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A tool to measure divergent thinking
I’ve been using this Divergent Association Task to measure my verbal creativity. It takes less than 2 minutes and involves thinking of 10 words that are as different from each other as possible. The test was designed by a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and according to the study — which involved 9,000 participants all over the world — people who are more creative generate words that have greater distances between them. You can choose to participate in the study anonymously or not. I’ve been taking the test everyday to try to beat my own score. — CD

Extension cord with right angled plug
My mother-in-law got a new bed and the headboard was squashing the extension cord plugged into the wall. I bought this SlimLine Flat Plug extension cord with a right-angled plug and it solved the problem. It has a low-profile and the cord comes out parallel to the wall. Just what we needed! — MF

YouTube without ads
I finally decided to pay for YouTube. Now with YouTube Premium I see no ads of any kind. Given the many hours I spend every day on YouTube this upgrade has been life changing. I already had an adblocker on my browser, but that did not work 100% of the time, and I also watch a lot of YouTube on my TV via Roku, which can’t block ads.  For $12 per month all that nonsense is gone, and I get YouTube music as well, which can stream in the background if wanted, and download videos for offline (airplane) viewing. Thanks to my friend Hugh, who kept insisting I needed Premium; you were right. — KK

“10 things” rule for decluttering
Before I transition from one room to another I try to grab 10 things that I can put away and clean up. If you have kids and want to get the whole family to participate check out this Apartment Therapy article for tips on how to implement it. When I read this ridiculously simple rule for keeping your house clean it was both an aha moment and a duh moment. — CD

Interpretive dances inspired by hydraulic presses squishing things
My Boing Boing friend David Pescovitz wrote about this incredible video of Smac McCreanor’s interpretive dances running side-by-side with videos of hydraulic presses squishing things like books, mugs, fruit, cookies, and kitchen tools. Brilliant. — MF

Search tip
An under-appreciated Google search trick is to focus your search by excluding all unwanted alternative meanings — you append a minus sign in front of the term(s), as in < dolphins -miami > for non football dolphins or < orange -color -telecom > for the fruit. — KK

-- Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, Claudia Dawson 08/29/21