I got put on a watch list during my time in Saudi and Abu Dhabi. Didnt affect my banking but every plane ticket i got for years had “SSSS”[0] printed/sharpied on it and all my luggage would get a secondary hand-search at every stop immediately pre-boarding both domestically and internationally.
I am just average white US citizen who was working on oil rigs but most likely some of my whatsapp/facebook/iMessage contacts were related to families involved in dissidence against the Saudi government (because the oil region of Saudi is populated by a minority Shia group that is severely underrepresented in governance). Their mosques also had individuals with mental health issues who occasionally try to bomb the mosques in a very, very similar parallel to school shooters back home here in USA.
“Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche” by Ethan Watters.
I have been chronically depressed since I was 6 years old. I have had suicidal tendencies as long as I can recall being sentient. I would estimate this book singlehandedly cured 90% of my mental “disorders”. If you have ever suffered from depression or any “mental disorder” you will thank me after reading it, trust me.
In my middle school German textbook, I found the following note (translation my own):
Hi Katie, we should meet up over tea over these images. The first image should be a simple sketch of two dudes playing football, tell the guys in graphics that the one they gave me is waaa too complex. The second image should be a chick playing tennis.
The note went on in this manner for a couple more sentences, describing all the images on the page. Because I was a blind student who used a screen reader, I had to get the PDF version from the publishing company, which I then put in a specialized ebook reading app for the blind. I strongly suspect that the editors of that book used some PDF tricks for hiding information to post notes to each other. Whether they were alt descriptions, white fonts on white background, regions shrunk to be 1px tall by 1px wide or something else entirely, I do not know. That file was intended for printing, not digital distribution, so I guess that they decided the notes didn't need removing as long as they weren't visible.
I once took a critical thinking course and bought the textbook 2nd hand from the college bookstore. A week or two in, I noticed half of a sentence written in the margin. As the professor started teaching the topic from that page, he rhetorically asked a question, did not get an answer, and then answered himself with the sentence from the book. I filliped ahead and found that the entire book was annotated with all of his answers, anecdotes, and various other helpful notes. There was even a table that accurately listed his wardrobe choices! The notes were in several different handwritings, and the book had been resold over a dozen times, so that professor must have been teaching the same class the exact same way for a decade or more. I quickly became a star pupil as I always had an answer ready. I added a few notes along the way and then sold it back to the bookstore at the end of the year. I really wanted to keep it for posterity, but It just seemed wrong to take it out of circulation.
People who describe themselves as super honest usually are self-deprecating. They tend to under value their knowledge and experience.
The reality is, 95% of scenarios don’t require what is asked for, and stating your capabilities in the most generous way is the optimal decision. Just back it up with work.
I stumbled into a presentation on tea at a tea festival a number of years ago. I keep meaning to figure out which notebook my notes are in and make copies because it was so good. The presenter was this elderly British gent with a background in operations who got sent out to figure out how to boost tea output.
There were a bunch of charts about time and temperature and humidity for various types of tea but the biggest fact was slightly buried. 'fermentation' with respect to tea is a bit of a euphemism. It's actually autolysis. The big epiphany moment for me was connecting the dots and seeing why that was the case. Caffeine is an insecticide. It's stored in little crystals in the tissue. With oxalic acid, the crystals are the point. They're sharp and they damage the attacker.
With caffeine it's metabolic disruption. Within other organelles in the tea leaf are enzymes that can decompose the caffeine crystals into a solluble form. These chemicals only mix when the leaf is bruised, or masticated. They are booby trapped.
When you process camellia sinensis into tea, the oldest process is matcha, which started in China and is now mostly preserved in Japan, is drying the leaves and then powdering them, which I presume frees up some of the caffeine simply by mechanical decomposition. For the others the leaves are processed by bruising, heating and drying the leaves, and the order and duration dictates which kind of tea you get, and how much of the caffeine has been converted to a form that is water soluble. Black tea is aged longer, and has more available caffeine.
Almost none of them are actually fermented as in beer (puehr is the most notable, and the common reaction upon smelling it is, "This reminds me of my grandmother's garden." It is an acquired taste.) Edit: and kombucha, which is fermented after being steeped, rather than before. Also by many accounts an acquired taste.
Once I developed pine mouth (https://www.foodauthority.nsw.gov.au/about-us/science/food-r...). It was was one of the weirdest experiences I've ever had; I thought I had stumbled on some strange genetic metabolic disorder that was starting to manifest before I eventually figured out what it was. Basically, everything with carbohydrates started tasting super metallic and bitter, a little like soap or something, and it lasted for days.
At first I thought it was all pine nuts. Eventually, after being in a study, and with more attention and study of it, people figured out it's linked to certain reactions some people have to certain species of pine trees in Asia.
So then I started becoming picky about where the pine nuts come from, and discovered the US was a major producer of pine nuts up through WWII. I started buying pine nuts from local producers, from which I learned a fair amount about them, that there's different varieties of different size and oil content, with different taste profiles, oil content, and shelf-life.
