
Alexander is a writer, traveler, and serial digital entrepreneur. He’s the founder of the Frontend Lists, the Gen X personal growth newsletter Further, and offers small business advice at Unemployable.


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Director and Chief Evangelist

Alexander Hipp


Anil is a content-obsessed marketer who loves driving organic traffic for outstanding companies. He is also the creator of Hack the Content, co-host of The Runner, and owner of several digital commerce sites.

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Anil Vugels


Monika is a writer, musician, and content strategist with a passion for language. When she isn’t helping clients, you can find her writing songs, hiking in a northern forest, or furiously journaling.

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Ann Monika


Robert is a creative writer who loves learning new skills, and helping others. He’s the author of several novels, and in his free time, you can find fim swimming, reading, or baking.

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Robert Britt


If you are over age 30 and not working to counter the natural effects of aging, your muscles are wasting away as you read this. By age 70, you’ll have lost about 40% of your once enviable muscle mass. It doesn’t have to be like this, and if it is, you still have time to fix it.

You can build muscle at any age. It just gets a little more challenging later in life.

“Old and young people build muscle in the same way,” explains Roger Fielding, PhD, a professor of medicine at Tufts University. “But as you age, many of the biological processes that turn exercise into muscle become less effective. This makes it harder for older people to build strength but also makes it that much more important for everyone to continue exercising as they age.”

Building muscle, no matter how old you are, offers clear and numerous health benefits.

### Stronger body, longer life
You’ve probably heard plenty about physical and mental well-being boosts from aerobic exercise, such as brisk walking. A new study adds to the smaller but convincing body of work on the health benefits of building muscle.

Muscle-strengthening workouts — using weights, resistance bands or even just doing push-ups or some heavy lifting in the garden — lower the risk of heart disease and cancer, and up the odds of longer life, according to a review of 16 studies on the topic, published in the July 2022 issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

### You can do this
Around age 50, the chemical and biological processes that trigger muscle growth start working more slowly, Fielding writes. But the process doesn’t stop. It just means older people don’t gain muscle as easily as younger people. And while it might seem hard at first, building muscle gets easier with time, regardless of age.

### It’s never too late
What if you’ve never worked out before? No problem.

Just ask Mike Harrington, who was a complete couch potato at age 69 and is now a state-champion powerlifter.

We don’t have to become powerlifters to reap significant health benefits. The American College of Sports Medicine suggests this basic approach for healthy adults who want to build strength:

* Warm up and cool down for 5–10 minutes.

* Choose a weight or resistance level that you can move eight to 15 times. The last repetition should be difficult.

* Do one to three sets, two or three days a week.

* Exercise all the major muscle groups.

* Use proper technique and full range of controlled motion.

* Seek a professional trainer if you don’t know proper technique.

The answer is a strong yes, and here’s why you should start now. If you are over age 30 and not working to counter the natural effects of aging, your muscles are wasting away as you read this.

Can You Build Muscle When You’re Older?


A team of researchers at Jilin Engineering Normal University in China recently published a paper indicating they’d built an AI model capable of recognizing human facial expressions.

I’m going to save you some time here: they most certainly did not. Such a thing isn’t currently possible.

The ability to accurately recognize human emotions is what we here at Neural would refer to as a “deity-level” feat. The only people who truly know how you’re feeling at any given moment are you and any potential omnipotent beings out there.

Here are my three golden tips for realistic planning:

* Underestimate how much you can get done in a day
* Overestimate how much time a task will take
* Overestimate interruptions during your day

### The reason some bootcamp grads are set up to fail
* In my experience, not all bootcamps are created equal. They vary widely in acceptance processes, curriculum, program structure, and quality of instructors. They’re designed to push candidates through courses that will have them writing some code fairly quickly.

* As a result, programs are forced to strip away a lot of fundamentals — those basics that help developers understand the “why” behind the code they’re writing.

* When young software developers learn by copying and pasting, it can make troubleshooting difficult when they come across something that doesn’t fit the pattern they’re used to.

* Small businesses and startups are those most likely to hire developers without degrees, but I’ve seen too many bootcamp grads take jobs at startups only to find they haven’t learned enough to make any real impact.

### Up front:
The research is fundamentally flawed because it conflates facial expression with human emotion. You can falsify this premise by performing a simple experiment: assess your current emotional state then force yourself to make a facial expression that presents in diametric opposition to it.

If you’re feeling happy and you’re able to “act” sad, you’ve personally debunked the whole premise of the research. But, just for fun, let’s keep going.

### Background:
Don’t let the hype fool you. The researchers don’t train the AI to recognize expressions. They train the AI to beat a benchmark. There’s absolutely no conceptual difference between this system and one that tries to determine if an object is a hotdog or not.

What this means is the researchers built a machine that tries to guess labels. They’re basically showing their AI model 50,000 pictures, one at a time, and forcing it to choose from a set of labels.

