The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.
science
How Many People Does It Take to Colonize Another Star System?
A multigenerational journey between stars would require a lot more passengers than scientists previously thought.
Metaphysicians
Sloppy researchers beware. A new institute has you in its sights
How Inactivity Changes the Brain
How to copper coat anything metal
by @LaughlinJames. Bookmarking for when the kiddo gets a bit older.
Innovation Starvation
Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems — climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation — like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley — accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance — will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure.
Neal Stephenson from Innovation Starvation