I think to break up the linear feeling is actually refreshing for someone like me. It was actually perfect for me to get a break from it for two years and write something completely different, and then I could come back to it and fine-tune it and maybe even improve it somehow. When you have a different year in life, you sometimes spot things that you didn’t spot when you were inside of it.

When they come to us they often know what is happening and don’t need us to be a news aggregator.

The Atlantic introduced nine writer-driven subscriber newsletters this fall and three new staff newsletters.

How we put it to use: Our consumer strategy and growth team used this insight — that people who are familiar with The Atlantic appreciate the range that it offers — in planning recent marketing emails to prospective subscribers. (The sharp writing below is from senior copywriter Ashley Larkin, who also helped in synthesizing and clarifying the five needs statements.)

Take a single nine-pocket sheet and a reasonable $100 budget, and build a nine-card collection with a unifying theme.

nearly all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults.

But this disjunction between reviewer and audience doesn’t just happen with children’s movies. The problem with being a professional critic is that you end up consuming so much culture that you stop processing it like a normal person. Once you’ve seen your 20th car chase of the year, the novelty begins to wear off. But the average audience member is not mainlining movies like that. A paint-by-numbers action or comedy flick may feel completely fresh to them—and so may a banal superhero movie or the latest Harry Potter or Star Wars release.

In the past, I used to quote much more -- my dissertation advisor pretty much cured me of that.

There are very examples of trudging through a person’s archives to reconsider them in a positive sense

The love and joy inherent in a wedding ceremony are also characteristic of the ministry of Christ, who came into this world because of love (John 3:16) and brought joy to all who believe (Luke 2:10).

The miracle made a strong impression on Jesus’ new disciples, teaching them from the start that He could take care of them (Isaiah 46:4; Matthew 6:8).

One consideration is that of honor. In those days, family honor was of vital importance. Weddings usually lasted for seven days, during which time food and wine supplied by the bride’s and groom’s families flowed freely. To run out of either implied a thoughtless or impoverished host. Running out of wine would bring dishonor upon the family name. As a personal favor, Mary turned to her divine Son for help. Her family was about to be shamed in the community, and she knew her Son could do something about it.

Jesus’ creation of wine may be significant, prophetically. Jeremiah had foretold that in the Messianic age “they will rejoice in the bounty of the LORD—the grain, the new wine . . .” (Jeremiah 31:12). Amos said that Israel “will plant vineyards and drink their wine” (Amos 9:14). The association of the Messiah with a time of plenty—including freely flowing wine—makes Jesus’ first miraculous sign all the more meaningful.

The dreariest thing in all the world is a godless old age, and one of the most beautiful things in all the world is the calm sunset which so often glorifies a godly life that has been full of effort for Jesus, and of sorrows patiently borne as being sent by Him.

massive Ant-Transformer armor

Optimus Prime asks Tony Stark what his Transformer-sized armor is made from, as the hero reveals it's made from carbon nanotube transistors, printed on silicon wafers, with a capacity of about fifteen amperes.

"Imagination is the air of mind," in which it lives and breathes.

it had floated out into the stream, and was nowhere to be seen.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

Lester won his first two World Series rings in Boston, and he also learned what being a good teammate on and off the field meant."You have people from all walks of life on a team that have one goal," Lester said. "I saw David [Ortiz] bring a lot of those guys together that you never thought would be friends. I wanted to bring that when I came to Chicago."While he was one of many stars on the Red Sox, Lester took on that role that Ortiz had played in Boston when he signed with the Cubs in 2015. Kris Bryant was still in the minors and players like Javy Baez, Kyle Schwarber and Anthony Rizzo had yet to reach their peak for a franchise in need of a winning mentality more than a century since its last title. Lester took it on himself to bring everyone together.Ross recalled one memorable road trip to Oakland that included a private plane to take a group to Pebble Beach for golf. A day later it was a private bus to a Kenny Chesney concert, all expenses paid by Lester."It was the greatest trip I've ever been on," Ross said. "It's not about private planes and stuff, but just that he wanted everyone to have a good time."And there were the postgame parties Lester threw at his house not far from Wrigley Field. Everyone was invited."I knew we had a young team," Lester said. "We wanted to introduce ourselves and also get to know other people. Best way to do that is off the field. Besides, we like hosting, which always helps. I'd rather just walk up to my room and go to sleep than worry about getting an Uber."

