Life
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Curiosity Required | Cap Watkins
Once, while looking for a new gig, I met up with a couple of potential coworkers for food and drinks. We were chatting about their project, what I'd worked on previously, etc., and eventually started talking about recent tech news. At one point, I mentioned having found out about a story on Twitter.
Joe Kraus Blog
A few weeks ago I gave this rough presentation on a topic called “SlowTech”. I wanted to cover three things We are creating and encouraging a culture of distraction where we are increasingly disconnected from the people and events around us and increasingly unable to engage in long-form thinking. People now feel anxious when their brains are unstimulated.
The New England Journal of Medicine looks through 200 years of back issues to understand how we die differently: The first thing to notice here is how much our mortality rate has dropped over the course of a century, largely due to big reductions in infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza. The way we talk about medical conditions has changed, too. NEJM finds that, back in 1812 – the first year it published – reports of spontaneous combustion were taken quite seriously by the medical community, as were debates over how, exactly one would be injured by a close-call with a cannonball: Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact — could shatter bones, blind people, or even kill them (1812f).
How we die (in one chart)
In June of 1971, just days before his 26-year-old son, Michael , got married, future-U.S. President Ronald Reagan sent him the following letter of advice. It really is quite stunning. ( Source: Reagan: A Life In Letters ; Image: Ronald Reagan, via . )
Love, Dad
A Short Lesson in Perspective
Many years ago, when I first started to work in the advertising industry, we used to have this thing called The Overnight Test. It worked like this: My creative partner Laurence and I would spend the day covering A2 sheets torn from layout pads with ideas for whatever project we were currently engaged upon – an ad for a new gas oven, tennis racket or whatever. Scribbled headlines. Bad puns. Stick-men drawings crudely rendered in fat black Magic Marker.22 February 2012 Last updated at 11:58 ET By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
The myth of the eight-hour sleep
He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible. In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean. In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook , sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.)
John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74 - NYTimes.com
‘A man grows most tired while standing still.’ ~Chinese proverb Post written by Leo Babauta .