This quote from G.R.R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire and other novels, offers a good illustration of the key difference between Roam and Notion: “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”

Yet when researchers measured how fair participants felt each queuing system was, “first come, first served” was seen to be the most fair, while “last come, first serve” was seen as the least—so good luck trying to implement this system in real life.

The problem with “first come, first served” is it incentivizes people to arrive early, which researchers say results in people waiting for the longest period of time. When this incentive is removed—under a “last come, first served” system—the queues are more efficient. Researchers suggest that under this model, people are forced to change their behaviors and arrive at the queues at a slower rate. When people who arrive last are served first, there is less of a bottleneck and thus less congestion in queues.

“If you invest across all asset classes—stocks, bonds, real assets and cash or cash equivalents—some of them will zig, while others zag, and you’ll get a more consistent, stable and predictable return over time.”

And what retiree wants to be awakened in the middle of the night by a tenant calling to say his toilet is leaking?

Dr. Johnson said the “optimal mix” in a portfolio is 50% real estate, 30% stocks and 20% bonds.

Family cookbooks are an example of social annotation, a practice of collaborative notetaking that feels tailor-made for digital spaces even though it’s quite old.

“Reading is an honor and a gift,” he explains, “from a warrior or a historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write.” Yet many people spurn this gift and still consider themselves educated. “If you haven’t read hundreds of books,” Mattis says, “you’re functionally illiterate.”

The Stoics say over and over that it is inexcusable not to learn from the past.

Buridan's ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will.

and eventually waste away and die never having taken either path.