            As a consequence of favoring discovery over creation, the concept of ownership of an object also changes. Much like the mathematician discovering a fundamental truth, we as designers shouldn’t take credit for the objects we create if they are truly natural.

so defining an object’s quality simply by its output is also not an option

Aligning company goals with the value provided — as ephemeral as it might be — is the foundation for a company that is built to last

Some people

You either hire reporters to cover teams or you don’t, and that means keeping a lot of journalists (currently around 450) employed.

Average revenue per subscriber back in 2019, again according to the founders, was $64 at a time when a subscription cost as much as $120 per year. Today, revenue per subscriber is likely well below that. It’s hard to say without access to the financials, but based on figures reported today, it has likely sunk below $55 per subscriber.Not great.

Including a $100 million dividend they paid themselves in 2020, Eisner and Madison Dearborn made a 55% return on Topps

21. 2020 Topps Now USA Election Bernie Sanders #21 Can a meme become a trading card? A mittens-wearing Bernie Sanders proved emphatically that it can. The card, which shows the Vermont senator at the presidential inauguration, went on to sell a massive 91,169 copies. That’s the most ever for any Topps Now card. It garnered plenty of mainstream attention and likely made its way into the hands of many non-collectors looking for a timely souvenir from a memorable moment.

Mimosa Shah

The unfolded “mailer” showcases the particular bending, wear, and tear on prints as they travel from one destination to another, bearing singular traces of human touch. Tangible markers, like abstract patterns produced by the colorful tape holding folded images together, signify intimacy and personalization. There’s a sense that this piece of mail can’t or won’t be duplicated, that it’s bound for only one mailbox: yours.

When galleries passed on purchasing them, Shore took advantage of the fact that the postcards didn’t list locations and could therefore be from anywhere. On a subsequent road trip, he paused at rest stops around the country and surreptitiously—and provocatively—stocked postcard racks with selections from his mountainous stash.

These thinkers and dreamers often need to bring more time and focus to stages 1 and 4 in order to keep their creative process on track. Balance inspiration with generation by creating the necessary structures to help you commit to action and put one foot in front of the other to make it happen—or just collaborate with a doer who you can outsource your ideas to! 

More inward-focused, idea-generating types excel in stages 2 and 3: getting inspired and coming up with brilliant ideas. But they run the risk of getting stuck in their own heads and failing to materialize their brilliant ideas in the world.

stages 2 and 3 are all about inspiration: dreaming, reflecting, imagining, opening up to inspiration, and allowing the unconscious mind to do its work. Stages 1 and 4, meanwhile, are about generation: doing the external work of research, planning, execution, and collaboration.

One of the most illuminating things I’ve found is a popular four-stage model of the creative process developed in the 1920s. In his book The Art of Thought, British psychologist Graham Wallas outlined a theory of the creative process based on many years of observing and studying accounts of inventors and other creative types at work.

the rise of the tech companies represents a qualitative change. The oil and real estate magnates of the 1982 Forbes 400 didn't win by making better technology. They won by being really driven and good at making deals. [2] And indeed, that way of getting rich is so old that it predates the Industrial Revolution. The courtiers who got rich in the (nominal) service of European royal houses in the 16th and 17th centuries were also, as a rule, really driven and good at making deals.

The pure tech companies used to be called "high technology" startups. But now that startups can punch through the middle of the ice crust, we don't need a separate name for the edges, and the term "high-tech" has a decidedly retro sound.

But on religion everyone's an expert.

If you're nice, as well as wise, you won't merely resist attacking such people, but encourage them. Having new ideas is a lonely business. Only those who've tried it know how lonely. These people need your help. And if you help them, you'll probably learn something in the process.

Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy way to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is a full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry.

The lower time limits for intense work suggest a solution to the problem of having less time to work after you have kids: switch to harder problems. In effect I did that, though not deliberately.

There is some technique to it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate (which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong.

It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win.

It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win.

Most people type around 40 words per minute (WPM) with skilled typists hitting upwards of 100 WPM. Competition typers can break into the 200 WPM.

Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day.

So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them.

When it comes to the business model, most of these new magazines have common characteristics. They have smaller frequencies, they rely on circulation revenue, they have high cover prices, and they are printed on high-quality paper.They probably need all four elements to survive.

Samir Husni, perhaps the world’s foremost expert and advocate for ink-on-paper magazines.

First, we think of time as a separate "thing" (unlike, say, medieval peasants, who'd have had no such abstract notion). Then, we feel we've got to make the most of it, or squeeze the most work from it, or use it to get on top of things, or do enough with it to feel a sense of self-worth.

You have a certain number of slabs of time available for work, unfolding one after the other, whether you like it or not, until it's time to pick up the kid from preschool or make dinner or go to bed. 

