Author: obsidian_ns

Dad’s taxi duties continue unabated, 10 hours of it today! In stationary minutes, I did read a few things, including applying a note-taking technique that Martin Weber shared, one inspired by Vera Birkenhal, to the book "The Upside of Uncertainty" by Nathan Furr & Samantha Furr. I’ve done the first reading of the book I’ll write up both the notes and my experience of this technique soon.

Daily Reads:

Kelly Corrigan: Words on Women & Strength and talking about her book "Lift"

(I’ve not watched this yet) Masterclass Live with Dan Brown promises another writing structure that has sold stories like ‘hot cakes’ as the late George Carlin would mock 🙂

Mr. Fulghum in full flight of the imagination. I’m saving this text here because his blog now only retains 3 recent posts.

AUTUMN HAIR

Out walking in the windy rainy twilight before supper this evening, I collected a bouquet of fresh fallen leaves. I like autumn leaves and the ways deciduous trees go about their business. 
Suppose people could do the same thing every fall.  
Hair would slowly turn shades of yellow and orange and red.  
(We would let our hair grow long at this season to show as much color as possible.)  
Imagine the conversations:  
“Your oranges are very sharp this year.”  
“That’s a nice shade of yellow you’ve grown.”
Then, little by little, like the leaves, the hair would fall out.  
Not to worry – it would quickly begin to grow in again – just as the buds of new leaves are already there on the trees right behind the loss of leaves.
“But we’d be bald,” you protest. Not for long, and bald is beautiful – sometimes.  
It is the absence of something that makes the presence of something a matter of delight.
For one thing, we would have an annual Hat Season –  
caps and scarves and hats of all kinds for indoors and out.  
And after that, Surprise Season, as our hair grew back –  
always in some strong new shade of natural.  
Or, through vitamins _(fertilizer)_ we might be able to opt for some other color for spring.  
I would try green one year – just to make it clear I was still alive and still growing.
In the trees now clean of leaves, the empty nests of birds are visible.  
One nest had been blown down by the wind.  
On examination, I was surprised to find quite a few long strands of human hair woven into it.  
Given the tensile strength of human hair, I would say the bird had a good idea for nest construction.  
Perhaps, when I clean out the hair from my brush, I should put the hair out near a bird feeder or birdbath come spring for the birds to use.  
I like the thought of my hair being woven into a nest way up in a tree.
Imagine, then, if our hair turned yellow and orange and red in the fall – and we put some out for the birds in spring – there would be these beautiful nests made – which we could then harvest in the fall and wear as hats while our hair grew back.  
Fall-ing Hair.  
Poetic recycling.

Bob Ewing shares the stages of public speaking success in The Arc of Progress as ‘Disappointment’ > ‘Breakthrough’ > ‘Delight’. Once we start practicing something we tend to expect a payoff right away.

QOTD:

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it – but all that had gone before. – Jacob Rils

Music:

Didn’t think this was possible but it was! Tom Petty & Chuck Berry rock and roll with Memphis & Roll Over Beethoven!

Another day of little reading. Spent time with the people I love and care about, and in great conversation with newly made acquaintances.

Daily Reads:

Ash Maurya: 4 pitches every founder should master

The Monkey Business illusion is even more startling when you have watched the previous version and know of the gorilla!

I cackled loudly at this episode of Black Books because one of the characters is a comically accurate representation of a person I know.

QOTD:

Management also needs to live with not being able to set specific strategic goals. Instead of managing the organization like a ship, steering it one direction or another, they need to concentrate on managing its capabilities, nurture the system it has, and plan around the kinds of outcomes the company is capable of instead of specific ones. – Baldur Bjarnason

Music:

I love this version of John Prine’s rendition of "Hello in There". The man was a captivating storyteller in verse and tune, using few simple chords and a basic picking pattern. It hurts to hear the truth: "Old people just grow lonesome, waiting for someone to say hello in there, hello".

Daily Reads:

My RSS feeds are overflowing with content but it was another slow reading day. I made some memories instead, spending time with a dearly loved one.

I skimmed through a couple of articles that caught my attention.

