We’re rolling out a new series on the Gong Blog, and we couldn’t think of a better way to kick off the series than with an introduction to our newest Hodger, Evans Mandes. He joined the team at the end of 2018 and has hit the ground running. Chances are you haven’t met Evans yet, so to give you a head start, here’s a chance to get to know a little more about him. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I was born and raised in Northern Virginia, and I grew up playing baseball and golf. Still to this …
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Read More👀 Apparently I can’t resist a story about emojis. Here, from NPR, is a report on a new study on how well the pictograms work for communication: “Not so fast, say a group of researchers who found that different people had vastly different interpretations of some popular emojis. The researchers published their findings for GroupLens, a research lab based out of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.” Is the chicken local? Maybe you heard this on All Things Considered yesterday: The Tampa Bay Times conducted an in-depth investigation into purported “farm to …
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Read MoreFor every great April Fools’ prank, there are a dozen bad ones. This April Fools’ edition of HodgePodge is a look at the good, bad and ugly of the contentious April 1 holiday. April Fools: A (Unknown) History As maligned a holiday as it is, no one really knows where April Fools’ comes from. (Don’t) drop the mic Pro tip: Don’t email a .gif of the Minions to potential employers. Nothing to see here One solution to annoying April Fools’ pranks? Ban them. Roanoke 2026 Shout out to my hometown of Roanoke for its faux Winter Olympics announcement. SEe also For all …
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Read MoreStand if you want to Using a standing desk can be a good change of pace from sitting all day (and might even be your preferred way to work all the time), but the science is far from settled. “I’ve been itching to get a standing desk. After all, America’s sitting itself into an early grave. Sitting is the new smoking. Clearly, a standing desk would stop me from sitting, and standing is just so much better for you than sitting, right?” “Contrary to popular belief, science does not say so.” Bucket of crazy The surprising, profane story of the …
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Read MoreMusically speaking Interesting, long and subtly interactive, this New York Times piece looks at where popular music is heading. “One of the great tricks of pop music is that no matter how much we like to imagine it’s about musicians expressing themselves, it tends to be more useful as a way for listeners to figure out their own identities: Each song lets us try on a new way of being in the world. For a long while, the idea was that young people could use music to shape their style — their clothes, their haircuts, their sense of cool. Then …
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Read MoreWork it In New York Times Magazine’s The Work Issue, they featured articles on work-life balance, hiring practices, lunch breaks and this interesting long piece on how to build a team: “Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers — a practice known as ‘employee performance optimization’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last month, found that ‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned …
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Read MoreObLIGOtory space item You may have heard this week that a laboratory named LIGO proved Einstein right about gravitational waves. The New York Times has a video illustrating the waves and how they were detected and The Atlantic called it “the dawn of a new era in science”: “More than a billion years ago, in a galaxy that sits more than a billion light-years away, two black holes spiraled together and collided. We can’t see this collision, but we know it happened because, as Albert Einstein predicted a century ago, gravitational waves rippled out from it and traveled across the universe to an ultra-sensitive detector here …
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Read MorePizzaology You could slice your pizza the regular way, or you could use the power of math to slice it into 40 identically shaped pieces: “Mathematicians already knew from previous research that they can divide the six congruent slices of the pizza, cut through the center of the pie (below, left) by dividing each slice across its middle. The result is twelve three-sided slices, six on the inside with very little crust, and six on the outside with the most of the crust…” “But the slicing patterns Haddley and Worsley have designed in their new paper go beyond 3-sided slices. …
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Read MoreFor the new year, I’m trying something a little different with the format of HodgePodge. I’ll still bring you five (or so) interesting stories each week, but now I’ll include an interesting excerpt as well. Digital Dominion A huge portion of the “cloud” runs on Amazon Web Services, which means much of your daily internet activity runs through Northern Virgina. The Atlantic took a tour of AWS’s data center: “Once in a while—not quite often enough to be a crisis, but just often enough to be a trope—people in the United States will freak out because a huge number of …
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Read MoreLuke, use the data Bloomberg Business applies some data journalism to The Force, tracking screen time the mysterious power was used for good vs. evil, which powers were used by which characters and more. Where’s Dr. Beckett? WSJ.D reports on Google’s latest experiments with quantum computing. TL;DR version: We at least know it’s not completely useless. That’s so money Reclusive Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is probably this Australian guy. Except, probably not. (Trigger warning: highly technical content.) Ashton will fix it The Verge traces the history of celebrity hires by struggling tech companies (think Blackberry naming Alicia Keys as its …
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