The100: Expanding time, talking to animals and Chile’s Atacama Desert

SharkNinja’s $16B+ Product Machine

SharkNinja must see more launches than a shipyard. Each year they release 25 new products and also try to enter 2 new categories. Phwoar. Trung Phan has been spilling the beans on how they became a product behemoth:

“We immediately got feedback from consumers that they wanted larger capacity. So, we developed a five-quart, a six-quart, a seven-quart air fryer. We then found out from consumers that they were batch cooking […] What if we could develop an air fryer that was a dual basket? […] Shortly after that, we found out that consumers love that concept but… it took up too much counter space. So, we took that side-by-side air fryer and we stacked it on top of each other.”

Doo-little context, doo-little understanding

Ben Page, former-resident of the county of Ipsos, shared a chart on the cultural distance from the US vs. similarity between AI and human responses: 

“several academic studies show that the more distant a country is culturally from the United States, the lower the correspondence between AI responses and human responses… as we roll out synthetic data this will become more and more important.”

Related, researchers are using AI to do a Dolittle and understand what animals are saying. Will we see synthetic dog and cat respondents for pet studies one day? 😁 Although, they too have caveated needing contextual and non-verbal cues to fully understand meaning. 

How to instantly be better at things

Want to be better at something? Be that in work or out of it, Cate Hall recommends mimicking someone else. 

“Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation that’s a little awkward […] Maybe I could ask an open-ended question, or tell a short amusing anecdote […] Sometimes I fare better by simply telling myself to act like a charismatic person. I know some of those, and I can slip into a passable imitation of one much more easily than I can break their talents down into steps.”

Time after time

Time speeds up as you get older because its proportional weight gets smaller. But it also goes by faster than you can say “hangovers-now-last-3-days” because of the ‘Oddball Effect’. 

From Yana Yuhai’s really lovely piece on the perception of time and how to expand it:

“[the Oddball Effect is] where the brain devotes more energy to encoding novel events, making them feel stretched in memory. As children, everything was an oddball event. The first time we rode a bike, the first time we lost a tooth, the first time we saw fireworks […] Time felt slow because we were there for it. We looked closely, felt deeply, and lived inside our experiences rather than outside of them. The good news? You don’t need to go back in time to reclaim this. You only need to start paying attention again. Because when you do, time stretches. Days regain their texture. Life, once again, feels like something you’re living.”

And finally…

Modern cars next to their toy older selves.  

Photos from the annual World Dog Surfing Championships. Shred it dood.

What happens when you throw a tyre from the top of a sand dune in Chile’s Atacama Desert? A surprisingly mesmerising 3 minutes of YouTube. Really felt it when the lil guy finally fell.