There are a few structures for good Copywriting offered in this article. They are storytelling techniques of course, and many echo the ones I’ve observed or used previously. Handy list, nonetheless.

This short list of verbs for an effective resume will be useful to someone (future me?).

Steve Blank shares an early career experience in Profound Beliefs. Plenty of insights, but most memorable for me was the matrix of consequences between beliefs and customer discovery
Blank suggests that strong beliefs that are validated or modified by evidence gathered outside the building are worth their weight in gold. This resonates strongly, & also confirms my own learning in the last 3 years on a project that I ‘pioneered’ within the organisation.

Prof. Emily Bender makes a nuanced case for why research scholarship should be slow. I much prefer this take over what was her original short-form post about arXiv being a cancer (a breathtaking claim in a tweet/X). Her post was reinforcement of a comment that my colleague & friend Rod made to me that the value of identifying content as human generated will continue to hold, if not increase.

QOTD:

We offer great rewards to a man who can tame a tiger, admire those who can train horses, monkeys, and elephants, and praise to the skies the author of some modest work. Yet we neglect women who have spent years and years nourishing and educating children. -Francois Poulain, author, philosopher, and priest (?? Jul 1647-1723)

Music:

I’m loving this YouTube channel that has tabs on some classic Django Reinhardt tunes. Another waltz titled Indifference Valse that I would love to learn next.

Daily Reads:

Speaking to a colleague today, & they rattled off a bunch of words they heard an executive say in a meeting. I said "Buzzword Bingo" and startled them. Coincidentally, I’d read this article last night, talking about what buzzwords in job descriptions really mean.

I learnt that kayfabe is a real word in the professional wrestling word that describes the altered reality of layered falsehoods in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. The human mind can suspend reality for fantasy. The application: When joining a new team, it’s worth understanding if the situation we find ourselves is a kayfabe – a situation where the players are all deliberately coordinating to remove unpredictable upheavals that imperil the participants, while the audience continues to believe that what they’re observing is reality!

Tim Urban’s 2015 post "The Tail End" is worth reading at least once every year for a reminder that viewing life as units of time, we are better served (and our focus sharpened) if we measure it in activities or events. For example, he points out that by the time we’re in college, we’re statistically likely to have spent 93% of the in-person time we will spend with our parents in our lifetime.

I watched and shared Simon Willison’s talk at WordCamp 2023. He offers some concrete examples of how to think about, and work with, LLM’s, and some caveats on the problems that can arise.

QOTD:

In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul. – Mary Renault, novelist

Music:

I’ve begun learning Django Reinhardt’s Montagne Sainte Genevieve from this. I’m making slow but steady progress.

Daily Reads:

The 37 Signals tenets were part inspiration for some of the work I did with JL and the rest on the team. Re-reading the manifesto on Fathers Day reminded me of this one tenet that I seemingly have forgotten for myself. Tenet 21 Know no: "No is no to one thing. Yes is no to many things."

Eric Sun prepares for the last performance of his life. This video from a few years ago needs no words, just a box of tissues, or standing in the rain afterwards.

Anne Helen Petersen describes a time in her life that might well have been my own in The Sterile World of Infinite Choice. The most resonant paragraph of all was this: It’s all very paradoxical: that the ability to constantly communicate has made us bad communicators, that instant access to all forms of entertainment would leave us with so few touchstones, that surveilling kids doesn’t necessarily make them safer, that the absence of limitations also often means the absence of creativity — and that the particular form of abundance we’ve fetishized can feel so sad, so unspeakably sterile.

Gartner says that Generative AI has, rapidly, reached the peak of inflated expectations. Women in particular have been calling out the problems with AI systems for a much longer time. Today I came across this article that suggests that AI has the potential to destroy value: "A lot of the people trying to deploy AI as a business solution are doing it because they don’t know how to measure what’s valuable about their business. A claim I’m certain will get my technophile friends agitated.
Gary Marcus has another stinger piece on AI. Not to say that LLM’s don’t have a place, but I hear echoes of another recent technology’s commercial rise and fall

A X that headlinesThe tool that feels right in your hands is interpreted as an extension of the human body

Simon Willison talk at WordCamp 2023 is worth a listen.

