Happy Monday,
On the first Saturday of the new year I hosted an annual review day for a small group of friends. Together we reviewed the past year, reflect on what we’ve experienced and learned, and created an action plan for 2020.
I want to share and publicly commit to some of my goals for the new year:
- Grow this newsletter to 500 subscribers
- Publish 12 essays, and 12 newsletters
- Start and grow my personal website
- Graduate my masters in Digital Design Cum Laude
- Find a job and move to New York or San Francisco
- Talk to 10 new people I admire
Smaller habits:
- Read 1,5 books per month
- Run 52 times
- Write for 7 hours per week.
- 100 days of meditation
Coolest things I read this month
Robot birds
Scientists at Stanford have developed a first flying robot bird with real soft wings. The “PigeonBot” is only an early prototype, but it could pave the way for drones that maneuver as nimbly as birds. It looks cute, but it also worries me that we could have flying robots for surveillance. Soon we can’t trust an innocent pigeon anymore.
(From MIT Technology Review)
A wine bottle that comes with a playlist
Smart marketing by this wine bottle. Frontera added a Spotify playlist to the experience. Multi sensory media is a cool concept. Once all houses are ‘smart’ this could become a thing. I can imagine your Uber Eats coming with an Italian mood package. Ambient Philips Hue lightning, the right Italian playlist could, and maybe even raise the temperature of the room to mimic a hot Italian summer night.
Let’s talk dating
Online dating
It looks like almost all couples will have met online by the end of the next decade.
I wonder how that changes society? Certainly the stigma that dating apps once (and maybe still have) will fade.
Girlpower
There still is a huge difference between how men and women rate each other. Men rate women on a normal distribution while the scale of woman more looks like a power law.
Men drive the decline in sex
With all that dating you would expect an increase in people having sex but the opposite is true:
Muslims also date
And then finally a fun fact. There exists a Muslim dating app called Minder (Muslim Tinder). It’s for western Muslims, and it helps them date like everyone else.
(From Dan McMurtie - Thesis of the dating market)
That’s it for this month. If you’re enjoying this short email, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.
Until next time!
— Kent