This Week:
4.18.16
Portland, OR - 2015
The Battle Over the Sea-Monkey Fortune - “A few years after her husband’s death in 2003, Signorelli von Braunhut licensed out part of the labor of his multimillion dollar Sea-Monkey enterprise, mostly packaging and distribution, to Big Time. If you’ve ever been 8 years old, then you know that Sea-Monkeys arrive in a small plastic aquarium with several small packets that include the tiny brine-shrimp critters, which reanimate once you add water — by way of a secret formula that Signorelli von Braunhut keeps locked in a vault in Manhattan.”
Why The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam - “‘I saw something in the news, so I copied it. I put a piece of tape — I have obviously a laptop, personal laptop — I put a piece of tape over the camera. Because I saw somebody smarter than I am had a piece of tape over their camera.’”
What I Learned Selling A Software Business - “You basically make a list of accounts that the business controls — Stripe, email, hosting provider, etc etc — and put them in a PDF file.”
The Mastermind - “He was a brilliant programmer and a vicious cartel boss, who became a prized U.S. government asset. The Atavist Magazine presents a story of an elusive criminal kingpin, told in weekly installments.”
This Week:
1.12.16
NY Times
Netflix Secret Categories - A directory of all the “secret” Netflix categories.
The Search for the Killer Bot - “But in the fall of 2013 Brown chose to write a bot — a simple piece of software that, when sent a message, returned a single lunch option from among the 20 or so restaurants and food trucks that Brown entered into its database. Lunchbot, as Brown called it, was a simple technology that soon grew more sophisticated. Other employees added restaurants to the program; later, an updated version accounted for places the team had recently ordered from, preventing consecutive visits to Torchy’s.”
The Best Things I’ve Read This Week:
10.7.15
The Martian - “After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.”
The Night They Drove the Price of Electricity Down - “In the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, the mighty state of Texas was asleep. The honky-tonks in Austin were shuttered, the air-conditioned office towers of Houston were powered down, and the wind whistled through the dogwood trees and live oaks on the gracious lawns of Preston Hollow. Out in the desolate flats of West Texas, the same wind was turning hundreds of wind turbines, producing tons of electricity at a time when comparatively little supply was needed.”
What Refugees Bring When They Run for Their Lives - “Refugees travel light, for their trek is as dangerous as it is arduous. They are detained, shot at, hungry. Smugglers routinely exploit them, promising safety for a price, only to squeeze them like sardines into tiny boats. Most have no option but to shed whatever meager belongings they may have salvaged from their journeys. Those allowed to bring extra baggage aboard often toss it overboard, frantically dumping extra weight as the leaky boats take on water.”
The Big Meh - “Remember Douglas Adams’s 1979 novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”? It began with some technology snark, dismissing Earth as a planet whose life-forms “are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” But that was then, in the early stages of the information technology revolution.
Since then we’ve moved on to much more significant things, so much so that the big technology idea of 2015, so far, is a digital watch. But this one tells you to stand up if you’ve been sitting too long!”
- Man who traveled to every country on earth explains the most difficult places to visit and why - “Last summer, my Royal Air Maroc flight from Casablanca landed at Malabo International Airport in Equatorial Guinea, and I completed a 50-year mission: I had officially, and legally, visited every recognized country on earth.”
The Best Things I’ve Read This Week:
6.15.15
You Remind Me of Me - “You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better.”
‘Digital Darth Vader’ Charles C. Johnson on Manipulating Politics and Media - “I’m not sure when I first became aware of Charles C. Johnson. It may have been from a few tweets he directed at me. It might have been from one of the numerous controversial profiles of him in the New York Times, Politico, Gawker and other places. I do specifically recall being tagged in a tweet for a $500 bounty he’d put on anyone who could get an advertiser to pull out of Al Sharpton’s TV show.”
A bad job is harder on your mental health than unemployment - “Although employment is associated with health benefits over unemployment, the psychosocial characteristics of work also influence health. We used longitudinal data to investigate whether the benefits of having a job depend on its psychosocial quality (levels of control, demands and complexity, job insecurity, and unfair pay), and whether poor quality jobs are associated with better mental health than unemployment.”
Can Reading Make You Happier? - “We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.”
The Best Things I’ve Read This Week:
5.17.15
A Prayer for Owen Meany - “Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend’s mom with a baseball and believes—accurately—that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom.”
Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck - “The imminent need for basic income in recognition of our machine-driven future.”
In Flight: En route from London to Tokyo, a pilot’s eye view of life in the sky. - “At about 30 feet above the surface of Japan I pull the nose up and begin to close the thrust levers. I feel that moment of poise: a sense that continued flight is as likely as anything else, that we have lowered the wheels but they are not yet turning upon the Earth, that a question has been asked but not answered.”
Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks - “Our email program has a time client built into it. So you can actually see in your email box who’s online and who’s not. And there’s an implicit culture [here] that if you don’t see somebody on at the same time at a certain hour of the night, you’re wondering what the heck they are doing.”
The Man Who Broke the Music Business - “The dawn of online piracy.”
13 Things:
- Do something now.
- Start working and do not wait for perfect circumstances.
- Believe in your abilities.
- Believe in your interests.
- “You’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”
- Have a strong image for why you want to be successful.
- Set specific goals.
- Aim for the best.
- Be persistent…try again.
- See failures as lessons.
- Nothing will ever replace experiences.
- Concentrate on your weaknesses. Make them stronger.
- Do something now.