QOTD:

Many people mow their lawns because that’s what they’ve always done. There’s a perception that a close-mown lawn demonstrates you’re caring for the garden more. – Steve Coghill, from this article

Music:

Alison Balsom performing Haydn Trumpet in Eb, 1st Movement

I’ve been posting consistently here for the last six weeks. I publish these links for my own sake, to keep my reading habit going. While I think it’s been a good thing, I’m also realising something is missing.

My information consumption to output ratio is pretty pathetic. It’s something I would like to improve because my hypothesis is that it is closely connected to both my income and my happiness.

One of the principles of an effective note-taking system is regular review of the notes. The principle of deliberate review, of spaced repetition, of bringing these ideas back to working memory is something I’ve not done or done well before.

Switching to Obsidian has significantly improved the way I track my incoming flow of information. It’s also made publishing to this blog much easier.

My information diet consists of text primarily, video next & audio the least. My information processing system now includes a regular review of the notes I make (often, not always) as I consume information. While the nourishment from this information is likely healthy, I’m definitely not exercising my own mind enough.

So for the next few weeks, I will try an experiment. I will devote one day a week to review everything I’ve consumed, shared or made notes of during the preceding week. I have no idea what form this will take so I will go with the flow. What I’ve started here is a compilation of everything I’ve read or watched through this week and that I’ve shared here.

Caution: Some of the links will be dead when I publish to the blog because they are documents on my local machine.

Reading

Victoria’s public learning website was inspiring to read. Her plan of learning for the next few months is in the public domain. No one will care whether she follows through, but doing it publicly is her way of learning. Her retro reminded me of what I’d started this year every fortnight which fell by the wayside. As much as I like the idea of writing, Resistance (as Steven Pressfield calls it) is intense for me, along with a few other habits that need replacement or upgrades.

Seth Godin is a staple:

• Observations on mavericks and status quo felt incredibly important when I read it, but I have no idea why. Writing my own thoughts along with the link is probably useful to future me if no one else. I suspect the thing that caught my attention the the principle he called "Change begins with the smallest viable audience, not the largest possible one." It reminds me of the changes we’ve managed to pull off at work with the field tool, obsessing about the folks who don’t usually get any love or attention.
• "How do I create more value?" is a better question to ask than "How do I find a better job?" if we want job security. Amen, brother.
• Are you doing what you said you wanted to do? is a provocation I need nearly every day. Keeping my word to other people is one thing, but what about keeping my word to myself?

Ness Labs The Sixth Sense felt important enough to [[The Sixth Sense | make notes]]. For a long time, I’ve believed that there are more than five senses (intuition, gut, imagination are also senses, no?). The word ‘interoception’ (or how the mind maps out the body’s internal landscape) adds to my vocabulary to describe what is going on. The article goes on to explain some fundamentals of interoception, how to train it, what to be cautious about (it can go wrong!), and it’s implications on both our physical and mental health. The [[The Sixth Sense#^3c6f2c | awareness exercises]] are helpful.

Nature has so many cool ideas that could inspire humans, if only we paid attention. The National Geographic video on biomimicry explained how termite nests inspired a building that can cool itself.

Another video, this time it’s Duke University’s Kara Lawson recommending that we all learn how to handle hard better. Things will never get better at a later date – but we can learn how to better deal with whatever hardships come our way.

The third video was Joshua Rudder’s explanation on a concept that drives most of us mad: Time. How other languages tell time is a reminder that it is not a universal concept, even though we all seem to think it is. 24 hours is not the only way to count time, and different cultures have different ways of dealing with the change of earth’s distance from the sun.

Alfred Hitchcock’s secret to suspense is the ‘bomb under the table‘ – a [[Storytelling MOC | storytelling]] technique that Nathan Baugh explores in his blog post. There are 3 specific ideas in this post: a. The power of anticipation b. Believable bombs – ie specific and realistic & c. The possibility of relief.

Bob Ewing’s blog post on [[Story Structures – Bob Ewing]] went into (or re-emphasised) my [[Storytelling MOC]] techniques collection.

