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The Monday 6 – January 3, 2022

The Monday 6
The Monday 6 – January 3, 2022
By Kyle Petzinger • Issue #41 • View online
Hi there!
Welcome to 2022. 🥳
On to the 6:

1. 3D Scans With Your iPhone
If you have an iPhone 12 or 13 Pro (regular size or Max), your phone comes pre-installed with a lidar sensor which has astounding capabilities of capturing things in three-dimensional space.
The best app to show off the lidar sensor feature is PolyCam (iOS only). It’s free.
Download the app and start capturing a room in your home.
PolyCam for iPhone
PolyCam for iPhone
2. What Happened To Originality?
Derek Thompson’s essay from about a month ago titled America Is Running on Fumes has stuck with me. He also wrote a follow-up to that original piece titled Is America Really Running Out of Original Ideas?
From the first piece:
I couldn’t get the thought out of my head: Truly new ideas don’t fuel growth the way they once did. I saw its shadow everywhere.
I, too, feel like I see the absence of new ideas or the inability to execute everywhere I look. Here are just a few examples that immediately jump to mind:
  1. We’re nearly two years into the pandemic, and you’d have to squint to see how we’ve improved anything except for the development & distribution of vaccines, despite trillions of dollars spent. Our data is still shitty. Testing remains under-utilized/hard-to-find/non-existent. Public health messaging is confusing and contradictory. The FDA still isn’t acting quickly enough. Inertia is winning.
  2. Our ambitions to send humankind back to the moon in 2024 were recently set back because we evidently cannot make an adequate spacesuit anymore. Yes, we went to the moon in the sixties.
  3. This chart/tweet shows how deeply unoriginal film has become:
Matthew Ball
When the Marvel Cinematic Universe began, it averaged 5% of the domestic box office, releasing one-to-two films per year.

In 2019, it hit 15% through its three releases.

In 2021, the MCU's four films collected one in every four tickets sold (26%), ranking 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th https://t.co/wksWTdXxbz
Derek dives into several more examples and I encourage you to read both pieces. I suspect this is something I’ll be thinking about for a while.
  • What do you think?
  • Have you noticed such stagnation?
  • Is it overblown?
  • What do you think is driving it?
In film, science, and the economy, the U.S. has fallen out of love with the hard work of ushering new ideas into the world.
www.theatlantic.com  •  Share
The nation’s crisis of originality isn’t in our minds, but in our markets.
www.theatlantic.com  •  Share
3. 2022 Tweet Thread
Famed blogger of Wait But Why Tim Urban put together this tweet thread of “21 thoughts from 2021 I’d like to take into 2022”.
Tim Urban
21 thoughts from 2021 I'd like to take into 2022: https://t.co/hdHCgGiYVj
There are 20 others, but I think this is my favorite:
Tim Urban
When you’re the boss of the ideas in your head, you’re always willing to revise them.

When there’s no amount of evidence that will change your mind about something, it means that idea is your boss.

Humility is the awareness that no idea is worthy of being your boss.
With this one as a close 2nd:
Tim Urban
When kids repeatedly ask “why?” they’re trying to see the underlying reasoning behind what they’re told by authorities. “Because I said so” rejects that instinct and says “stop reasoning and obey.” We then become adults who only know how to trust authorities other than ourselves. https://t.co/yfDnEMFjLo
4. Get The Character You Want
Sometimes I need to type a symbol but don’t exactly know what it’s called. Shapecatcher lets you draw any character in your head, and the tool will identify the character(s) that most closely resemble what you’re looking for.
You need to find a specific Unicode character? With Shapecatcher you can search through a database of characters by simply drawing your character into a box. It can find the most similar character shapes for your drawing.
shapecatcher.com  •  Share
5. Quiz To See How Wise You Are
What is wisdom? Some researchers at UCSD created a “wisdom scale” called the “Jeste-Thomas Wisdom Index” that measures how wise someone theoretically is. According to the researchers, wisdom expresses itself with these seven characteristics:
  1. Acceptance of diverse perspectives
  2. Decisiveness
  3. Emotional regulation
  4. Prosocial behaviors
  5. Self-reflection
  6. Social advising
  7. (To a lesser degree) spirituality
You can take the quiz directly here and read more background in the link below:
Do you know what to tell people who come to you for advice?
www.psychologytoday.com  •  Share
6. What Happened To The Champlain Towers In Miami?
On June 24th, 2021, roughly half of the Champlain Towers in Miami inexplicably collapsed in the middle of the night. The Miami Herald put together an in-depth, interactive look at what went wrong.
In the six months since the tragedy, the Miami Herald reconstructed the collapse using photos, videos, call records and testimony of key eyewitnesses. This is what we found.
This an extremely sad story (over 90 people lost their lives in the collapse), but this reporting is so exceptionally well done, I had to recommend it.
House of Cards
How decades of problems converged the night Champlain Towers fell
www.miamiherald.com  •  Share
That’s it for this week. If you found anything useful or fun, let me know! And if you have any suggestions, shoot them my way. 😊 See you next week!
Did you enjoy this issue?
Kyle Petzinger

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