You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you'll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.

It's not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your "big rocks", but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar.

But it's also true that we're increasingly the kind of people who don't want to rest – who get antsy and anxious if we don't feel we're being productive.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

If you’re practicing and you want to scramble a solved cube, you have to keep the cube intact and scramble it up manually. If you break it apart and reassemble the cubies randomly, there’s actually only a 1 in 12 chance that it’s solvable.

In the story of the 4,000, the word for basket (spuris) had to do with a much larger container, the very same kind of basket used to lower Paul over the Damascus wall (Acts 9:25).

First, check out the locations: the 5,000 were fed on the Jewish side of the lake while the 4,000 were fed on the Gentile side. Jesus had compassion for both crowds; He cares about both Jews and Gentiles!

We now know that at least 10-30% of those who survive any Covid infection (from asymptomatic or “mild”to severe) will go on to live with (and sometimes die from) long Covid – a long-term, lifelong, or even life-threatening or fatal, disabling chronic syndrome, the biological pathways of which are still largely unknown.

All of these, both Midianites and Ephaeans, come out of Sheba, which Strabo (xvi. 4, 10) describes as "the highly blessed land of the Sabaeans, in which myrrh, frankincense, and cinnamon grow."

The promise of Isaiah 60:5 is expanded in two pictures, seen from Jerusalem’s commanding position between the desert and the sea. The first is a procession of camels and flocks representing the tribute of the East.

These were the things the Sabaeans abounded with. Strabo (z) says, that frankincense, myrrh, and cinnamon, grew with them; and that they have such an abundance of spices, that they use the branches of cinnamon, cassia, and other things, for fuel

The multitude of camels - Lowth renders this, 'An inundation of camels.' The Hebrew word properly denotes an inundation or overflowing of waters, but it is not improperly applied to a numerous caravan or company of animals.

The verse paints the commerce of the East, as Isaiah 60:5 had described that of the West.

This visualization depicts United States search metrics on a set of 2018 news events, curated by Axios. Each event was represented by a unique search term (or terms). The Google Trends API was used to obtain the date at which search interest peaked for each event throughout the year.

They’re coming as worshipers, and their worship is appropriately being offered to a King as evidenced by the gifts that they bring, which are coronation kind of gifts – and we’ll explain that a little more.

They’re there to worship Him. They’re not on a political mission, although it has political implications.

Daniel actually became prime minister, and for over 60 years had a prime minister role in the Middle East that transcended several of those empires during the Babylonians, the Medes, and the Persians, he was there.

Daniel became, according to Daniel 5:11, the chief of the magi, having been trained in the law of the Medes and the Persians with his friends when they arrived there.

Well, maybe you don’t need that half-season A team. Maybe you don’t need two Rookie teams. Hey, what did the Astros just figure out? Can we do that too? Hey, how can we better unify what we’re doing at all levels of the organization?

One such team, the Houston Astros, brought in the consulting firm McKinsey, and actually had consultants go to Europe and try to learn best practices from the top soccer teams there. Among the results of this was a determination that the minor league system was too bloated, and that more attention needed to specialized work with top prospects.

For easy math, let’s just say that every team had 5 affiliates. That means at any given point in time, for every guy in the majors, there were 5 guys in the minors. How many of those never made it? A lot.

(Since the advent of the MLB draft in 1965, only 23 players have gone to the majors without playing in the minors.)

I’ve thought the total interested audience would be about six people

if cross-format identifiers like DOIs are used, annotations made in one format (eg, EPUB) can be seen in the same document published in other formats (eg, HTML, PDF) and in other locations.

Annotate any EPUB: Just drag and drop any EPUB file on the target at docdrop.org to open it with Hypothesis enabled.

That’s kind of where I see we could take Hypothesis, where you can almost recognize where a certain message, maybe in an entirely different reply thread or context, could actually be really useful in some other context that’s in another conversation; that’s happening somewhere else.

But here is an artist.

To easily open YouTube videos for annotation, use the bookmarklet.

And, as is preached in some cultures, those connections endure even when some humans are gone. Which, of course, means that they are not completely gone. And by living this way, by establishing throughlines from generation to generation, even if we don’t fully grasp it, our existences mean that they, all of them, are never completely gone.

I think though that as humans we must feel freer to live more intentional lives.

A lot of what we like to think of as tradition can spill into the realm of obligation. When that happens the intentionality is lost, and really, the intentionality is what makes something special.

