some fairly intelligent search engines (some of them look like Google, while most of the best search engines are in places like LinkedIn, etc…). What do we really need to remember anymore (and, is that even a negative statement)? This is an interesting perspective, that begs the question: in a day and age when we don’t need to remember much of anything, how will digital memory shape our future?” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.