I’ve always struggled with concepts in mathematics, until some simple explanations of the first principles makes my head explode with possibilities. While I’ve not yet entirely grokked this matrix transformation visual intuition, I love both the visualisation technique used here to introduce one idea at a time.

Occam’s razor is one of many mental tools out there. Charlie Munger’s The Psychology of Human Misjudgement was the speech that got me interested in mental models like Occam’s Razor. I’ve been finding interesting visualisations around the place, like this) and this. The "Writing Knife Block" suggests that when trying to understand something, writing it out is helpful. The Boasters Razor suggests that truly successful people rarely need to boast about their success.

Any content that Ed Brenegar, Geoff Marlow, Richard Merrick & Colin Newlyn put out have become staple consumption for me. Each has a different style, yet every one of their writing is resonant with the loosely floating ideas in my head. I find myself nodding furiously in agreement often, and shaking my head in disagreement sometimes.

Marlow’s post Mastering Creative Tension begins with a quote from Robert Fritz (loosely paraphrased that in the realm of creativity, we create our own satisfaction, & then bring it to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in). Marlow uses the metaphor of a rubber-band stretched between two hands, one above the other. The upper hand points to the envisaged future self we want to create. The lower hand is the experiential awareness of the present day self, as clearly & honestly as possible. The tension in the rubber band seeks resolution. The more powerfully we experience both the future we seek and the current reality, the stronger the creative tension. There are two ways in which we can resolve this creative tension.

• Reduce our aspiration (ie drop the upper hand down by deciding it’s unrealistic for us to achieve, or telling ourselves that it is undesirable etc)
• Move towards the future self, genuinely (rather than telling lying to ourselves that we are closer)
  PS: I think I should turn this into a note!

Multiple Ed Brenegar observations this week:

• is that for most people, in the truest sense, leadership happens outside of their job.
• What are networks of relationships, and why are they important? offers a way of thinking about relationships in a different way.

Ben Werdmuller: AI in the newsroom: the hard sell was an article I had to share with several colleagues.

Ben’s other article Homesick I had to share with my loved ones. In my opinion, the professional and the personal are all intertwined. A human in these two different context might need to behave differently. But keeping the two distinctly separate all the time is impossible, at least in my case. One affects the other, and I’ve found it silly (or insanely difficult) to pretend they don’t.

Ben Evans ponders a question about Intellectual Property in the context of Generative AI. If you put all the world’s knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid? This is a completely new problem that we’ve been arguing about for 500 years. Perhaps Neil Postman was right: Techno-utopian views of our future are not inevitable. They are a series of choices & their consequences. Right now, I think we don’t even know what those choices are.

I (predictably) forgot [[2023-08-28 Links#^af327f | my intentions]] after reading Robin Hanson’s blog post on an informal observational study on who & how often people initiate smiles.

Rohit Krishnan’s blog post on Rest was memorable for two reasons. First, the AI generated image of "Isaac Newton, working his investment banking job, and writing Principia in between zoom calls" made me giggle. Second, the idea that breaks where we can be bored, and let our mind wander for hours on end is almost something I’m doing right now with a damager toxic manager induced sabbatical. I’ve been inspired to read Bertrand Russell’s "In Praise of Idleness" too. Late edit was this compilation of comments on that Rest post.

Humor is important to me, even when I find myself grumpy because of external reasons. Reading this [letter to Marilyn Monroe from John Steinbeck](<https://preview.redd.it/letter-from-john-steinbeck-to-marilyn-monroe-v0-o3ko8tdzaskb1.jpg?auto=webp&s=4ce97102b3fa9a53aafcfc2ca2bd8cf3ac815479)) had me cackling with delight. Great turns of phrases "He doesn’t believe it (that I have met you) his respect for me has gone up even for lying about it" and "He is already your slave. This will make him mine." More great humor in this story about the personal ads section in the London Review of Books I’m no Victoria’s Secret model. Man, 62. is an example, or in the story of the Salon writer who found her husband through an ad there.

I discovered Om Malik in 2007 when Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures introduced his writing to me. I’ve remained a fan because I find his perspectives on the technology industry and the humans working in it valuable. His opinion that the day of reckoning is near for camera makersrings true with my own experience of the software that seems way behind the software running my other devices to which the images need to be stored on.

