Author: Wells Baum
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Picasso: Art as a form of diary
Art is where our mind’s eye merges with reality to create a theater inside our head, resulting in the form of a diary. This was especially true for Pablo Picasso. Picasso was perhaps best known for his practice of public journaling via painting. “My work is my diary. I have painted my autobiography,” he said.…
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The tale behind the term ‘horsepower’ 🐎
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The terms ‘horsepower’ and ‘10,000 steps’ were both marketing gimmicks. In the 1770s, James Watt wanted to demonstrate that his steam engine invention was more powerful than the work of multiple horses. By watching horses circle a London brewery mill, he calculated that one horse could push 33,000 pounds one foot in a minute. He…
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Henry Rollins: The One Decision that Changed My Life Forever
Talent is overrated. Hard work, discipline, grit, and consistency are attributes that increase your chances of getting what you want. Luck is a matter of being specific about your goals and two, putting yourself in a position for good things to happen. It is the accumulation of small and steady risks that make the biggest…
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‘I wish I was a little bit smaller’
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Nicholas Kulish is 6 foot 8 inches. Towering about the average American height of 5 foot 8, society is simply not built for him. As if a tight plane seat isn’t burdensome enough, “Why do we bob and weave around the New York City subway in a strange dance?,” Kulish writes, “Are we performing for…
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Alien Hand Syndrome
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What if you woke up one day and had a brand new second hand that moved on its own? This is what happened to Karen after she had brain surgery to help cure her epilepsy. After her operation, her left hand immediately took on a life of its own. For starters, it immediately began to…
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We are ‘brilliant only in tiny bursts’
“The law of linchpin leverage: The more value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value. In other words, most of the time, you’re not being brilliant. Most of the time, you do stuff that ordinary people could do. A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator…
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Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence
Francis Bacon painted ghostly, violent images. Some say he emptied his darkest thoughts on canvass, mostly as a manifestation of his relationship with his sadistic lover, Peter Lacey. Bacon cultivated a sense of darkness that gave his paintings an “edgy atmosphere…gambling everything on the next brush stroke.” Says Bacon in the video: “We do with…
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Why some children struggle to hold pencils
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According to doctors, you can blame tech for children’s inability to hold pencils. Apparently all that screen time is doing nothing to strengthen their thumb, index, and middle fingers which work together to form one’s basic writing technique. Generation thumbs Having grown up with perpetual swiping and speaking in images and emoji, the next generation is…
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The difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org explained in simple terms
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This post may contain affiliate links. Please see the disclosure for more info. There seems to be a lot of confusion out there still between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Think of WordPress.com as the all-in-one site-building package that hosts all your content and design, pretty much everything! It’s a one-stop-shop that comes with WordPress’s own plugins like Jetpack…
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The tools of our tools
Technology is not neutral. FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) wants to make all decisions for us and dissolve us into all-consuming bots while the machines do all the thinking and making. Humans are workers, not to be hedonistic jobless throwaways. We seek meaning and identify ourselves through our labor. But our biggest misconception is presuming…
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‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it’
If you are thinking in absolutes, the fickle world will shake you. Uncertainty is what keeps you on our toes, never in a standstill. Predictable patterns try to lull you to sleep. You compel yourself to ride with the pendulum. Comfort meets chaos with patience and confidence. If you need reassurance, read Rudyard Kipling’s 1895…