I’m not that big into shopping, but I fondly remember holiday shopping… strangers at the mall seemed jollier

I would thoroughly enjoy having other kinds of small traditions to engage in. I don’t want to contrive something just for the sake of having something else to do but… isn’t what I’m talking about something that a lot of people are missing out on these days?

what I might call the “classic” version of what I remember, the last year of that was probably when I was 10.

I think these smaller traditions - intentional ones, ones which might not be perpetual, might even fade away, but which might nevertheless have a durability - I think these get at the essence of the holidays, and indeed, at the essence of the human experience.

BuzzFeed is the first major digital-media company ever to go public.

He had previously been a scout for the Cubs and signed Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, George Altman and others

You will have heard that keeping a “gratitude journal” – in which you regularly count your blessings – can increase your overall wellbeing, for example. Yet research shows that we can overdose on this. In one study, people who counted their blessings once a week showed the expected rise in life satisfaction, but those who counted their blessings three times a week actually became less satisfied with their life. “Doing the activity can itself feel like a chore, rather than something you actually enjoy,”

the more they reported fantasising about their success, the less time they spent studying for their exams

a simple appreciation of the small pleasures amid the stress could help ease us through the day-to-day anxieties, Mahmoodi Kahriz says. That will be much harder for people who are constantly thinking about their happiness, since they’ll always be lamenting the loss of the many more exciting activities that they could have been doing.

As well as reducing everyday contentment, the constant desire to feel happier can make people feel more lonely. We become so absorbed in our own wellbeing, we forget the people around us – and may even resent them for inadvertently bringing down our mood or distracting us from more “important” goals.

His baseball glove has the reference for the Bible verse Philippians 4:13 on it, and Hughes has the entire verse ("I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.") tattooed on his left arm.

Rivera's pitching glove was inscribed "Phil. 4:13", in reference to the Bible verse Philippians 4:13 ("I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me").

He has the Bible verse Colossians 3:23 inscribed in his baseball glove.

James has many tattoos, including a partial sleeve on his left arm. The bible verse Psalms 119:105 is tattooed on his forearm. The verse reads, "Thy Word Is a Lamp Unto My Feet and Light Unto My Path."

On the strap of his left batting glove, Francoeur has the phrase "Joshua 1:9" written, referencing the Bible verse.

Getting the project built in Chicago was a challenge. Wrigleyville is a tight-knit, activist neighborhood that doesn’t look lightly on new mixed-use residential. “Everything about the project in the neighborhood was controversial,” said Keller. Developer Rossi concurred: “It was a really difficult project that had a lot of resident opposition.”

“You can’t build anything higher than the eaves of Wrigley Field,”

“What we’re trying to do is make this from a 6-month venue to a 12-month venue.

Casper goes private / TechCrunch (🔐): This is a worthwhile, premium report by TechCrunch. In an earlier thought comparing Purple and Casper, I explained: "One was run like a company that raised $340 million and one was run like a company that raised $2 million. Venture capital isn't the manufacturing plant for DTC success. Capital constraint can influence extraordinary brand and operational creativity. "Since its early-2020 IPO, Casper has struggled as a public company, seeing the majority of its value evaporate after its operating results failed to excite investors. Casper will sell for $6.90 per share, or around a 94% “premium to the closing share price on November 12, 2021,” per its own mathematics. When it listed, Casper sold its stock for $10 per share, rising above $15 per share in its early life before falling as low as $3.18 per share more recently." Here's the takeaway: Casper has been acquired by PE firm Durational Capital Management for roughly $300 million ($6.90 per share), about a year and a half after it went public in February 2020. In a year of high-profile DTC IPOs that have followed, the bed-in-a-box brand’s fate is now a cautionary tale for companies like Warby Parker and Allbirds.

There’s exactly one person alive with my name

they finished in fourth, earning a first round playoff game hosting Gotham

And the women’s game looks like actual soccer, whereas some of the MLS games we’ve seen have looked kind of like wrestling matches.

The Chicago Red Stars are the local NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League) team.

A few weeks ago, the local weekly newspaper, the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark, ran an article about a guy here in our town who is clearly far more fascinated by Lustrons than I am. Dirk Fletcher has photographed 250 extant Lustron houses.

Light and its characteristics remained a through line in Lungren’s career. Concluding his Paris sojourn, the artist returned to the US by September 1884. Working in both oil and pastel in New York and later in London, he rendered views of streets, parks, docks, and interiors amid rain, snow, fog, fireworks, lamplight, and more.

