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This post was first sent to my newsletter on September 17th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) via Michelle Scott on Pixabay Welcome folks, to the September work letter! :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles. A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety You’re adapting my what? When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on September 5th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) It’s September! Time for a new letter :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the originals. Leo Babauta on the First Two Steps to Creating Resilience If you’ve known me for any length of time in the past decade, you know I set great store on being Antifragile.. While Leo says these are two beginner steps, to my mind, these two will bear the brunt of all the resiliency / antifragile weight. It’ll take you more than half the way there. ...

My idols have feet of clay, as usual. The book is one of those, do as I say, not as I do books. I learnt about his abusive behaviour about a month after reading the book. While I absolutely loved reading it, I cannot in good conscience suggest you buy it anymore. Hopefully the clip I linked to, should be enough, because what he did share in the talk, is worth emulating, even if he himself, didn’t. ...

This was so much fun! If I had teachers or mentors like Kip Thorne in my youth, I’d have never had such a crippling fear of mathematics or the hard sciences. I’d have never plagued by doubt and fear, that I was not smart enough or good enough. I have just one note to share. This is Kip as he closes the book … Every time I watch Interstellar and browse back through this book, I’m amazed at the enormous variety of science they contain. And the richness and beauty of that science. More than anything, I’m moved by Interstellar’s underlying, optimistic message: We live in a universe governed by physical laws. By laws that we humans are capable of discovering, deciphering, mastering, and using to control our own fate. Even without bulk beings to help us, we humans are capable of dealing with most any catastrophe the universe may throw at us, and even those catastrophes we throw at ourselves—from climate change to biological and nuclear catastrophes. But doing so, controlling our own fate, requires that a large fraction of us understand and appreciate science: How it operates. What it teaches us about the universe, the Earth, and life. What it can achieve. What its limitations are, due to inadequate knowledge or technology. How those limitations may be overcome. How we transition from speculation to educated guess to truth. How extremely rare are revolutions in which our perceived truth changes, yet how very important. I hope this book contributes to that understanding. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on August 20th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe Welcome to August’s work letter :) As usual, click the headings to wander off to the original articles A couple of my own posts I wrote about my thoughts on my Kindle Oasis … I got it. I used it. And decided within a day, that I was not going back to a Paperwhite, ever. I realised that the Oasis, to me, is not a “premium” device. ...

Just finished John McPhee’s, Draft No. 4. I could pithily summarise it as … Practice a lot of things. Work at finding your thing. Practice you thing (lots! deeply! a fuckton.) Work within established rules. Bend the rules to fit your thing. Break the rules once you know your thing deeply! McPhee writes about the craft of writing. But the advice could apply broadly to any creative endeavour. ...