Kickoff For April 4, 2022
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Monday Kickoff, a collection of what I’ve found interesting, informative, and insightful on the web over the last seven days.
Welcome to a new month. Here’s hoping it’s turns into something that’s better than the last couple have been.
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
Online Life
Jumping-Off Point, wherein we learn about a term from the early days of the World Wide Web, one which never really caught on although the idea behind it did.
How Minnesota Teachers Invented a Proto-Internet More Centered on Community Than Commerce, wherein we learn how the US state was a technological hotbed in the 1950s and 1960s, and how that lead a group of educators in the American midwest to spearheaded an online service that resembled the original vision of the internet, rather than what the internet became.
The metaverse is a new word for an old idea, wherein we dip in to the what’s new is old again files and learn the origins of the concept of the metaverse — something that didn’t spring from the brains at Facebook.
Work
Japan’s formula for life satisfaction, wherein we get a look into continuing struggles that Japanese workers face to find a balance between work and life, and what some people are trying to do about it.
Our ancestors worked less and had better lives. What are we doing wrong?, wherein Ståle Wig looks at how we evolved from working only as much as we needed to into creatures who seem to be constantly on the job.
Why workers might eventually reject hybrid work, wherein Bryan Lufkin argues that it might be employees, not employers, who push back against the mix of working from home and from the office — mainly because of the inconvenience of shifting between the two and because of the lack of in-person interaction with others.
Odds and Ends
Walking America’s car-centric hellscape, wherein Eve Andrews introduces us to Alex Wolfe and why he takes long walks through pedestrian unfriendly suburbs and urban landscapes.
Heartlands: Kagurazaka, wherein we’re taken on a short, but fascinating, tour of a section of Tokyo that while Japanese has a distinctive French flair to it.
The Myth of ‘I’m Bad at Math’, wherein we discover that I may have been lying to myself all these years (but I still won’t be hitting the math textbooks any time soon).
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.