Issue #20 · September 19th, 2017 · View in your browser

The world's favourite colour is blue. Why you ask? For seven years, psychologists Stephen E. Palmer and Karen Schloss conducted a research that aimed to answer this very question. In 2010, they published their findings: your preference for a colour can be determined by averaging out how much you like all of the objects you associate with this colour. Oddly enough, it seems like a lot of things people like — a lot of positive things, really — are blue. We can think about the sky and water for instance, or blue jeans and ballpoint pens. What's interesting about this theory is that it also explains why your favourite colour may not be blue (e.g red where the average of objects you like are red). And it explains why your colour preferences evolve over time. [Artsy]

Writing letters is an incomparable form of communication. Here is what playwright Sam Shepard has to say about it, in a letter he wrote to his best friend and brother-from-another-mother Johnny Dark:

Dear John,

One thing I realize I love about the ‘letter’ as a form is that it’s conversation; — always available. You can just sit down any old morning & have a conversation whether the person’s there or not. You can talk about anything & you don’t have to wait politely for the other person to finish the train of thought. You can have long gaps between passages — days can go by & you might return & pick it up again. And the great difference in all other forms of writing is that it is dependent to a large extent on the other person. It’s not just a solo act. You’re writing in response to or in relationship to someone else — over time. I think that’s the key — over time. We’re very lucky, I figure, to have continued the desire to talk to each other by mail for something like 40 years. But then again, what else were we going to do? It is probably the strongest through-line I’ve maintained in this life. [Brain Pickings]

I really like octopus. Sure, I like octopus when it's grilled with parsley, garlic, pepper but really, I find the animal fascinating. I am not going to list a series of fun-facts about them (they can lift 13kg with each of their 1600+ suckers on their arms (yes, arms, not tentacles), they are so smart they need to be sedated before a surgery, their whole body can fit through a hole the size of their eye). I am going to tell you why they are of unique philosophical and scientific interest. The reason is that they are very, very smart and that's a puzzling thing for invertebrates. Our last common shared ancestor with them probably was a blind-worm like creature that existed 600 million years ago. They are problem-solvers, can use tools, display ability for mimicry and some say even humour. Their arms, even detached, can reach, grasp, smell even exhibit short-term memory; the frontier between their brains and bodies is blurred. Nonetheless, the central brain can reestablish control when it wants to. One last word about colours. Their skins are layered with chromatophores which are like pixels. They change their colours for camouflage (adopting another animal's colour) or for signalling but they are colour-blind (just Google “octopus colours” and see for yourself). Lots of things to unpack here [London Review of Books]

The Apple Watch might soon save your life. The number one cause of death in the United States is heart disease. It's pretty much the same in a lot of Western countries. Before the Apple Watch was announced, in 2015, I remember a lot of discussion about the health sensors that would be included in the device. We were all a bit disappointed when it shipped with only a sensor to measure your heart rate. Little did we know that two years later, software engineering would bridge the gap. Cardiogram, a startup working to make the data your Apple Watch gets from you actionable has been developing neural networks that can detect atrial fibrillation (AF) with 97% accuracy. 2.7M Americans have AF and, even though it is mostly asymptomatic, it can lead to a stroke. This story raises interesting questions about how artificial intelligence can make already existing hardware much more useful. We might be on the verge of the real third industrial revolution (it did start with now-basic software like Excel and Web 1.0 apps but society will profoundly and quickly change with AI. The speed at which AI might hit consumer markets is going to be a sight to behold. I would also bet a beer or two with you that if the Apple Watch can detect heart problems a priori it will be a much, much bigger commercial success. [Mobile Health News]* *

*Thanks and have a nice day, 

Ulysse*