Labor Day long reads: 6 tech-related articles for your long weekend

It’s (almost) Labor Day weekend! Time to breathe, reconnect with the important people in your life and get outside before summer slips away.

To enhance your break, we’ve assembled six longer tech-related stories from writers and publications we respect. There’s a little of everything here: intrepid wind-powered drones, advice for the young folk as we venture deeper into the 21st century, a profile on one of Japan’s most beloved companies (hint: their U.S. headquarters is in Redmond) and more. And while we can’t guarantee that the following list is completely Musk-free, we promise you’ll learn a little — perhaps quite a lot — from each story.

Enjoy your long weekend. You’ve earned it.

Big Brother-style tech is helping hikers avoid crowds — Outside Magazine

There are only a few universal truths about millennials:

1. We were all born roughly between 1981 and 1996.

2. We require food, water, rest, avocado toast and oxygen for survival.

3. We love to hike. And take photos of our hikes. And post those photos to Instagram.

This is especially true in the Pacific Northwest, where our outdoors-loving, tech-savvy population congregates with an almost-religious fervor around tags like #pnwonderland. The Seattle Times recently reported that the number of hikers in Puget Sound has grown seven times faster than the region’s overall population growth in the last decade — and that’s putting a strain on the very landscapes all these new hikers are learning to love.

In this story, Outside Magazine contributing editor Christopher Solomon details how a team of researchers and conservationists are using Big Data — namely, the geotags and timestamps embedded in social media posts — to analyze how parks departments can better deploy resources and even divert hikers to underused trails.

Meanwhile, Instagram influencers are grappling with the question of whether to geotag their snaps at all — thereby exposing them to the hiking hordes — and how to toe the line between awareness, advocacy and overexposure for the places they love.

Saildrones go where humans can’t — or dont want to — to study the world’s oceans — Seattle Times

They can be used for surveillance, monitoring forestry lands and towing surfers when there aren’t any waves, but our vote for the coolest use of drone technology goes to Saildrone, a Bay Area company that builds and deploys drones to travel the ocean using wind power. In this story, Seattle Times science reporter Sandi Doughton tags along with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to assess whether or not fleets of Saildrones can be used to gather data on wave height, salinity, acidity and even fish stocks, contributing to research on climate change and El Nino.

And if you’re doubting whether those flimsy, orange windsurfers could possibly survive the open ocean, think again. Doughton recounts the story of one plucky Saildrone that apparently took on a 78-foot wave — and lived to transmit the tale.

A female founder’s take on the tears of Elon Musk — Forbes

Okay, this one needs a bit of unpacking. So, earlier this month Elon Musk gave an “emotional” interview to the New York Times about the stress of wrangling Tesla towards profitability. “He demonstrated an extraordinary level of self-reflection and vulnerability, acknowledging that his myriad executive responsibilities are taking a steep personal toll,” the Times gushed, in what appears to be an attempt to wrest control of the narrative from Azealia Banks (of all people). The paper of record even alluded to tears being shed.

This prompted an essay by The Atlantic’s Marina Koren, who asked a very good question: “What if a female CEO acted like Elon Musk?” And last week, Seattle’s own Amy Nelson — founder and CEO of The Riveter, a rapidly-growing chain of coworking spaces for female entrepreneurs — weighed in with her own essay for Forbes. Nelson pointed out that she had experienced similar feelings to those Musk had described, but letting her raw emotions show is a risk that she, as a woman, simply can’t afford to take.

“I must show up every day as strong (but not too strong), calm (but with enough assertiveness), and kind (but demanding of excellence),” Nelson wrote.

Musk actually read Nelson’s piece and tweeted a terse, perfectly Muskian response: “For the record, my voice cracked once during the NY Times article. That’s it. There were no tears.”

Neuralink and the brain’s magical future — Wait But Why

Wait But Why is a blog where writer Tim Urban investigates everything from the Fermi Paradox to why everyone actually hates cool bars. Starting in 2015, Urban began a series of lengthy posts about Elon Musk’s various companies (and you thought we’d finished with him for today) and the reasons he started Tesla and SpaceX. It’s easy to be turned off by the title of the first of this seven-part series (“Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man”), but if you can push through all that, each story reads like the billionaire’s attempt to explain himself to us humans. We were most interested in the Neuralink story because:

1. Musk mostly takes a backseat to proceedings, and

2. Urban explores the history of human communication and extrapolates that trajectory into the future, based on lengthy conversations with the company’s team of experts across a wide range of disciplines.

This is a long one — it may well take you through this weekend and into the next — and we won’t attempt to sum it up for you here. Let’s just say that you may spend the next few weeks aggressively bringing up the so-called “wizard hat” and the coming of superintelligence with every single person you meet. It will suck you in. You’ve been warned.

The Legend of Nintendo — Bloomberg Businessweek

Bloomberg’s Felix Gillette ventures inside Nintendo’s Kyoto headquarters to learn how the company continues to bounce back and reinvent itself, defying its somewhat regular periods of decline and predictions of its demise.

To whet your appetite, here are three charming, slightly unexpected facts about the company that created The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario, Pokemon Go and Donkey Kong:

1. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a producer of hanafuda playing cards. The company still produces these cards in Japan.

2. There’s a new Mario movie in the works. This is definitely not the trailer.

3. Nintendo’s Kyoto headquarters announces the end of lunch hour with the Underwater Theme from Super Mario Bros.

Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind — WIRED

Philosopher and historian Yuval Noah Harari has made a name for himself in recent years with a series of ambitious books attempting to summarize humankind’s history as a species, the challenges and opportunities we will face in the future and, most recently, a list of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.”

In “Sapiens,” Harari argued that gods, money, nation states and human rights are essentially fictional constructs designed to help humans cooperate on a large scale. In “Homo Deus,” he predicted that the emergence of artificial intelligence means that intelligent design will soon replace natural selection as the main force of evolution. Try bringing that up at your next dinner party.

In this excerpt from his latest book, Harari argues that our education system must shift its focus from cramming information into students’ heads and instead help them prepare for unending, profoundly transformative change.