I have been listening to old This American Life episodes as I work. How sad is the postscript at the end of the episode that includes the story of the priest, in which Ira Glass tells us that Patrick Wall no longer attends mass… And after some more listening, some fascinating research by Will Felps on bad apples and group dynamics. I’d be curious to see more documentation about the longer term effects on in any group, workplace, or family; though thinking about the groups I’ve been a part of, I think I know what they’d be. The most interesting part of the research is the idea that it’s possible to counter this effect. Most of us know the minimum needed to make a group run smoothly, it’s just that some people are certain none of it applies to them.

This is absolutely fascinating: work on a nanovaccine that stops autoimmune disease by stimulating the immune system. Obviously the immune system is much more than a single function or closed loop, but what is it? The researcher describes the two types of T-cells as “musicians in the same orchestra,” but it must be more than that… I haven’t researched it, but anyone with an autoimmune disease knows from experience they are more prone to infection than other people. (There’s probably data on that.) What does that mean? Also, how does this tie in to the hygiene hypothesis? e.g. if we accept the conjecture that autoimmune diseases are in part a result of generations of hand washing, vaccinations, pasteurization, antibiotics, and parasitelessness (good things!) in our extremely sanitized developed world, could we start to think of something like this as a complementary prophylactic therapy?⁰¹

The comics of Alejandro Jodorowsky. (via We Love You So)

I mostly gag at tips for boosting creativity, but some of these are actually interesting. (I always feel like a crank for not liking creativity boosters.⁰² Everyone appears to adore them even when they suck… While we’re at it, I also dislike exhortations to designers to see every bit of organization and infrastructure as Important Design Problems. Don’t say that. Most of us who make things waste a lot of time procrastinating by telling ourselves that everything is a design problem. Everything can be, but you’ll accomplish a lot more of the stuff you love if you can learn to live with the odd badly designed mess without coming unraveled or having to turn into a design superhero.) I’d add recording your dreams. For some reason, when my brain feels like a shuttered house, a few days of recording my dreams always cracks something open inside my head. Maybe this counts as absurdist stimulation.

Mike Perry’s Lost In The Discovery I love the wall of prints and the painted wood blocks.

Just in case you’ve missed Significant Objects.