Roundup: lego garden, screenless programming, travel tips, and predicting happiness
Sept. 1, 2017
Awesome Lego Garden Railway - Charlie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOLpVTwlAE8
This video from 'TrainGuy 659' made me want to revisit my childhood only with a ton more lego train track - seems I didn't get nearly enough the first time round.
Programming without a screen - Murray S
https://www.vincit.fi/en/blog/software-development-450-words-per-minute/
I find that it's always eye-opening to hear how other people, particularly those with a different set of abilities to me, use a computer. So this description of how a blind programmer works without a screen and the affordances that various operating systems and programming tools do or don't give him is right up my alley. The audio snippets are especially interesting, I could barely keep up with the English audio, let alone the Finnish audio version reading English text.
The best time to travel anywhere - Elena T
https://championtraveler.com/best-time-to-travel/
Whenever I get excited about discovering cheap plane tickets to far away places, I'm always somewhat unsure whether the reason for the price drop is that it's unsuitable to visit in that period or I just got very lucky. I end up spending a lot of time doing research about what the weather is like for a country in order to decide if it's worth taking the plunge. This tool seems to be doing the work for me so I can just type my destination and decide if I'm being bamboozled or not.
Why we're bad at predicting our own happiness - Elena T
http://www.npr.org/2017/08/21/545097480/you-2-0-why-were-bad-at-predicting-our-own-happiness-and-how-we-can-get-better
Daniel Gilbert is a psychologist known for his studies on happiness. In this podcast he discusses how humans are pretty bad at making predictions of future events and how they're going to react to them. Because of this people are predisposed to taking bad decisions about their future and it's a bit improbable that they're going to improve, since the human mind is always searching for something new and different.