3 things: Swift, CRISPR, WEIRD

I’m trying something new. I’m going to record three things I learned or found interesting in the past week. I don’t think these will be long or in-depth posts. Just a quick note to myself about where my mindset was for the past week. I’ll see if I can make a habit of it or not.

So my three things this week.

Swift

I’m still slowly learning Swift. I read Total programming in Swift this week. There is a lot to unpack here and I should revisit it in the coming weeks. One of the things I found interesting (and had not come across before) was ‘lifting’. By using map and flatmap a function’s arguments and return types can be changed to something more general. I want to follow up on this more.

CRISPR

I listened to RadioLab’s episode on CRISPR. CRISPR is a tool that allows scientists to edit DNA. I found it fascinating, awesome and scary at the same time.

WEIRD

I listened to the You Are Not So Smart episode “Psychology’s long obsession with the WEIRDest people in the world”. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic. Much of the psychological research is done in the west. However, culture effects our behaviour and thoughts. So, psychological findings may not apply to non-western cultures. For example, the belief that high self esteem is highly correlate to happiness is a western idea. In Japan self-esteem is not seen as needed for happiness. And the Japanese word for self-esteem is imported from English, as their closest words for it have a negative connotation.