Lungren’s keen interest in optical effects was not about translating sunlight into daubs of pigment like Monet or Renoir; rather, it was keyed to the new electric lighting of the late 19th century and how to render in paint that modern experience of seeing, especially at night. (The interest ran in the family. His brother, Charles Marshall Lungren, who stayed the course and became an engineer, developed lighting technologies and worked at Popular Science Monthly.)

Trying to make sense of the architectural space of the café, whose street-facing doors and windows have been completely opened, is no easy task. The many mirrors and lights, reflections and refractions, confuse spatial relationships and unsettle our footing in the scene.

Did you ever have the feeling you were missing something vastly more important than your keys?

I don’t know where life will bring me. I only hope it will be worth it in the end. I hope i will resist, that i will be strong enough to keep moving forward becoming a better version of me. I love you all!

I would like to use my 100 club post to lament the things I miss about the old Internet:— Suck.com— Altavista— Hotwired— A sense of optimism about the future— a sense that a Gibsonesque cyberpunk future was right around the corner I’ll take this though. A bit of succour to bring me to the other side. See you at number 1, fools.

Will Minus ever die? This is a thought I had since the moment I found out about this project, yesterday. If you analyse how early users of big social media behaved, it feels pretty familiar when looking at the Minus community at the moment. A niche group of people, with *many* interests in common, building a great environment for discussion, finding new stuff, and meeting friends. With the growth of all those platforms, however, as we all have observed, this positive environment crumble. They either died because of lack of engagement (Tumblr, Clubhouse, Fotolog, etc), or have turned really unpleasurable yet addicting to use (Twitter, Facebook, etc). Will Minus follow this path? Will the rules established by this project be capable of being the “David” against the “Goliath” of Big Techs? What do you think?

It’s an interesting idea. After all, what use would I make of words if I knew they were finite? First, I would say that I am a very optimistic person. Optimistic to the point of being selfish, to the point of not caring. Yes I don’t care. Because, for me, everything is fine. This would be my outburst, because how long did I have to be silent about it? What’s wrong with thinking everything is fine when I feel that way? Why should I feel ashamed for considering that life, no matter what, has always been beautiful to me? I don’t really care as in my mind and heart there are only butterflies flying.

I always hate eating the last bite of a delicious meal. It seems somehow cruel that an experience so grand, so…life-giving, can be so limited. Maybe if I delay this final bite, I can somehow cling to the fleeting joy for just one moment longer. Once I swallow that final time, will I ever find such beauty again? My paralyzing fear and inaction doesn’t actually increase my enjoyment of that morsel. To enjoy, I must consume. This is its cycle. Maybe joy isn’t renewable. But can I trust that joy is bountiful? For this same reason, I fear posting. What if I think of something better to use my limited submissions on? What if I’m wasting what little opportunity I have. But fuck it, life must be lived. Eat the damn bite.

Who’s minus community ? The curious ? The social bulimic ? The outsider ? Ben Grosser’s friends and family ?

One of the goals in my life is to encourage people live a more reflective life.

I love communicating via sticky notes. The sticky note is my canvas. I’d love for the sticky note to be the canvas of others, so I encourage people to do the same.

What are the questions that strangers on the train think about?

Chinese outlets’ focus on Covid-19 was much more domestic, perhaps because they were focused on trying to contain the outbreak, while the U.S. view was much more focused on politics and the conflict between various levels of government when it came to combatting the crisis.

Jacob opened up about being “unintentionally complicit” in helping undermine democracy by following journalism traditions and treating Republicans and Democrats equally.  “When I edited political stories, I went so far as to count the quotes from Republicans and Democrats, thinking an equal number would make us fairer. I didn’t think I was helping either party. I thought I was helping the readers. I was wrong,” Jacob wrote. “If you look back three or four decades, you see many corrupt pols in both parties. Scandals like Abscam and Keating Five were mostly Democratic. But in recent decades, it’s obvious the GOP is more unethical and anti-democratic. Which means treating the parties equally helps Republicans.” So, what’s the solution? According to Jacob, the framing of political stories needs to change from being party-oriented to democracy-oriented.

Incidentally, I’d be quite fine living on Red Pistachio Nut Lane.

Marmora is one of the M streets. They start when you cross Central. Not immediately, mind you. The first north-south street west of Central is actually Parkside. But then you get to Major. Depending on where you are in the city and how the grid square is laid out, it goes Major, Mango, Menard, Monitor, Marmora, Mason. Then it’s Austin, one of the big thoroughfares, and then it starts up again with… McVicker. McVicker is everyone’s favorite.

