Hello you. This week I learned from the insuppressible Diamond Geezer that the term heatwave was given a precise definition only recently, and the thresholds are different depending where you are. I could’ve proposed an alterative scale based upon the length to which the cat has stretched herself out.

✍️ Experience: I was Tupac Shakur’s pen pal: In Barnsley, the phone rang and a voice said, ‘It’s Tupac. You sent me a copy of your fly-ass magazine’.

📦 Panasonic Will Help You Transform Your Living Room Into an Office Cubicle: As horrible as cubicles are, it can be hard to carve out working space into a domestic environment. A new offering called Komoru (which translates as ‘seclude oneself’) will let you create your very own partitioned desk and cubicle in your living room.

🛰 How to cast a wider net for tracking space junk: There are only so many hours of the day you can use to track orbital debris. Some scientists think they’ve found more hours.

🏋️‍♀️ The Workforce Is About to Change Dramatically: When the pandemic is over, one in six workers is projected to continue working from home or co-working at least two days a week. Another survey found one-fifth of the workforce could be entirely remote. If white-collar workers are told the downtown office is forever optional, some will take their superstar-city jobs out of superstar cities. See also: This is what coronavirus will do to our offices and homes.

🛫 The Airport of the Future Will Have No Check-In, Security Lines: Navigating the Roman circus of obstacles known as an international airport is likely the one thing travellers aren’t missing. Now that forecasts predict tourism won’t fully recover until 2023, there’s a rare chance to make many of the changes flyers have long wanted—along with upgrades they never imagined.

🧠 These Scientists Just Completed a 3D ‘Google Earth’ for the Brain: The Julich-Brain atlas is a probabilistic map that accounts for individual differences using a computational framework. Rather than generating a static PDF of a brain map, the atlas is also dynamic: continuously changing to incorporate more recent brain-mapping results. See also: Why language remains the most flexible brain-to-brain interface.

🛎 The things of everyday design: Interface designers signal to users how things work using affordances. This excellent article explores how affordances define our digital tools. Bringing affordances out of the shadows can lead to clearer conversations about design, no matter if you’re a veteran designer or a casual user.

The bias of flexibility

In 1987, two researchers at the University of Oregon, Terri Baxter and Lewis Goldberg, published findings from a psychometric study. The researchers had investigated the hypothesis that we perceive ourselves to be more psychologically flexible than others, even those we judge as equals. Their study revealed a highly uniform pattern in the predicted direction: the majority of the subjects described themselves as more psychologically flexible than the other person.

There are many cognitive biases, but I find this paradoxical one particularly interesting. Tending to see ourselves as more flexible than those around us is a mark of psychological inflexibility. Conversely, psychologically flexible people tend to be more resilient and mentally healthy. They’re strong at accepting perspectives from others and recognising when they need to change approach. They’re flexible in their approach to achieving what they want in life, and they don’t buy into rigid dogma simply because it’s the way things have always been done.

What this shows is our biases weaken our intuition about ourselves and the world around us. We are generally poor, for example, at grasping probabilities, and tend to underestimate the likelihood of likely things while also overestimating the likelihood of unlikely things. Understanding our biases is an important dimension of the discipline of contemporary design, and exercises to explore bias are valuable so that designers can help people draw good conclusions.