### The problem:
All of this seems useful because, when it comes to outcomes that don’t affect humans, predictions models are awesome.

When AI models try to predict something objective, such as whether a particular animal is a cat or a dog, they’re aiding human cognition.

You and I don’t have the time to go through every single image on the internet when we’re trying to find pictures of a cat. But Google’s search algorithms do.

### Neural take:
This is a total scam. The researchers present their work as useful for “fields like human–computer interactions, safe driving … and medicine,” but there’s absolutely no evidence to support their assertion.

The truth is that “computer interactions” have nothing to do with human emotion, safe driving algorithms are more efficacious when they focus on attention instead of emotionality, and there’s no place in medicine for weak, prediction-based assessments concerning individual conditions.

A team of researchers at Jilin Engineering Normal University in China recently published a paper indicating they’d built an AI model capable of recognizing human facial expressions.

Why ‘facial expression recognition’ AI is a total scam


### The AGI hype train has hit some heavy traffic.

While futurists and fundraisers used to make bullish predictions about artificial general intelligence, they’ve become quieter lately. Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire and rumored vampire — says Silicon Valley big brains have lost enthusiasm for AGI.

“Elon’s not talking about it anymore and Larry Page is off to Fiji and doesn’t seem to be working on it quite as hard,” Thiel said at a recent event.

While futurists and fundraisers used to make bullish predictions about artificial general intelligence, they’ve become quieter lately. Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire and rumored vampire — says Silicon Valley big brains have lost enthusiasm for AGI.

### IT is healing
Can self-healing security software fight cybercrime?

Thiel described Musk as “a weathervane for the zeitgeist,” who’s stopped talking about AGI because interest has declined.

Scientists are also increasingly skeptical. A recent study paper posited that AGI is “in principle impossible,” while other researchers have mocked the term’s proponents.

“I have yet to come across work on AGI that I can take seriously,” tweeted Abeba Birhane, a cognitive scientist based at University College Dublin.

### The path towards AGI increasingly appears — at best — a long one.

Imbuing machines with human-like intelligence remains immensely challenging. As Melanie Mitchell, a computer science professor at Portland State University noted in a preprint paper published last year on arXiv:


>Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has cycled several times between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment
<cite>Alexender Toto</cite>

Critics fear that another AI winter is coming. Hyping AGI helped spurred enormous investment in artificial intelligence, but overconfident predictions could be detrimental to progress in the field — if the real-world advances prove disappointing.

While futurists and fundraisers used to make bullish predictions about artificial general intelligence, they’ve become quieter lately. Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire and rumored vampire — says Silicon Valley big brains have lost enthusiasm for AGI.

The Power of Visualization in the 21st century


[According to research](https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/00251740610673332/full/html), up to 90% of consumers’ snap judgments made about products can be based on color alone. Color also plays an important role in brand identity. Coca-Cola is red, Facebook’s blue, and so on.

A number of companies have actually succeeded in trademarking and “owning” colors that their competitors can’t use.

For instance, Tiffany & Co has trademarked its shade of blue, T-Mobile magenta, and UPS its “pullman brown.”

### Know the legal requirements
The Lanham Act defines trademarks as, “any word, name, symbol, device, or any combination thereof” that’s used to, “identify and distinguish one set of goods or services from other sources.”

Although colors aren’t included in that definition, since 1995, they can be trademarked as part of a service or product, providing they meet four conditions:

* The color needs to work as a source of brand identification.

* It must not have a functional purpose — think yellow or orange for safety signs.

* It needs to show proof of “secondary meaning.” That is, the public has come to associate a 
color with a particular good or service.

* It doesn’t put competitors at a disadvantage by affecting cost or quality.

Ticking all the boxes can prove challenging, especially when it comes to secondary meaning. General Mills, for example, has failed to trademark yellow for its Cheerios box. The court ruled that the color isn’t a distinctive element of the brand, as it’s commonly used by other cereal companies.

### Apply for the color trademark ASAP

You can file a trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), even before you’ve started using the color in commerce, or proven its secondary meaning.

If the USPTO determines that the color mark isn’t distinctive yet, but can be, if used consistently in the future, it will be registered on the Supplemental Register.

### Hire a trademark attorney

Navigating the legal waters can be challenging, and it’s better to speak with a professional early on, before making a substantial investment.

Trademark attorneys can check whether a color is available for use, and whether there are any similar color marks already being used in the relevant market that could impede registration, or result in lawsuits from competitors.

According to research up to 90% of consumers’ snap judgments made about products can be based on color alone. Color also plays an important role in brand identity.

Latest Posts

Can You Build Muscle When You’re Older?

Why ‘facial expression recognition’ AI is a total scam

The Power of Visualization in the 21st century

Yes, your company can trademark a color — here’s how