The plea "Don’t drink & drive" doesn’t work if the number of fatalities and road accidents caused by alcohol are any indication. An initiative in Japan encourages people to (safely) experience first hand the implications of alcohol on their driving and response-times.

My working assumption was that there are 24 time zones across the world. Not true – there are 38. I didn’t know that some time zones are only 30 or 45 minutes apart, and that the International Date Line creates 3 more!

LinkedIn is becoming a lot noisier with people who had Twitter X as their megaphone move over. Posts like this one, claiming you can build a $2500 per month e-book business, clearly appeals to people. Nonetheless, I agree that writing is a powerful skill. A podcast conversation between Danny Miranda and Kieran Drew touched on a similar topic, but I found it much more interesting for the personal stories that both of them shared.

Mathias Sundin’s 3 steps to become a fact-based optimist are a. Laying a fact based foundation (book recommendations like Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, David Deutsch’s Optimism, pessimism & cynicism, Kevin Kelly’s Case for optimism), b. Ignoring "doom scrolling" & preferring a diet of "hope scrolling" (with recommendations to blogs and feeds that amplify this), & c. Daring to dream about the future, including a quote that Martin Luther King had a dream, not a nightmare.

AI consumes a lot of my mindshare at the moment. The immediate and real dangers of AI juxtaposed against the (potentially transformative) benefits of Generative AI keep showing up in my newsfeeds a lot. SK Ventures had a startling headline "AI isn’t good enough", with a definition of automation I wasn’t familiar with "so-so automation": a particularly insidious and increasingly common form of tech-enabled automation, where there is high worker displacement without commensurate productivity gains impact—where minimal human flourishing is created. I will need to explore this from first person view where execs seem intent to be seem to be at the forefront of this utopian technology, yet have little to none business use cases (& perhaps even understanding?) to throw at this.

I watched this very short interview by famed director Werner Herzog of a young man, Michael Perry, sentenced to die within the next week or so. I have no words.

The concept of Attention takes a lot of my mindshare (what’s this thing called?).

• Richard Merrick had a wonderful post on this titled "Noticing", with the observation that data doesn’t capture so many things but which the artisan notices.
• The Changing Room Illusion catches me by surprise every time I watch it, & reminds me to pay attention to small changes around me.

Break time: Scrolling back up here is a bit startling. I’m not done yet – I have at least 3 more days of content to parse through here. Notes are sparse, links are aplenty. How much of this content I’ve consumed has become new knowledge? What purpose does this weekly review of content serve? Is the benefit worth the cost in time I’m putting into it?

The book [[Learning to Build – Bob Moesta]] introduced me to practical implementations of Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to be Done Theory. One of Moesta’s mentors was Dr. Genichi Taguchi, who’s Robust Design method is a way to run few experiments to capture the most variability, primarily in a manufacturing context. Moesta shows how it can be applied in a customer interview context too.

How far the distance from an entrepreneur to a fraud? A 2021 post by Prof Scott Galloway compares the stories told by several Silicon Valley (or VC) ex-darlings to show that defrauding investors is what gets people into prison, not the human damage that they actually cause. Our laws reflect our values.

David Cain says meditation can help us train ourselves to deal with the bumpy terrain of every day life. Becoming wise In the last few months, my own practice of meditation has disappeared entirely without being replaced by anything more valuable. Why? How do I get back on track?

Steve Blank on Vannevar Bush reminded me of [[Doug Engelbart]]’s speech. We are nourished and/or inspired by the most random, accidental things we come across. People do extraordinary things in ordinary circumstances. Fame catches up with them, & creates an impression of superpowers in those people. The quote from Robert Fritz in Geoff Marlow’s post earlier that we create our own satisfaction & then bring to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in appears to be MO for these ‘successful’ people.

[Droste effect](<https://images.prismic.io/sketchplanations/7c6bcf87-702e-423f-a70e-785f2c4c3a04_SP+836+-+The+Droste+effect.png?auto=compress,format&w=798)): A picture inside a picture inside a picture inside a picture inside…. is named after a Dutch cocoa company’s ad.