Tonight as I walked the short distance home from a meeting, and I mulled over those old walks, I thought about how back in Chicago, if we’d wanted, we could have just kept on walking. One small neighborhood would roll into another. I could have taken dozens of pictures of different street sign combinations. Out here in the suburbs, you go three blocks, and it’s like everything ends. I go one way, I’m in a different town. I go a different way, there’s weird industrial buildings and a quarry. I go yet a different way, and there’s a federal highway. The compactness is visceral.

Of all the odd coincidences, my sister lived on Giddings St. until just a few months ago. She was the pastor at the Jefferson Park UCC church and lived in the parsonage.

For example there’s a weekly challenge thing on Words With Friends where you have to beat the computer a certain number of times. I was actually getting to the point where I was trying to knock it off as soon as I could each week so I wouldn’t have to think about it when the weekend rolled around. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I said, screw this, and just stopped doing it. You know you’ve got something like this. It might even be the same damn thing!

I imagine that sense of peacefulness feels distant for most of us. We’re not back to normal, we’ve got little appreciable sense of when that will happen, we maybe don’t even know what we mean by that anymore. Oh, we reach out for facsimiles of normal, sure. But is normal even the point? Or instead is normal just a crib for something else we’re really trying to get to, which is peacefulness?Of course normal and peacefulness aren’t the same thing. Sometimes what we mean by normal is a certain state of busyness. Maybe even freneticness, if that can at least feel comfortable. Call it rhythm, say. But I submit that part of any good rhythm is reaching that peaceful space.

What I feel though is that even if there’s a certain quantifiable good that might more than offset a certain quantifiable bad, we may nevertheless be scuttling our advantage simply by drowning in worry.

kosmeo from kosmos = adorning or order, ornament, decoration, adornment -- this root word gives us our English cosmetic something women use to "adorn" their face and make themselves more physically attractive

The Greek verb bears is stego which is derived from stege (a thatch or roof or covering of a building) and conveys the idea of covering closely, of protecting by covering and of concealing by covering.

Personal newsletters should have no rules. They are where you find your audience, voice, topics, cadence, products, etc.

He served as Braves third base coach in 2014 and was pegged to become the Cubs first base coach in 2015, but with the hire of Joe Maddon he was bumped in favor of Dave Martinez and instead accepted the role of Cubs outfield & baserunning coordinator.

So, if you’ve ever felt bad about copying code from our site instead of writing it from scratch, forgive yourself! Why recreate the wheel when someone else has done the hard work? We call this knowledge reuse – you’re reusing what others have already learned, created, and proven. Knowledge reuse isn’t a bad thing – it helps you learn, get working code faster, and reduces your frustration.

While many of his hard-drinking counterparts played day games hung over after a rough night out, Cobb kept his distance. That made him more palatable to the public, but less palatable to his fellow ballplayers. "It was a source of tension," Leershen said. "In Washington, he'd go to the Library of Congress in his off hours to read, and that annoyed the hell out of them."

In the real world, the most common middle-class jobs in America in 2019 include primary school teachers, construction workers, nurses, and sales reps. What’s the commonality of all these professions? They all have non-zero marginal costs: To treat one more patient or make one more sale entails more time and effort. This dynamic creates a ceiling for customers, resulting in an equalizing effect on earnings. This stands in contrast to the digital content world, wherein creators have zero marginal costs for additional viewers.

On YouTube, creators earn just $3 to $5 per 1,000 video views.

“Sometimes you may come across a video in your feed that doesn’t appear to be relevant to your expressed interests or have amassed a huge number of likes. This is an important and intentional component of our approach to recommendation: bringing a diversity of videos into your For You feed gives you additional opportunities to stumble upon new content categories, discover new creators, and experience new perspectives and ideas as you scroll through your feed.”

How many times can a person listen to the same podcast episode? Probably not many before the content becomes repetitive and boring. In contrast, one can listen to a favorite song on repeat ad infinitum. In video games, there’s not only value in replaying a game, but increasing marginal utility because players gain mastery and can enjoy a game even more after sinking hundreds of hours into it. This suggests that categories with high replay value — like music and game platforms — are most susceptible to concentration among a few mega-hits.

it’s vital for creator platforms to provide paths for upward mobility and democratize opportunities to succeed. How can platforms do this?

Vine serves as a cautionary tale: Despite inventing the short-form comedy video format and reaching 200 million monthly active users in November 2015, the company gradually lost its creators to platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and Snap, where they could potentially earn more, build bigger audiences, and have a wider range of creative tools. Opportunities for audience growth and financial success were more readily available on other platforms, contributing to the platform’s decline.

