Can You Recognize Emotions Given Just the Eyes? Try It

https://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite

Your score is 28 out of 36.

Your score is equal or better than 64% of all participants.

Exercise Recommendation Test

Given descriptions of people, learn how good you are at finding optimal physical activities for them. Compare yourself to others! This study takes around 12 minutes. Try it!

How quikcly can you learn a new manual skill?

Take this 10 minute test, find out and compare yourself to others. Try it!

Decision-Making Study

What is your decision-making style? Take this 8-minute test to find out! Try it!

What is your Wiki Knowledge Score?

Find out in just 5 minutes how knowledgeable you are! Try it!

Spatial Reasoning Test!

How well can you visualize objects in space? Find out and compare yourself to others.
The test typically takes 15 minutes. Try it!

 

Now That's a Gem - Productivity Hack - Lead Time Planning

Brett Arends : https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettarends/2014/06/02/ten-things-i-learned-at-mckinsey-co/#260007cd5c7f

A manager once told me his number one personal productivity tool was sitting down for ten minutes, at the end of every work day, and writing out his to-do list for the next day.

I remember something similar in "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" by D Carnegie - the laggards leave the office early to "go spend time with the family" whereas the go-getters plan the next day.

Shame on me though :)

But, wait! What are the ten things this person learned at McKinsey?

1. There are no experts in business - they've just mastered the "act". There's a reason they pay these young smart consultants from McKinseay and Bain.
2. The answers are usually hidden in plain sight. That is, the information is accessible. It takes so analysis to convert it into actionable insights.
3. MBAs are a waste of money. This person did two years of history at Oxford and concluded : in a few weeks of formal study, you can learn enough about economics, finance and strategy. It helps to read about two dozen good books on strategy. (I guess speed reading comes naturally to someone who's doing a PhD in history at Oxford😊)
4. No jerks. Ever. Would colleagues want to sit next to you on a long flight? (the "flight test"). Bascially : follow the no a$$hole rule!
5. Everything's a grid. As in - important/urgent risk/reward pain/gain. 
6. The basics matter - agenda before meeting, lead time planning for next day, minutes and next-steps!
7. Start at the end and go backwards. State the hypothesis and look for evidence the supports/contradicts.
8. Don't look to consultants to save your company. They can only offer recommendations.
9. Everyone is in sales - like it or not. 
10. Manage upwards - handy for the case that your company doesn't follow rule 4 😊 Example : DD works for "the Rottweiler" who works his team to death. Predecessors who burnt out focused on mastering work-work while DD mastered meta-work - in this case, he figured out the office phone-system so he figured out a way to let the Rottweiler's calls go to voicemail. He'd listen to the message at his leisure, do the bare minimum and then use the phone system to record a message to his boss to be delivered later - at 10:30 at night! The Rottweiler was actually telling DD that he was working too hard!

BTW, Brett Arends is the guy who claimed he was going to invest in Russian stocks back in 2014. How did that play out?

If You're On Android, this is How Your Brain Works! Be Warned

From Michael Platt's excellent book: "The Leader's Brain"

Two years ago, Wharton neuroscience postdoctoral fellow Feng Sheng and I gathered groups of smartphone users to see if they had an emotional and social connection with their brand. 

(they used fMRI to observe brain activity)

Apple users showed empathy for their own brand: The reward-related areas of the brain were activated by good news about Apple, and the pain and negative feeling parts of the brain were activated by bad news, they were neutral about any kind of Samsung news. This is exactly what we see when people empathize with other people—particularly their family and friends—but don't feel the joy and pain of people they don’t know.

Samsung users, on the other hand, showed no increased activity in either area when they were shown positive and negative news about their brand. Interestingly, though, the pain areas were activated by good news about Apple, and the reward areas were activated by bad news about the rival company — some serious schadenfreude, or “reverse empathy.”

If I were the Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung, I would be worried. Samsung customers' brains tell us they’re just not that socially and emotionally connected to the brand, and that makes the company much more vulnerable to a potential competitor (just as a weak workplace culture can lead to higher turnover). 

How You Can Promote Neuroplasticity in Your Brain

From positivepsychology.com

1. Intermittent fasting (as noted earlier): increases synaptic adaptation, promotes neuron growth, improve overall cognitive function, and decreases the risk of neurodegenerative disease;
2. Traveling: exposes your brain to novel stimuli and new environments, opening up new pathways and activity in the brain;
3. Using mnemonic devices: memory training can enhance connectivity in the prefrontal parietal network and prevent some age-related memory loss;
4. Learning a musical instrument: may increase connectivity between brain regions and help form new neural networks;
5. Non-dominant hand exercises: can form new neural pathways and strengthen the connectivity between neurons;
6. Reading fiction: increases and enhances connectivity in the brain;
7. Expanding your vocabulary: activates the visual and auditory processes as well as memory processing;
8. Creating artwork: enhances the connectivity of the brain at rest (the “default mode network” or DMN), which can boost introspection, memory, empathy, attention, and focus (see art therapy activities);
9. Dancing: reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s and increases neural connectivity;
10. Sleeping: encourages learning retention through the growth of the dendritic spines that act as connections between neurons and help transfer information across cells

