John Stokvis

October 1, 2024

September 2024: 4 things I learned (🤬, 😭, 🤺, ⌨️)

Goodbye September! Thanks for reminding me that summer doesn't last forever. At least I learned a few things...

  1. Context collapse is a phenomenon enabled by the fact that broadcast media can speak to multiple different audiences who are invisible to each other. This phenomenon is turbo charged by social media. But there are two different flavors
    1. Context collusion occurs when individuals “intentionally collapse, blur, and flatten contexts.” 
    2. Context collision occurs when “different social environments unintentionally and unexpectedly come crashing into each other.”
  2. A newborn's cry is right around the frequency 3000 hertz, which causes a fight or flight response and can raise our blood pressure. When adjusting song mixes, engineers need to be careful not to boost sound in that range too much or it creates fatigue in the listener.
  3. Ludosport is a fencing-llke competition where competitors compete with lightsabers. It is simultaneously impressive and ridiculous. Which makes it the perfect sport.
  4. QWERTY keyboards didn’t actually come about to slow down typing. There were two factors, the need to reduce errors on telegraph machines and the requirement for something “new” to qualify for patent law.