Rosen argued that in markets with heterogeneous providers, like most creator economies, success accrues disproportionately to those on top: “lesser talent often is a poor substitute for greater talent … hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.”

The rest of its 3 million creators, or 98.6% of its artists, made just $36 per artist per quarter.

On Spotify, for instance, the top 43,000 artists — roughly 1.4% of those on the platform — pull in 90% of royalties and make, on average, $22,395 per artist per quarter.

Google has revealed that on a daily basis, 15% of all queries have never been searched before, a figure that has remained stable since 2013.

On Patreon, only 2% of creators made the federal minimum wage of $1,160 per month in 2017.

a recent study of kids ages eight to 12 found that nearly 30% aspire to become YouTubers

Launching a new platform, he said, was like starting a new country: Getting users to move from an established network that had an ossified economy and social classes to a new network requires the possibility of success — the lure of the American Dream.

But Puppetman, which can be seen here in full, didn’t make it past the pilot stage, so it was dumped into the CBS rotation as part of its anthology series CBS Summer Playhouse. It’s where pilots go to die. The idea behind Puppetman was slightly ahead of its time—essentially a comedy about a puppet show, breaking the fourth wall in a way slightly closer to NewsRadio than The Muppet Show—but it wasn’t picked up, and CBS Summer Playhouse was something of a last ditch effort to see if audiences would really care. (Alas, audiences weren’t won over by puppeteer Richard Hunt’s considerable charms as a human actor.)

They start off fairly inexpensive for those smaller than 7 inches, but start to climb in price for every inch of screen real-estate above that. They have both ESP32 and ESP8266 WiFi modules that allow you to take your displays wireless

you better have one hell of a point of view

Have killer voice. How do you develop killer voice? Be confident.

Who are you? Answer this question in every newsletter, preferably in the first paragraph. Unless you send a daily newsletter, readers will forget.

We’re not going to squish the text to save money.

A book with proper margins says a number of things. It says, we care about the page. It says, we care about the words.

Giving a shit does not require capital, simply attention and humility and diligence. Giving a shit is the best feeling you can imbue craft with.

trichloroethylene or TCE

But I rarely use it.

Comments at the end of the page feel stale and web 1.0.

There’s a rumor that the blue light from smartphones (or other screens) can ruin your vision, perhaps even leading to blindness, but it’s not backed up by evidence.

you probably remember being told that sitting too close would ruin your eyes. Scientific American traces that myth to a 1967 recall of early color TVs that emitted radiation (like, actual radiation) that were probably harmful to health, as well as to a misunderstanding about nearsighted kids who sat close to the TV. Most likely, they sat close so they could see better; the TV didn’t cause their nearsightedness.

The Internet Archive has a budget—soup to nuts—of around $20 million or less per year,

Thatch builds up over time, so it’s not necessary to dethatch every year. Plan on doing it every five years or so if your lawn needs it. You might want to give your lawn a quick check every year just to see how much thatch has accumulated.

Over watering and over fertilization contribute to thatch build-up. It’s too much of a good thing. Although infrequent mowing may be good for you, it’s not good for your lawn.

You can tell if your lawn has a thatch problem when water runs off the lawn instead of soaking and you’ll begin to notice grayish-brown matts. To determine how much thatch has accumulated, cut out a wedge of lawn about two-inch deep. It should be fairly easy to identify the thatch layer between the soil and grass.

Thatch can harm lawns. It’s difficult for water to penetrate a thick thatch layer, causing water to run off instead of soaking in.

The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.

I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week; to a surprising extent, this has been true. (I added ~130 documents to this repository over the first 3 years.)

only 30 percent of moisture converts into clouds, and then a very efficient cloud on its own will convert 10-20 percent of its moisture to precipitation

It's not a fucking blog.Seriously. The idea of a "blog" needs to get over itself. Everybody is treating writing as a "content marketing strategy" and using it to "build a personal brand" which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.Bullshit.This idea is toxic and led me to publish less and less over time.

They didn’t believe in Original Sin so they didn’t protect their customers. They didn’t believe in Original Sin so they didn’t protect themselves. They didn’t believe in Original Sin so they didn’t see this catastrophe coming. They suffered the fate of everyone who ignores nature from Marxists to hippies: nature always wins. Humans do not change.

They began with the fact of sin – a fact as practical as potatoes.

Another pattern I’m noticing in reading some other blogs is the need for community to propel learning experiences. Sharing what we learn elicits benefits of all kinds: giving voice to ideas, gathering feedback, and building an accountability/support network to name a few.