The Navalmanack - Your Most Precious Resource

Naval's recommended reading ("Read what you love till you love to read"): https://www.navalmanack.com/navals-recommended-reading

From one of his favorites, https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/

Consider the case of Acme Corp., a property development firm in a small town called Nepotsville. The unwritten rule of doing business in Nepotsville is that companies are expected to hire the city council's friends and family members. Companies that make these strategic hires end up getting their permits approved and winning contracts from the city. Meanwhile, companies that "refuse to play ball" find themselves getting sued, smeared in the local papers, and shut out of new business.

In this environment, Acme faces two kinds of incentives, one ..

If you tried reading that bit, you'll wish Kevin Simler (author of Melting Asphalt and also "The Elephant in the Brain") had read this by Scott Adams:

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

How You Can Squeeze Notebook LM

It claims to be happy with a URL. Try it and you find it doesn't do much - in fact, nothing at all..

So, what *can* you do?

Download the website - say it's one of those ancient online books with a TOC and Previous/Next buttons on each page. Use httrack.

Then, use this script (click to select) to (since Notebook LM takes markdown) pull the text from each page *meaningfully*. That is, you're saying Notebook LM is smart enough to make something out of headings. Else, you could just give it text. Ja? :)

Yes, you might need to ask chatGPT for a bash script to put all the text files into one - since N LM says something about a 50 file limit.

import sys
import os
import html2text

def convert_html_to_text(input_path, output_path):
    # Read the HTML content from the input file
    try:
        with open(input_path, "r", encoding="utf-8") as infile:
            html_content = infile.read()
    except FileNotFoundError:
        print(f"Error: The file '{input_path}' was not found.")
        sys.exit(1)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error reading the file '{input_path}': {e}")
        sys.exit(1)
    
    # Convert HTML to text
    text_maker = html2text.HTML2Text()
    text_maker.ignore_links = True  # Optional: Ignore links in the output
    text = text_maker.handle(html_content)
    
    # Write the plain text to the output file
    try:
        with open(output_path, "w", encoding="utf-8") as outfile:
            outfile.write(text)
        print(f"Text successfully written to '{output_path}'.")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error writing to the file '{output_path}': {e}")
        sys.exit(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # Ensure correct usage
    if len(sys.argv) != 3:
        print("Usage: python html2text_converter.py <input_file> <output_file_or_directory>")
        sys.exit(1)
    
    # Get command-line arguments
    input_file = sys.argv[1]
    output_arg = sys.argv[2]
    
    # Check if input file exists
    if not os.path.isfile(input_file):
        print(f"Error: The input file '{input_file}' does not exist.")
        sys.exit(1)
    
    # Determine output path
    if os.path.isdir(output_arg):
        # If output_arg is a directory, create the output file path
        output_file = os.path.join(
            output_arg,
            os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(input_file))[0] + ".md"
        )
    else:
        # If output_arg is a file, use it directly
        output_file = output_arg
    
    # Perform conversion
    convert_html_to_text(input_file, output_file)

And then:
$ for fil in download_folder_name/www.websitename.com/somefolder/text/*.html ; 
do python3 script.py $fil destination_dir; done

Then, just upload the files from this destination directory and you're ready to start chatting with your data. It does work!

Brad's Book List, with Love to You

From a man who can teach you to make a few billion dollars! Click on a cell for more info..

