Uncategorized
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“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That’s the short and sweet dietary advice offered by journalist Michael Pollan. But after writing Cooked, now he’s back with a new challenge: psychedelics. Pollan’s autobiography on his first-hand experience with LSD and mushrooms are sure to interest people once more. He tells the Financial Times: “There is…
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Mark Twain: ‘We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope’
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1 min read
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” — Mark Twain See combinatorial creativity.
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Bill Gates on the genius of Leonardo da Vinci
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1 min read
A good book review from Bill Gates on Walter Isaacson’s latest book Leonardo da Vinci. More than any other Leonardo book I’ve read, this one helps you see him as a complete human being and understand just how special he was. He came close to understanding almost all of what was known on the planet…
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How to persist after hitting rock-bottom
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2 min read
We can toil in obscurity for years before we get a lucky break. We can also give up and accept that it isn’t meant to be. But something happens when we feel like a complete failure. We start to simplify everything — what we own, where what we do — and get back to basics.…
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‘The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle’
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1 min read
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never get struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one…
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“I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.” Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
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This post may contain sponsored links. Please see the disclosure for more info. Like most people, my brain starts to fizzle out between 2 and 3pm. According to science, this isn’t due to a lunch hangover but rather a part of our circadian rhythm. To preempt the inevitable afternoon slothfulness, author Dan Pink proposes to take a…
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“The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren’t special.” — John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
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“To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.” — Man Ray, Self-Portrait
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The epidemic of worry
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1 min read
[bha size=’120×120′ variation=’01’ align=’alignright’] “He doesn’t give out energy for the benefit of others. He absorbs energy at others’ cost.” – Francis O’Gorman, Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History In other words, the worrier is the opposite of a lighthouse.
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The rules of spacing have been wildly inconsistent going back to the invention of the printing press. The original printing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence used extra long spaces between sentences. John Baskerville’s 1763 Bible used a single space. WhoevenknowswhateffectPietroBembowasgoingforhere.Single spaces. Double spaces. Em spaces. Trends went back and forth between continents and eras…
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Slow and simple notebooks with BIG TYPEFACES
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1 min read
I saw this in my Pinterest feed (yeah, I’m on Pinterest) and immediately snatched one up. In our ever-increasingly fast-paced world, it’s nice to slow down every once in a while and plan something out. And these pages look huge! I also just dig the simplicity of the notebook names and huge typefaces: LARGE, MEDIUM,…