Alex Waterhouse-Hayward has finessed the art of taking pictures of flowers, roses particularly, using a flatbed scanner. He calls it scanography, and the results are stunning. The tools he uses are not the newest software or hardware, and yet the results are astonishing. His wife of 52 years, Rosemary, passed away recently, and Alex devotes many words to her in his almost daily writing. Death and the lottery is a sweet if melancholic meditation on Alex’s own life experiences.

Speaking of tools, I came across a new tool called Flourish to create animated clickable versions of images. I also watched the insanely talented "One Skill Power Point" demo a clever way of animating in PPT with a feature I didn’t know existed, hover zoom

Dan Reich’s advice for college students would horrify many people of my generation. Starting a business as an entrepreneur flies in the face of the obsession to ‘focus’ on one thing. I’m of the opinion that children, and young adults, are better off increasing the surface area first before getting to depth, as David Epstein also claims in his book Range

I knew Doc Searls loved photography, but I had no idea that he thought of his images as a public service. Yes, it all costs money, and time, and effort. It’s thankless and some people may ‘steal’ it and claim it as their own. Yet, it’s Doc’s gift to the world.

Reading Jim Nielsen’s Family Tree wisdom reminded me of several of my older relatives on both sides of the family, and their pithy wisdom.

Josh Bersin posits some interesting use cases for Generative AI in HR His advice to "Fall in love with the problem rather than chase the technology" sounds common-sensical, but my own observations (and experiences) tell me there’s a long way to go.

I’ve loved RSS from the time I discovered it in 2010. Dan Q’s blog post on treating the RSS reader differently to email inbox is 100% my approach. Use the RSS feed, as Dave Winer says, a river you can dip your feet into or watch flowing by. Use the RSS reader to create joy

Animals find their way even when they’re lost. Humans seem to be losing their ability to do this with technology taking over. Kathryn Schulz explores this in a New Yorker article titled Why animals don’t get lost

My friend Marisa shared a documentary a few weeks ago titled The Birth Gap by a data scientist Stephen J Shaw exploring the stories. Prolific economist & blogger Noah Smith has more data that the whole world is heading toward negative population growth. The implications of this are colossal, and not entirely unimaginable.

Google’s Deep Mind launch SynthID to detect fake images. The expectation that fake news will explode with Generative AI models, and the damage it potentially will cause to the tech giants business models is probably a big reason but not the only reason why these kinds of tools will start showing up.

Music

I discovered many (to me) new artists this week.

• Sharon Shannon is an Irish musician who plays the button accordion. Galoway Girl
• Arturo Sandoval is a trumpet virtuoso – A night in Tunisia
• Poco – Rose of Cimaron
• Not necessarily a music video – Cellist Paul Tortelier talks about scales in a way I’ve never heard before.

YT also recommended new creations from artists I already follow:

• A different rendition of YMCA by the mellifluous Walk Off the Earth.
• Wynton Marsalis’ talk "Music is Life" should be classified as music, as should his 2009 Nancy Hanks Lecture
• Halidon Music compiles some great classical music performances. The Best of Baroque Music kept me company for a couple of days.
• Allison Young & Josh Turner The Bygones – Stars Turn Cold is interesting new fare from these two insanely talented musicians.

And of course some music I’ve heard before that I listened to again

• Chris White (Isto) covering the Groucho Marx song Lydia The Tattooed Lady

Daily Reads:

The Changing Room Illusion “a phenomenon in which observers are unable to notice changes to the world around them when those changes occur gradually.”

Question to self:

What’s the smallest change you can notice this week?

A splendid tutorial on using hover zoom in PPT

Wynton Marsalis: Music is life

Ed Brenegar: What are networks of relationships, and why are they important?

Josh Bersin posits some interesting use cases for Generative AI in HR His advice to "Fall in love with the problem rather than chase the technology" sounds common-sensical, but my own observations (and experiences) tell me there’s a long way to go.

Seth Godin’s provocation is timely (isn’t it always?) – Are you doing what you said you wanted to do?

Using RSS reader to create joy.

Kathryn Schulz on Why animals don’t get lost. There’s so many things of interest in this article, and not merely about animals and their way finding abilities.

What are stablecoins? and why are they relentlessly rising?