I love pine nuts and am happy in theory to buy them from whereever, but it did open my eyes a bit to possibilities that aren't really being realized. It seems like the US market is drying up due to lack of demand and/or competition, but it would be interesting to see local producers thrive, with an emphasize on varietal quality, sort of like apples etc.
Me: According to your book, America's political parties have flipped every ~70 years. It should have happened around the time of Ross Perot, so I guess we're overdue. Do you think another realignment is emminent?
Phillips: No. It won't happen while Wall St. and finance remains in control of our political discourse.
--
It'll be amazing if Biden Admin is able to uncork the next cycle. But I'm not holding my breath.
“The Design of Everyday Things” changed the way I see literally everything. You’ll never look at doors the same way again, and prepare to forever be frustrated by poorly designed objects, and delighted by incredibly well designed ones.
There is no better book on the philosophy of UX, imho.
* Factfulness and Thinking Fast And Slow. The latter helped me internalise that my thinking, like most humans, is biased. Even being aware of those biases doesn’t always help. We need to go above and beyond to overcome our biases. Factfulness goes into detail about what those biases are and how they lead to a distorted world view. Rather than taking the easy way out by blaming journalists/politicians/rich people, he turns the focus onto us and our biases and speaks about how to look at the world in an objective fact based manner.
* The Dictator’s Handbook. One simple axiom - leaders do what is necessary to stay in power. Using that idea they explain the basis of all political systems, whether autocracy or democracy or somewhere in between. I didn’t really understand politics before I read this. CGPGrey has a video where he summarises the book. [1]
* (Only for Indians) India After Gandhi. You can’t really understand your country if you don’t know it’s history. History stopped in 1947 according to our history books, and most people are blissfully unaware of what came after. They don’t know how close India came to losing democracy or how easily it could happen again. They don’t understand the dangers of promoting one language at the expense of others because they don’t know that it’s been tried before. Every Indian needs to know so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past over and over.
Years ago, I visited the zoo in Central Park in NYC and watched a polar bear, as it swam around and around in a pool. It swam in a triangle, touching the three same points on the wall of the enclosure as it made each circuit.
Last month I walked around Greenwich Park in London 125 times, each time following exactly the same route. I thought about that polar bear a lot as I walked.
Your post reminded me of a story I have, I was the CTO for a company that exited to a Spanish owned company. When that happened we had a lot of Spaniards that would come over and work for a while.
Anyways somehow there became this competition among them to learn and use the most obscure American English colloquialisms and use them in meetings. One of them the CTO for Spain became a very good friend of mine and we decided to start teaching him some words so he could win in these competitions.
With that said I am from a rural town in the US southeast (Florida to be specific). Needless to say he learned a lot of obscure US country colloquialisms. I can still remember the look of wordsmithed defeat by the other executives when he declared, in a meeting, that they where carpetbagging hornswogglers for deciding something without him. I have to say I nearly fell out of my chair with laughter in seeing how impressed with himself he was. The meeting quickly devolved into defining what was a carpetbagger and what was being hornswoggled, as well as requests for other words in which my friend declared that they need to get their own US mentor and not steal his. I was all good fun.
I also learned some Spaniard ones. My favorite which I could not spell out here to save my life, was one that amounts to the equivalent of monkey business.
In the offline world, much of what "trends" is stuff that hacks people's reward system.
E.g., high-fructose corn syrup, french fries, nicotine, slot machines.
It's bad for us long term, but satisfies our evolved physiological needs in the short term.
Most of the trending content on social media is the same, and much of modern news and commerce has adapted to it.
From what you've said, you're trying to win at the same game, against people/companies who are far more experienced, skilled, resourced and cynical than you.
The answer: don't play that game.
Find a small niche of people you can satisfy with earnestly good quality content.
Think really small - like, 5-10 people, who you can get to know personally and whose interests you can address really really well.
Then grow gradually.
It will seem painfully slow at first, but with a consistent effort over a long enough period of time, you can achieve exponential growth and eventually build a huge audience that really cares about what you have to offer.
One of the best people to follow for guidance on how to do this is Seth Godin. Follow his daily blogs/emails, and read his books, particularly Linchpin, Permission Marketing, Purple Cow and The Dip.
Simon Sinek is another person worth paying attention to.
I'm learning about trading bots. It allows me to learn new things about software développement (réactive streams forum example), mathematics, machine learning and deep learning
There is a huge space around """fitness""" devices that are running around the FDA regulatory process. I think there is going to be a huge health revolution by making everybody take their weight, glucose, blood pressure, sleep statistics, and heart rate statistics every day and feed them into an AI.
The major techincal step forward that is happening is microneedles that can draw out interstitial fluid. The patient doesn't feel it, and you can do things like constant glucose monitoring, and constant cortisol monitoring (which is huge) completely uninvasively. It's going to be amazing.
The breakthrough device is going to be a watch that can sense glucose and cortisol all the time. A while ago there was some PG post about wanting a tricorder, well it's coming, and it's going to look like a watch.
Sidenote: if anybody reading this is working in any of the labs working with these microneedles, please contact me, I would love to collaborate with you.
