__According to Wikipedia, Medium is an online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams, and launched in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation. The platform is an example of social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a blog host.__

__The funny thing is that Evan Williams was also the chairman and CEO of Twitter. It hasn't been a very profitable company. But at least there are large amounts of long and detailed articles to be found and read on the website. Vast majority of the best articles I've read happens to be form either STEEM or Medium. That's why I'm sharing a bunch of amazing articles from the website.__

# [Emoji: The World’s First Global Language](https://medium.com/s/story/meaning-without-words-an-emoji-revolution-aadb4bc0266c)
__This is an article that goes into the history of the Japanese origins of Emoji and even the much older Emoticons and discuss the potential implications of this new medium of communication. Here is the original set of Emojis:__

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*QKz0OtYyrNc7FL1At4EVog.png

>The original set of emoji were designed in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for the Japanese phone carrier NTT DoCoMo on their i-mode platform, the world’s first internet enabled mobile service. Kurita-san intended to create a set of “characters that could cover the entire breadth of human emotion.” He designed 176 12×12 pixel emoji covering a range of people, places, and things.

>Why would he feel the need to take on this challenge? The aspiration to cover all of human emotion seems more fitting to a literary work or musical opus. When we communicate through electronic or digital devices, our full range of emotion is inhibited on multiple levels — by the technology we use (via character limits set by services like Twitter or SMS), by the amount of communicating we can consume at one time (text-based communications by their nature are short and ephemeral), and, crucially, by the lack of non-verbal or inferred communication (body-language and intonation), which simply can’t be replicated in bits and bytes. Humanity’s desire to create a language that goes beyond mere words is not entirely new in its conception, but the technology available to us today makes it a real possibility.

__We communicate through language and words are just symbols. If you look at Kanji, they are practically a several thousand Emoji like representations that goes way beyond just emotions. In fact, the Emoji's originating from a country like Japan seems very natural. Our words are just symbols for things we only understand in our minds. Emojis are just more universal because they are using more universal things like smiles, laughter, anger etc.__

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*9MPJTLYRT45nN_57QAYPtQ.png

### [You May Also Like To Read About The Chinese Room Thought Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)
>The Chinese room argument holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind", "understanding" or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was first presented by philosopher John Searle in his paper, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. It has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of the argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room. The argument is directed against the philosophical positions of functionalism and computationalism, which hold that the mind may be viewed as an information-processing system operating on formal symbols. Specifically, the argument is intended to refute a position Searle calls Strong AI:

>__The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds.__

>Although it was originally presented in reaction to the statements of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, it is not an argument against the goals of AI research, because it does not limit the amount of intelligence a machine can display. The argument applies only to digital computers running programs and does not apply to machines in general.

# [The Evil of Envy](https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-evil-of-envy-1e749661a4bf)
__A great many of the social movements of the modern day incorporate some amount of envy. Without envy, socialism wouldn't have been able to take roots in any civilization. This articles accurately attack envy at its core which is the best way to disapprove some idea/argument. It's nothing too original and it's not some large thesis. It just saves a lot of my time when I have to answer why Envy is so disgustingly terrible.__

>### Carlos Ruiz Zafón was right when he wrote that “Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues.”

__Even the crypto-sphere isn't free from envy. I've seen fans of Etherum being s resentful of projects like EOS spreading FUD and even taking delight in failures. The worst offenders actually come from Bitcoin community. BTC and ETH are the two coins that are easiest to sell. There is no need to HODL and people can switch. But there is too substitute for ego. Many people don't want to be a part of something great. They want what they already have to be great and they'd wish everything else would become a failure. This is the one of the primary reasons with the unfair valuations of the cryptocurrency market.__

>If, however, our society continues to move down the path of envy we will eventually reach a critical point where the unhappy and the unsuccessful will become so resentful that all of the happy and successful among us will be forced to question whether or not they even have a right to their happiness and their success. This, if ever it came to pass, would indeed be a terrible thing.

# [A Few Principles for Thinking Clearly](https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/a-few-principles-for-thinking-clearly-d18a74a2ebe9)
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*8LnEl3jjMiKRAXaZ.png

__This one isn't some all in one package that is going to transform your life. But it has many golden nuggets in it and it's not even that long. It'd only be as long as this post that I'm writing or even less. There are many quotes packed in it and you'll find many nice things to learn.__

### [Paul Graham from startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator on Keeping Your Identity Small](http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html)
__This article was linked in the above article and I felt the need to share it for it's intelligence. If we look at the social media, we are exactly having the opposite of what Paul Graham is describing of.__

>Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs. But this isn't true. There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost. But the more precise political questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones. I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

### My Favorite Part of The Article
>More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about with others. The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. 

>Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

__I also believe in online conversations where you barely know the person you are talking to. By barely knowing, I'm referring to the personal details. Ideas should e judged on their own. Words that are written on old wooden pieces are not any more or any less than the words written on gold.__

http://www.quotesvalley.com/images/31/man-is-least-himself-when-he-talks-in-his-own-person-give-him-a-mask-and-he-will-tell-you-the-truth.jpg
<sub>[Source](http://www.quotesvalley.com/images/31/man-is-least-himself-when-he-talks-in-his-own-person-give-him-a-mask-and-he-will-tell-you-the-truth.jpg)</sub>

# [Why We Are Never Truly Satisfied](https://medium.com/personal-growth/why-we-are-never-truly-satisfied-917dc88a84db)

__This is another short article that is very much quotable and has many quotes mainly from Georg Henrik von Wright. The idea that is endorse is an accurate one. You cannot be unhappy if you are simply seeing, hearing etc. Unhappiness is an idea. What is generally perceived as happiness is also a transitory idea that only last while certain elements are present. The true bliss comes from understanding and liberation from [Conceptual Proliferations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_proliferation) through that understanding.__

>Given that we are the omniscient narrators of life, we trust that the existence of the past and the future is as real as the existence of the present. After all, our imagination allows us to both see the past and envision the future. We can look back on regrets, and we can construct a world in which we are not alive or happy or successful or fulfilled or (input a different desire here) even though both of these are abstractions that concern us with a made-up internal world with all its problems while ignoring the real, outer world. Any lack of satisfaction we experience in life is born from this predicament: We are so attached to an imagined inner story about who we are, causing both anxiety and fear, that we forget that the world in front of us isn’t at all dictated by this story; it simply is, in both its beauty and its simplicity.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*3GAIpGykzaCSYhywEmWmxQ.jpeg

>It’s been commonly noted in psychology research that humans report the highest satisfaction when they are completely lost in some activity around them rather than in the imagined struggle that goes on in their mind. When they are in harmony with the universe as it continues to transition, they are able to look beyond the incomplete stories constructed by their mind to fully engage with the real story that is unfolding all around them.

## Happy Steeming and May You All Grow Wiser!