Happy Monday!

I want to thank everyone for tuning in to this fun little project that I started back in February (time flys 🤯). Since then, this has grown considerably, and it's been great to see a lot of you enjoying the content and sharing with me cool stuff too.

If you see anything cool as you explore the infinitely expanding realm of the web, shoot me an email at ryan@ryanhatton.net or reply to this email. It might find its way on the next edition, and even it doesn't, I always appreciate it!

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📢 Community Call!

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What are some of the coolest sites that you visit regularly?

It can be anything you enjoy checking out. I'll aggregate the responses and anonymously share them in the next Mishmash. Feel free to reply to this email.

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💬 Power of "Because"

There was an experiment done in 1977 by Ellen Langer with her Harvard research team to discover how words drive human behavior.

🧪 The experiment ran like this; a researcher would go up to a library copy machine with someone already in line and ask to cut. However, the way the researcher asked was one of these three predefined scripts:

Version 1 (a request without a defined reason): "Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine?"

Version 2 (a request with a real reason): "Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I'm in a rush?"

Version 3 (a request with a fake reason): "Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I have to make copies?"

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🤯 Here are the results from the experiment:

Version 1: 60 percent of people let the researcher skip the line.

Version 2: 94 percent of people let the researcher skip ahead in line.

Version 3: 93 percent of people let the researcher skip ahead in line.

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The experiment later became popular and was called the The Copy Machine Study.

Langer's experiment revealed that as long as we justified our behavior whether it be a rational or irrational reason, we would be more likely to perform that behavior.

😉 So if you are going to ask a favor, give a reason and don't forget to use the word "because".

​(Link to the research paper)​

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🧠 Mapping the Brain

Here's an article discussing the creation of the 3-D visual for a portion of the human brain. This is a collaboration project with Google and Lichtman Laboratory at Harvard.

They even have an interactive site where you can move around 3-D renderings of the brain.

Right now, they have done this for only a small portion of the brain. This is due to not only the storage of the data (1.4 petabytes or roughly 1400 terabytes) but the sheer size of the data sets pose new unique challenges for 3-D mapping.

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🥇 Battle of the Women's 10K WR

🤯 The Women's 10K world record was broken twice in the span of 48 hours. Crazy...

​Sifan Hassan snagged the WR on June 6 with a time of 26:06:82 but lost it two days later at the same stadium to Letesenbet Gidey with a time of 29:01:03. Letesenbet now has both the WR for the 5k and 10k.

💡 I addition to the continual talk around 'super shoes' there is also new tech in the form of LEDs gaining attention. Created by Wavelight, this is a ribbon of LEDs placed along the rim of a track that can 'pace' runners for a specifically programmed pace. I haven't seen these in person yet, but I can only imagine that it would be immensely beneficial in cases where you have no pacers and trying to keep a consistent pace.

🥇 This new technology has been used in all the most recent women and men's 5K and 10K WRs.

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And that’s it for the Monday Mishmash! Thank you for reading and see you next week for the upcoming edition! As always, if you enjoyed this, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. (They can sign up at this link or feel free to share this email.

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Thanks and have a great week!

-Ryan

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