Welcome to Friday,
This week I returned from a visit to Pennsylvania, where my husband and I visited family and antique shops, walked around nature reserves, and generally ate too much chocolate. It felt wonderful to get outside our house after the past year.
Here is the best from around the internet this week:
NYU Professor and author Christian Busch on creating your own luck. The main ingredient is taking notice of things going on around you. I was pleasantly surprised to see so much of his work on serendipity line up with the magic of creativity. If creativity is blending together disparate ideas, serendipity is putting unnoticed things together to forge a positive outcome.
Take a look at the first 10 billion pixel photograph by the 3-D digital photographers at Hirox Europe. The project photographed Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and was undertaken to examine the surface of the painting, assess previous restorations, and learn more about Vermeer’s painting technique. “It’s as if you have the painting in your hands.”
The story of a nearly invisible demographic; how the pandemic has affected those who live in airports for months at a time.
Where Coursera is currently. The pandemic brought about an unprecedented shift to online learning, however the jury is still out on whether the MOOC model is viable. While online learning traffic certainly increased over the past year, whether that trend will press forward remains to be seen. Concerns about self-pacing and students actually finishing the courses continue to plague Coursera and similar companies. However, Coursera is able to attract learners at a much lower cost per student, making their model attractive to Wall Street.
What Marathoners Really Think About. The takeaway here is that one, everyone around you also struggles, and two, self-talk needs to be tailored to the occasion to be effective.
Currently reading: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Have a great weekend.
