Greetings from the end of a long weekend. Wish I could say it was relaxing, but it was mostly rush, rush, rush and work, work, work. Hope your weekend (whether long or of normal length) was a bit more laid back.

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

Baby-Making on Mars — This is one of the many problems that need to be solved (assuming it can be solved) before humans can not merely survive but thrive off world.

From the article:

We’ll need to conceive and raise children away from Earth. Mothers and their young—not towering rockets—will bear the most weight of our space dreams. It’s through them that humanity will transform into a multi-planetary species. And for all the excitement about venturing into space, we know astonishingly little about how life there will affect pregnancies or child development—and, by extension, the future evolution of our species.

Whether space can actually save us remains far from certain.

Flow Alone Won’t Make You a Writer — Flow is great. But when writing (or doing anything else), you need to combine flow with discipline, tenacity, and concerted effort to succeed.

From the article:

Everybody loves the flow stage of writing but most people don’t like the hard work stage. That’s Thomas Mann’s point: To be a successful writer, you have to work hard. Creativity research has shown that the most successful creatives love the tiny tasks that others find tedious.

The forgotten 80-year-old machine that shaped the internet – and could help us survive AI — A well-formed argument about why technology alone won't make use smarter or more effective or more productive, and that we also need human creativity and reasoning in the mix.

From the article:

Is this technology enhancing and sharpening our skills, or is it making us lazy? No doubt everyone is different, but the danger is that whatever skills we leave to the machines, we eventually lose, and younger generations may not even get the opportunity to learn them in the first place.

'We use them every day': In some parts of the US, the clack of typewriter keys can still be heard — Far from being mere articles of hipster fetish, typewriters still have a place in some parts of the world as tools for serious work.

From the article:

Typewriters engage the senses, says Banerjee. You hear the energetic clack-clack-clack of the keys as you work away. You might even detect the musty aroma of old offices or maybe long-faded cigarettes. In that atmosphere of industry distilled, you focus in on what you're doing. "I lose time," she says. She'll look up and two hours may have gone by. Her thoughts are right there on the pages in front of her.