Title	Author(s) & Year
Breathe, You Are Alive	Thich Nhat Hanh, 1990
Cognitive Behavior Therapy - Basics and Beyond	Judith S. Beck, 2021
Cognitive Behavior Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder	Marsha Linehan, 1993
DBT Skills Training Manual	Marsha Linehan, 2015
Evolution of the Brain from Behavior to Consciousness in 3.4 Billion Years	John J Oro, 2004
Feeling Good	David Burns MD, 1980
A History of the Mind - Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness	Nicholas Humphrey, 1999
How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything—Yes, Anything!	Albert Ellis, PhD, 1988
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life	Martin E. P. Seligman, PhD, 1990
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat	Oliver Sacks, 1985
My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson	Sidney Rosen, 1982
On the Origins of Human Emotions	Jonathan Turner, 2000
On the Origin of the Human Mind	Andrey Vyshedskiy, PhD, 2001
Parent Effectiveness Training	Dr. Thomas Gordon, 1978
Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin's Guide to Living a Richer Life	Glenn Geher and Nicole Wedberg, 2020
Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility and Violence	Aaron T. Beck, MD, 1999
The Psychobiology of Gene Expression	Ernest Rossi, 2002
Radical Acceptance - Embracing Your Life with the Heart of the Buddha	Tara Brach, PhD, 2003
Uncommon Therapy: The Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson	Jay Haley, 1973
Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present	Cynthia Stokes Brown, 2008
The Feynman Lectures on Physics	Richard Feynman, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands, 1977
The Life of the Cosmos	Lee Smolin, 1997
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History	David Christian, 2004
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind	Yuval Noah Harari, 2011
A Short History of Nearly Everything	Bill Bryson, 2003
Sizing Up the Universe: The Cosmos in Perspective	Robert Vanderbei and J. Richard Gott, 2010
Evolution: The Ants	Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson, 1990
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science	Natalie Angier, 2007
Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives	David Sloan Wilson, 2007
On the Origin of Species	Charles Darwin, 1911
Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition	Merlin Donald, 1991
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies	Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson, 2009
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body	Neil Shubin, 2008
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow	Yuval Noah Harari, 2015
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution	Walter Isaacson, 2014
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology	Ray Kurzweil, 2005
This is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race	Nicole Perlroth, 2021
Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right	Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, 2004
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done	Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, 2002
Executive Leadership: A Rational Approach	Albert Ellis, 1978
How to Win Friends and Influence People	Dale Carnegie, 1936
I Love Capitalism: An American Story	Ken Langone, 2018
The Innovator's Dilemma	Clayton Christensen, 1997
Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World	Michael Moritz, 2009
Service Success: Lessons from a Leader on How to Turn Around a Service Business	Daniel Kaplan, 1994
The Titans of Takeover	Robert Slater, 1999
Tools of Titans: Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers	Tim Ferriss, 2017
You're In Charge, Now What: The 8-Point Plan	Thomas Neff, Jane Citrin, 2007
Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Win in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term	David M. Cody, 2020
Andrew Carnegie	David Nasaw, 2006
Big Deal: The Battle for Control of America's Leading Corporations	Bruce Wasserstein, 1998
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance	Ron Chernow, 1990
M&A Titans: The Pioneers Who Shaped Wall Street's M&A Industry	Brett Cole, 2008
Phillip Brothers: The Rise and Fall of a Trading Giant 1901–1990	Helmut Waskis, 1992
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike	Phil Knight, 2016
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller	Ron Chernow, 1998
The Elements of Style	William Strunk Jr., E. B. White, 1918
Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All	Phillip Houston, Michael Floyd, Susan Carnisero, 2014
Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception	Phillip Houston, Michael Floyd, Don Tenant, 2012
Why Marriages Succeed or Fail and How You Can Make Yours Last	John Gottman, 1994

At Least One Person Understands Me (and You Maybe?)

From LinkedIn - signs of an intelligent employee by Cesar Solis

1. They cheat on their job with a side hustle.
2. They treat everybody equal (including the cleaner).
3. They rebel against micromanagement and dictator leaders.
4. They know when to say no to a meeting.
5. They help others advance in their career.
6. They don't respond to most emails.
7. They stay away from gossip and corporate politics.
8. They create passive income so if they get fired it matters less.
9. They try entrepreneurship at least once to see what it feels like.
10. They're fine to be the dumbest person in the room.
11. They ruthlessly protect their time.
12. They focus on outcomes not KPls.
13. They're wildly open to new ideas.
14. They create stuff people want.
15. They learn without being told.
16. They're humble.

Paul Chin and Eldad Eilam - Your Reverse Engineering Gurus

What Paul teaches in his Udemy course : 

By the end of this course, you will be equipped with the basic knowledge to understand dis-assembled code and be able to modify exe files, to insert new instructions and inject new functionality to any exe files. (using x64dbg)

1. Assembly Language Basics
2. Reverse Engineering
3. x64dbg Debugging Basics
4. Modifying exe files
5. Hollowing out an exe file and inserting new code
6. CPU and Flag Registers
7. Arithmetic Operations
8. Accessing Main Memory (RAM)
9. The Stack
10. Function Calls
11. Code Caves (unused space that can be used later without increasing size of the binary)
12. Jumps
13. Structured Programming
14. Signed and Bit Operations

And, in further courses:

1. How to crack software serial number keys
2. Remove Nag Screen Reminders asking you to register
3. Convert Trial Software to Fully Functional Software
4. Extend 30-day Trial Period Software
5. Learn Reverse Engineering and Assembly Language
6. Protect your software by learning how software is being cracked
7. How to Crack Software For Fun by solving CrackMe Challenges
8. C/C++, delphi, VB, p-code, Assembly, C# programs covered
9. Removing obfuscation, unpacking, patching, creating keygens, loaders

And of course, there's Eldad's venerable old book : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversing:_Secrets_of_Reverse_Engineering

And then, there's xorpd - who also appears to be Israeli : https://www.xorpd.net/pages/x86_adventures.html ("You must do the exercises. You may say, 'I'm a fast learner and I can learn a lot by watching your lectures.' To this I would say, would you attempt to learn swimming by just watching lectures?"