xkcd: Eventual Consistency
III of Canisia Lubrin’s _from_ and now famine, friend
slow regret marbling a hope unflagging the morning
Social media’s history
But when it really mattered, Facebook chose inaction.
Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison
Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death.
The regret fallacy
“Every single person that has regrets, has them with the benefit of hindsight. But you don’t have the benefit of hindsight when you’re making your decision do you?” The thing about Fig is that no question is innocent. One question leads to another, which leads to another, until he’s asked you so many questions that the answer becomes clear to you. Very rarely does he need to do any explaining himself.
The New Early Team
Accepting startups as clients is a bit like choosing to invest in them. You wouldn't want equity in a failing startup, and you wouldn't want a bad company in your consulting portfolio either. The quality of the companies in a contractor's portfolio is a signal for their reputation.
College After COVID
the mark of a good education would shift from what school you attended to which professors you learned from. You could stay on one campus for four years, or move around every semester to get the best professors in person. Totally up to you. Similar to how Minerva has their students change campuses each semester, you could jump around the country, or world, to get the professors you want to learn from in person.
Why Experts Make Bad Teachers
Simulate discovery whenever possible. For example, to teach the importance of numbers, first, imagine a world without numbers. Now give the students a problem to solve, like keeping track of the number of sheep in their herd in this world without numbers. The student needs the same opportunity to build their own abstractions as the Expert got. Without this, they can never gain true understanding.
The surprising joys of Preview
Did you know that you can use Preview to scan and fill out forms using nearby Phones so you can get paper work done and submitted?
Facebook and Humans
That's been one of the more disorienting parts of this: separating what I see on my feed and what’s directly around me. This compounded by the fact that I can hear sirens and the helicopters constantly. Trying to process what’s happening and assess danger, especially when you have little kids, feels bewildering. It was always about the will, ethics, and incentive structures within the company.
t’ai freedom ford wins the LAMDA Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry!
I’m really happy to announce that t’ai freedom ford’s poetry collection & more black won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. It was a honor to publish t’ai’s book through my press Augury Books.
Thinking Black Excellence Would Save Me
The double edge sword of black excellence is the understanding that to be great you must believe you are different, but in believing you are different you create an otherness not only from the crowd but at times communal blackness.
Why I Keep a Journal
Over time, opening the notebook and picking up the pen becomes like resuming a long-running conversation with a friend. We develop a voice, even though there’s no one on the other end to hear it — or rather, our self is listening. Past journal entries remind us of intentions, resolves, lessons forgotten. They bring home how much of our worries, schemes and plans are transient, even quaint in retrospect.
Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem
It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway.
independent research
And I hope we see a renaissance of organizations and individuals step up to support them. Where I want to take Distillations with its upcoming project to write a graph theory toolkit in Swift — a hopeful meeting of engineers and mathematicians.
This one sure made a change in mine. Congrats to the Big Sky Health team, and hopefully this new funding allows many more stories like these.
thoughts on Big Sky Health's recent raise, and what it means to me
Choosing Fitness
The best bit of advice I ever got on this was from a coach who would always introduce heavy lifting days with the phrase “be ambitious, but not greedy.” That so clearly summarizes the mindset that makes progress but avoids injury. You want to work hard, do the difficult work of improvement, but do so in an honest, humble way. Greedy exercise involves taking our abilities for granted and letting our ego make decisions for us. it is recovering from lifting weights that makes you stronger. This is a subtle but essential distinction to make.
To Make a Book, Walk on a Book
The biggest Koya Bound design challenge we faced was in transposing a time-bounded, linear series of photographs into a sequence unbounded from time but still connected to the emotional pulse of the eight days. Arriving at the next inn, we’d shed our soaked clothes, quickly slip into scalding waters, eat a sometimes lavish, sometimes spartan dinner, and sleep the sleep that well worn bodies sleep. Waking to do it all again the next day. This is why you must always give a book enough time to be made. A book must be allowed to sit still, set up shop in the back of your mind, hone your eyes so they’re receptive to the right inspirations at the right times. The goal of Koya Bound was just the opposite — to give physicality to a space without walls, being both bound for a place, and bounded by publishing. Is it possible to hold a walk in your hands?
“Indigo” by Ellen Bass
marked it up like a book, underlining, highlighting, writing in the margins, I was _here_.
Being Alone
People are so much more interesting when we give them space and curiosity to bloom before us. To be at home, in the company of yourself, exactly where you are.
The metaphor I left behind
Imagine instead a culture that viewed arguments as dances rather than wars. Arguments would be beautiful exchanges of ideas rather than battles to be won. In the “argument as dance” metaphor, opponents become partners who are working toward the common goal of bettering each other. People “would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently.” If we stand at the intersection of different ideas, then the ideas must be roads, paths, or lines of some sort. The metaphor of “idea as road” also has a lot of entailments. Roads are flat, two-dimensional, linear, finite, and narrow. They have edges. There are “rules of the road.” Starting points. Destinations. The properties of ideas seem very out of step with the properties of paths and roads. Ideas can be amorphous, rule-breaking, non-linear, multi-dimensional. They overlap with each other in strange and irregular ways.
Brandon Williams’ transducers talk
http://2014.funswiftconf.com
A live recording of Lane 8’s Don’t Let Me Go feat. Arctic Lake
The other day i was really missing my music buddies Arctic Lake, so I called them up and we made this version of Don’t Let Me Go. Enjoy!!
Buy/Stream the original: https://tnh.lnk.to/DontLetMeGo
Subscribe: http://po.st/ytlane8music
Follow Lane 8:
Website: http://www.lane8music.com
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Learning and vulnerability
It is better to start as a fool and learn from your mistakes than to fake being a genius and ignore your errors.
“In the Dark” by Phillip Levine
tiny fires blur the sky
“Lady Jordan” by Denice Frohman
thursday thoughts
I’m confident about the inputs. That’s my line. That’s a daily thought and frame of mind. Where I get scared is…maybe I am deluding myself and using the inputs as a self-defensive mechanism.
orbits
New behaviors create new graphs. New graphs don’t necessarily create new behaviors. What you’ve got to develop is a passing comet that can fly-by Saturn with a uniquely better offering. This offering is giving Saturn orbiters a chance to do something they can’t do at all today. It’s not about making what they can do slightly better or easier, it’s giving them a path to something bold and unmet.
Buckets and Buffering
Ways to contribute to an operation in two rough buckets: Determine the work to be done. Do the work. Player-coaches fit right between the two. When you are determining the work, I think of it as being the DJ. You and/or a team are choosing what track to play, for how long, in what sequence, and at what time. This enables the individuals you manage to go and actually play that song.
being in it
“What can I do to help you get there and make a decision?” What a fantastic question — and especially when holding space for friends to think things through.