It's a slightly different mix of links this week. OK, it usually is but this set of articles is particularly disjointed. In a good way.

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

'I Awoke at 1/2 past 7' — It's hard to imagine that the current craze for self optimization and quantification has its roots in the pre-internet era, but as often the case it's a matter of what's new being old again.

From the article:

As technology continues to improve our ability to mark and measure our own progress, we should learn from the Victorians and their diaries and ask ourselves: are we actually improving our lives or just finding new ways to criticise ourselves?

Pizza Hut: Its forgotten role of role in one of America's great acts of subterfuge — A glimpse into a different time and a more-than-slightly surreal story of how an iconic American brand set up shop in the Soviet Union.

From the article:

Pizza Hut was importing something totally new: a casual, sit-down restaurant that served a quality meal for a reasonable price. There were loads of people in Moscow hungry for that kind of experience.

Inflatable space stations — A look at how an idea, dating back to the 1960s, is being revived and how it could change space habitation and, potentially, space travel.

From the article:

Volume is a useful metric for evaluating comfort in zero-gravity stations where astronauts utilize all three spatial dimensions equally. The measurement becomes less relevant for artificial gravity stations, because rotation creates a gravitational force. The ‘up-down’ dimension functions more like it does on Earth, making floor area per astronaut the more meaningful measurement – just as we use square footage rather than cubic volume to assess terrestrial living spaces. Still, larger volumes are a necessary first step toward higher floor space. The problem is that this race for volume makes rigid space stations less and less viable: there is a battle to pack larger volumes as compactly as possible into a rocket.

Swiping and Writing: On Hinge as Muse — Katherine J. Chen ponders the creative doors that using online dating services can open for writers and artists, and how using such services changed the way in which she looks at her craft.

From the article:

There is an aspect of online dating that lends itself to storytelling. Everyone is a stranger, and owing to the sheer abundance of strangers, everything feels low stakes. On occasion, that paradoxical combination of the human search for love and the impersonality of the Internet enables a glimpse into someone else’s life. It’s like walking past a house where the shutters suddenly fly open. There’s the sense that even if the sight is mundane, you really have no right to look, and yet the temptation is irresistible.