Google’s SynthID to detect fake images.

Noah Smith: More data that the whole world is heading toward negative population growth.

QOTD:

Most bridges remain standing while many strategies collapse. – Steven McCrone

Music:

• Cellist Paul Tortelier talks about scales in a way I’ve never heard before.
• Allison Young & Josh Turner The Bygones – Stars Turn Cold is interesting new fare from these two insanely talented musicians.

Daily Reads:

Listening to Bob Moesta in conversation with Lenny K

Dan Reich has some sensible advice for college students which I wish I’d heard when I was in college.

I love what Doc Searls does with his photos as a public service!

Jim Neilsen’s compilation of family tree wisdom _-

Graphic design ![[Pasted image 20230901213310.png]]

QOTD:

“I’m not young enough to know everything.” – Uncle

Music:

3 people at a piano using it in a novel way making a beautiful version of a classic Walk off the Earth – YMCA

Daily Reads:

Richard Merrick: Noticing The artisan notices; the half smile, the new shoes, the developing patina, the change in raw materials, the level of laughter in the office, and all the other little things that data doesn’t record.

Bob Moesta often refers to one of his mentors, Dr. Genichi Taguchi’s Robust Design Method. While the core idea focused on improving engineering productivity, the concept can also be effectively used in discovery interviews. If you understand what the levers or the inputs are to a system, we can design an experiment that induces that variation.

Scott Galloway’s post from early 2022 merits another read. Tell me a story
Tools: Turn static SVG’s into interactive images with Flourish

In How to Become Wise, David Cain explains the reasons why meditation can help. What if there was a way you could train your whole mind-body system to gracefully handle the bumpy terrain of everyday life, regardless of what form it took: disappointment, elation, uncertainty, temptation, overexcitement, shame, expectation, tension, and everything in between? Imagine this training allowed you to cruise smoothly over all these familiar contours in a way that felt good, at least more of the time.

Steve Blank’s recent posts on history have been stunning reads. This is no different: Before there was Oppenheimer, there was Vannevar Bush. A document he refers to in this post is what Doug Engelbart credits with getting him interested in changing his life’s course.

Sketchplanations: I had no idea this had a name, or the story behind it! The Droste Effect is derived from a Dutch brand of cocoa powder where the advert was a picture of a nurse carrying a tray with a box of the cocoa powder.

Oh if I could attend these Unhurried Conversations! I recently connected with Johnnie Moore, & in the last fortnight have come across more of his work, like this reference from Gaping Void!

I’ve been drawn irresistibly to the writings of Alex Waterhouse-Hayward who is a photographer and is publicly mourning the death of his wife of 52 years, Rosemary. Death and the lottery

Rohit Krishnan on Rest, and a compilation of some of the comments on that post

QOTD:

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. \ – Salman Rushdie.

Music:

Sharon Shannon Galway Girl

Daily Reads:

Hilariously self-loathing ads in the London Review of Books. I spent a lot of time on this

Bertrand Russell "In Praise of Idleness": what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

Mathias Sundin: Three steps to become a fact-based optimist

Ed Brenegar: Where Leadership Starts For many their genuine contribution as leaders happens outside of their job. They, too, are invisible, except to those whose lives are changed by their acts of leadership initiative.

Automattic announced a 100-year hosting plan for $38,000. I wonder who is this actually for?

Catching up on Ben Werdmuller: AI in the newsroom: the hard sell was an article I had to share with several colleagues. Homesick was an article I had to share with my daughter.

Scott Eblin: How to be someone’s best boss ever

SK Ventures with more provocation: AI isn’t good enough is a startling headline, and the nuanced prediction is worth a read, particularly about the ‘so-so automation’ which I see aplenty at work.

Werner Herzog interviewing Michael Perry a week out from his execution.

QOTD:

You will see that the most powerful and highly placed men let drop remarks in which they long for leisure, acclaim it, and prefer it to all their blessings. They desire at times, if it could be with safety, to descend from their high pinnacle; for, though nothing from without should assail or shatter, Fortune of its very self comes crashing down. – Seneca

Music:

The Best of Baroque Music is keeping me company on my reading.