What You Need to Know Today: March 14
Good afternoon, Early Risers!
Here’s what you need to know
TECH
March Madness. What was supposed to happen: Last night, CBS was planning on taking its sweet time to announce this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament field. What actually happened: Within the first hour — of the two-hour special — someone leaked the full bracket on Twitter. Cue everyone (except Charles Barkley) clapping.
The future of bedtime stories. “When the company’s representative opens the book, it springs to life with animations that can be dragged off the page and then used to interact with nearby physical objects like a teacup or deck of playing cards,” says The Verge. Sony’s Future Lab just demoed a cool “Interactive Tabletop” at SXSW, using Lewis Caroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland. “Although its practicality right now seems limited, this kind of technology has huge potential. It’s not hard to imagine Sony’s device as an educational tool to turn novels or history books into animated interactive lessons.”
+ VR abs could be a thing. A Munich-based tech company invented a virtual reality abdominal machine. Their tagline is “We Make You Fly.”
CAREER
Tighten your writin’. “Many of us have ended up writing and blogging for a career almost by accident. Now, in the early days of the Internet this did not matter much — indeed it almost was an ‘advantage’ to not be a professional. But times have changed and many leading blogs now employ professional writers and editors. So how is the ‘amateur writer’ but full-time blogger to compete? Two skills that will make a difference,” says Income Diary’s Anna Olinger. Must-read for bloggers today.
+ Finding the perfect blog-post image is easy now. Shutterstock launched a new feature called Reverse Image that uses AI to find royalty-free stock photos that closely resemble other photos that might not be free to use.
‘Let me run it by our Chief Spiritual Officer…’ Does your company have a CSO? By 2017, it might. Fortune says meditation is now a billion-dollar industry. “This year 22% of employers will offer mindfulness training — typically priced between $500 and $10,000 for large-group sessions — a percentage that could double in 2017, according to a forthcoming survey by Fidelity Investments and the National Business Group on Health.” Meditation is the new yoga.
+ The shadow side of the McMindfulness craze.
LIFESTYLE
What geniuses ate. Next time you’re running an interview, consider bringing soup. “Thomas Edison used soup as an interviewing tool. He had prospective job applicants taste while he observed them carefully. Those who seasoned the soup — with pepper, for instance — before tasting it were rejected outright. They had too many assumptions.” Eric Weiner author of The New York Times best-seller The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places, from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley wrote an article about what foods fueled history’s great minds. Think a shorter version of Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals but with food.
Mastery > TV. “Research shows that ‘mastery experiences’ are also key to helping people recover from the workweek. So what’s that mean? Doing stuff you’re good at and trying to get better. Actively engage in a hobby, don’t passively sit on the couch,” says Eric Barker. Barker lists Mastery as one of his seven steps in his evening ritual. Hey Barker, what if you’re mastering watching House of Cards?
#NOWYOUKNOW
Daylight Savings is Literally a Joke
Yesterday, Ben Franklin was laughing in his grave at all those Snapchats you and your friends sent about how much you hate daylight savings time. According to Nat Geo, Ben Franklin was first to introduce the idea of daylight savings back in 1784 with a letter to the Journal of Paris.
In Franklin’s letter, he joked about how shifting our bedtimes so that we rise with the sun is one cost-effective way to save on candles. Two-hundred and thirty-two years later and this joke is still not funny. Sorry, Ben.
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