The Master does his job and then stops. He understands that the universe is forever out of control, and that trying to dominate events goes against the current of the Tao. Because he believes in himself, he doesn't try to convince others. Because he is content with himself, he doesn't need others' approval. Because he accepts himself, the whole world accepts him.
I built a side project ( https://findkismet.com ) and my cofounder found it. He reached out and a lot (a LOT) of conversations later we decided to build a company together.
Finding a cofounder is like love: it often happens when you're not looking for it. The best thing you can do to improve your odds is continue to improve yourself and put yourself out there.
I spend summers in a seagull rookery on a small island, about 2000 adult birds. Each pair averages about two young. A few years ago when the young were hatched but still tiny, puffy balls with legs there was a strong wind for two days. One by one the chicks lost their balance, tumbled away across the island and blew into the cold water. It was nearly a 100% wipe of the young. But the birds live many years, and 1 young per adult per year is unsustainable, so they have to get eaten or die somehow. It just feels horrible to see all of a year’s young go at once.
For better or worse, Yerevan is certainly becoming more cosmopolitan in the center. A younger part of the diaspora that never lived in Armenia seem to be spending time in Yerevan, with capital to be able to open the likes of wine bars, coffee shops and fancier bars.
The piece talks about wine but it's not as if booze from the region had a poor reputation before. Armenian & Georgian wine, Armenian cognac, all pretty reputable in the region.
It's not the wine, it's the _wine bar_ that's different here. History seems to be littered with change that occurs when thinkers, talkers and dreamers can meet openly in public.
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
In college freshman year I tried to teleport to see my gf by driving into the back of a semi on I-79. As far as I can tell it didn’t work.
I spent a lot of time lost in what felt like a deep metaphor / parable.
One time I thought my gf as an alien from another star system; when I looked out at the city of Madison, WI I saw present day Madison but also an overlay of an ancient city — it felt like this was some sort of eternal city that always was.
I walked into a church and saw the priest was a vampire.
I had a conversation with a time traveling Albert Einstein at an airport in Boston.
At times it felt like childhood make beleive, there was still a tether back to reality but I was deep in the other realm.
At times terrifying. Flights into the depths of hell and judeo-Christian mythology.
I was also in and out of suicidal depression.
Somehow I also managed to start a number of projects and get lots of press and even some investment, but I couldn’t keep anything going sustainably.
A few years ago I was at wits end and had a vision that guided me to start feeling my emotions.
That led to Psychedlic therapy, Somatic
Therapy and Breathwork.
It also led to a new context for relationship and learning how to navigate love induced psychosis and coming out the otherside more healed.
Eventually I was able to get underneath the symptoms.
I found abuse in my childhood, dishonest and narcissistic care givers, a school that couldn’t hold my high IQ, bullying, etc.
I was also always fascinated with technology, psychology, shamanism, the occult, Psychedlics, personal development from a very very early age... sometimes this feels like my purpose.
Anyhow, I’m symptom free, healthier than ever, in love and engaged, running a fairly full transformational coaching practice (supporting unicorn founders and other creative minds), building an eco village island at Majagual.org and have no need for medications.
Western Psych said I’d be on meds for the rest of my life. Turns out I followed the path of others like Jung - going mad and then creating your own tools and frameworks to find your way back out.
Don’t believe your thoughts. The voice in your head sounds like your voice but that doesn’t make it yours.
Trust your inquisitive nature and question things., people and choices, especially if they feel off.
Most people fake it, most of the time.
Remember what your inner compass feels like. Use that feeling.
Remember that you exist.
Anyone who tries to sell you your own divinity is a scammer.
Anyone who tries to define you sees themselves your master.
Anyone who tries to punish or reward you sees themselves your master and wants you to accept that role.
Your parents (and guardians) are often piloted by the blind forces of trauma patterns. What they do at these times is not parenting but seizures of madness, of which you are the audience and often the victim. This is not your fault, not your doing, and is not right. You are good to the core, but happen to be on the receiving end of these seizures.
This is true for every occurrence of unkindness, humiliation, or abusive interaction by a person who has power over you.
Sometimes it’s helpful to see beliefs, stereotypes, even language and habitual ways of thinking as forces that have colonized humanity. There’s space and life beyond these. Follow your curiosity about that dimension. It exists and is vast — infinitely more expansive than the mind’s ability to think.
Humanity/society is multilayered. The shittiest layers get most of the publicity. There are many, many awesome people living in integrity, creating with open hearts and rich imagination. You can be one of them; the easiest way is to join their communities and friendships.
Friendships are sacred, and deserve your utmost integrity, attention and honesty.
You’re good and you are able to recognize the people who have not broken/fallen to the dark side. Trust that.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
Lets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around.
You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day.
You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor.
Since US labor laws don't allow Jim's manager to set specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read furniturenews.com. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager.
Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects.
Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
I have a slight fascination with sweeteners. About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai. It was claimed to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar. It's a white powder and came in a metal can with a crimped lid and typically plain chemical labeling. Supposedly it is FDA-approved and a distant derivative of aspartame.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.
In honesty to say "logical fallacy" is spoddy, I advise against for aesthetic reason.