For Kandinsky, if that objective element of a painting were taken away, the building blocks of the composition would reveal themselves to cause a feeling of repose and tranquil repetition, of well-balanced parts.

"These new compositional structures led him toward free chromaticism, which emphasized nonharmonic tones and "emancipation of dissonance" (i.e., unresolved dissonance), one of the principal features of atonal music.

in Wagner there is also an affinity with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who considered music to be of central importance in man's emotional life

e felt special attraction to Wagner, whose music was greatly admired by the Symbolists for its idea of Gesamtkunstwerk that embraced word, music, and the visual arts and was best embodied in Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung, with its climax of global cataclysm.

Estonian Krooni

Ferris Bueller vest

World’s biggest trophy

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS – Alexandra has one fake tooth. – She has a metal plate screwed onto her fibula. – Before becoming a writer, she trained to become a helicopter pilot. – Her top heroes are: Mister Rogers, RuPaul, and Michelle Obama. – She does not have any social media accounts. – She has taught classes on writing, creativity, goal-setting, and other topics in 18 cities around the world. – She has lived in New Zealand, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and currently, Hawaii. – Sagittarius Sun, Cancer Moon, Cancer Rising. – Favorite treat: Stroopwafel. – Fantasy career: magician or hair stylist.

It is a calm place. – I have 8 apps installed on my phone which I use occasionally: banking app, ride-sharing app, and a few others. – I keep these apps hidden on a secondary page. Out of sight. They’re not the first thing I see.

The various products associated with the site earn over $10,000 a month, almost entirely passively. Last month they made over $60,000.

This site’s products make no sense when looked at in aggregate. There’s an app for men’s kegels, a course on SEO, a course on programming for marketers, I do SEO/content consulting, there’s a medley of affiliate deals sprinkled throughout…You have to get creative with your monetization, and you can’t follow the traditional models for “making money from blogging.” My approach is to keep writing articles about what I’m interested in, and then create products around the topics that do well. Sex was a big one for a while, which inspired those products. My marketing articles do extremely well so I offer SEO and content consulting to startups (email me if you’re interested).I prefer to create products that can sell themselves through the blog consistently and stay relevant for at least a few years. I don’t like doing the big launches you typically see bloggers do, since it burns out your email list and forces you to focus on list building. I’d rather create evergreen content that can naturally transition to being the top stage of the sales funnel.

For this site I’d have to say “hey you’ll learn about learning, college, sex, philosophy, marketing, travel, money, photography…” it’s all over the place.

If you’re starting a blog to sell a product, then certainly, you should niche down. It wouldn’t make sense if Teachable published an article about brewing kombucha. But if you’re starting a blog for yourself, like this one, then not niching yourself can be a smart move.

It’s a matter of time before we see this dynamic applied to other areas. I don’t want to create a podcast on my own but it’d be fun to record a season with a few friends.

Substack, for example, is designed for individual writers. Every, a writer collective that is somewhere between writing for the New York Times and writing on Substack recently announced their move away from Substack as the toolset was not serving their needs. In a Founder’s Letter worth reading, Nathan Baschez and Dan Shipper write: When you write together, you don’t have to publish so often that you risk burning out. Instead, the group can share the load. 

In short, the architecture of digital platforms has made us obsessive documenters and consumers of the present, yet largely indifferent to the archives we create.

Williams also said that Medium’s “subscriber base has continued to grow, while our publication’s audiences haven’t,” citing this as another reason for the new pivot.

It works exceptionally well for both web pages and when reading .pdf texts within a browser window.

By the time most of us get through a day we’ve read emails, clicked links on the internet, and received a half a dozen text messages. Our minds become quite scattered after all that.

grab handles are mainly there so people can climb in and out of cars with ease

We’ve chosen to keep highlights private to avoid pages being cluttered by highlights that have no surrounding discussion. We understand that people may want to share highlights with others, and we think there are effective ways we can address that in the future.

The nature of data science is a hybrid of many disciplines. Where it composed of different subject areas like math (i.e., statistics, calculus, etc.), database management, data visualization, programming/software engineering, domain knowledge, etc. In my opinion, this may be the primary reason why people interested in jumping into the entry-level data science career often feel completely lost.

He doesn’t like thinking of himself as a software developer, which feels like an oversimplification for him. He refers to himself as a “media hacker.”

You can script your presentations, but I don’t recommend that. One of the reasons to avoid scripting is it makes you think word to word rather than idea to idea.

Here’s the formula: Add about a half cup of baking soda to the drum of the washing machine and then add distilled white vinegar to the fabric softener dispenser.