Dani and I have been spending a bunch of time recently thinking about the relationship between applications and infrastructure. It's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. You need infrastructure to build apps, but often times you don't really know what kind of infrastructure is needed until you build some apps.
For example, we didn't get AWS (the infrastructure) until we had Amazon (the app). Often times, the early innovators need to build all the infrastructure themselves in order to build the app they want to build. And then that helps lead the way for the next generation of infrastructure: taking what was built for a killer app and offering it up to everyone.
One of my favorite books is Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From -- punchline is: innovation is typically not a single "eureka" moment, but rather an accumulation of many years of cumulative discovery. This blog is an example of one of my favorite ideas in the book, the "slow hunch" reinforced by the "commonplace book". Another idea from the book is the Adjacent Possible: essentially, that we can innovate only with what we can see and touch today. But by innovating at today's edge, we continually stretch the boundary of what's possible:
The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.
For more on how this concept applies not only to "web 3" (crypto/blockchains) but how it played out looking back at the history of technology (internet 2.0, planes, cars, etc), here is our post.
One of the greatest things Frannie and I have in common is that we get the chills from music -- typically at the exact same time, triggered by the same musical... something.
For me it starts at the back of my neck, and if it's really good, it spreads all over my back, head, and chest -- if it's really really good I end up with tears in my eyes. I get it the most from vocal solos and tight harmonies, in particular R&B, gospel, and certain musicals.
It'll happen and the two of us will look at each other and be like, wow.
Apparently this is not just a random thing, but there is actually a lot of science to it. I never really looked into it until today, but it even has a name: Frission, or more colloquially, a "skin orgasm". Here is a good overview of the phenomenon, and here is a ton of assembled academic research on it. There is even a subreddit devoted to it.
I experienced it this morning on my train ride into NYC, and of course immediately thought to blog about it and include a clip that attempted to communicate it. As I read more about, a few things stood out: first, not everyone experiences it -- estimates vary but somewhere around half of people feel some sort of frission response that can include chills, welling throat, tears, etc. Second, the experience is not just about music but also about meaning -- often times particularly sad passages cause the experience (eliciting a deep-seated survival instinct), so it often requires at least some conscious or sub-conscious attention to lyrics. And third: musical context matters -- it is often the result of a musical build-up over the course of a song, and an isolated passage on its own might not have the same effect.
Given all that as setup, here is the one that got me today. The closing number from The Greatest Showman (which happens to be my daughter's favorite album right now, so is playing constantly in our house). The part from 3:18 to the end is the kicker, but it's probably best to start from the beginning to get the whole build.
Best with good headphones, loud. Curious to know if others get it too. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW2FUY3N-n0