Betterment

Some of us are cursed to hear the future.

And assertions are maps. Which means that: Budgets Timelines Plans Decision trees and projections are nothing to be afraid of. They’re a gift. They give us the chance to act as if, to describ…

For most people, their siblings will be the longest-lasting relationships of their lives, potentially enduring all the way from birth until past the death of their parents.  Marked by both jealousy and conflict and love and loyalty, siblings are also some of our most complicated relationships. While a little over half of people describe their relationships with their siblings as positive, […]

Even guardians of America's atomic clocks say time doesn't work the way we think it does.

When someone shares too-private information on Instagram in the search for likes. When someone does any kind of dance on TikTok. When someone excitedly joins a multi-level marketing scheme. When someone swears they’re turning over a new leaf for the sixth time in as many years. When someone acts like they’re the first person to […]

This is the season for all the lists–the hot authors, singers and restaurants in any given genre. If you’re on the list, congratulations! You’re the next big thing. For now. But t…

When we’re in execution mode, we swim in signs of our progress. A day’s work stands crisply in some endless checklist: four problems solved; three features added; check and check. Am I on track? Did I...

Adopting new habits is hard! What a shame: New Year’s resolutions could represent such a bright spark of optimism. Instead, they’re a clichéd punchline on the futility of human will. Certainly, my own...

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Random events are unevenly distributed and rarely arrive on time. Resilience and frequency increase the chances that the break we are hoping for will arrive when we need it. The resilience to keep …

18 tips to become a Google Scholar expert — one for every year it’s been around.

The question, of course, is how long? We’ve been working hard on fusion for sixty years (using ‘we’ to include myself with all of humanity, not because I’m a physicist). The…

The right ten books can let you understand the expert consensus for almost any question. Here's how to pick them.

The philosopher and sinologist, Edward Slingerland was on the Infinite Loops podcast recently, where he discussed among other things his 2014 book,

In the days of hand drafting, architectural lettering was taught to all Architecture and Industrial Design majors. (My graduating class was one of the last ID classes to draft by hand, and they were already phasing it out.) This type of lettering evolved from the days of drafting

Our stories about brains are all invented. If a stunning surrealistic painting turns out to have been painted by an elephant or a toddler, does that make it less beautiful? If an essay on the natur…

How to export and convert your bookmarks from Raindrop.io to Obsidian using Pandoc

➡ I am not a professional writer and english isn’t my mother tongue. Some of the screenshots may contain text in other languages Please be nice 🙂 I will describe two use cases Using raindrop for litterature notes when studying a specific topic. Creating a backlog for things to study, watch, read with raindrop. Using raindrop for litterature notes when studying a specific topic. (Example: “Chaos Theory”) My raindrop notes are all stored in the folder “50 - Ra...

“Hair of the dog” refers to solving a problem using the same element that caused it. The expression derives from the old idea that a bite from a rabid dog could be treated by stuffing the wound with fur from the dog that bit you. The same concept, which the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates termed […]

Level 1: NOT BUSY My schedule is wide open. I can choose infinite paths. Zero commitments. The weekend. I sleep like a baby. Life is good, but am I living my best life? Level 2: STUFF TO DO I have a few commitments wandering around my brain. They are reasonable, knowable, and not deadline-based. I

If a customer, a colleague or a friend is generous enough to share their feelings, those feelings are what they are. We might disagree with the assumptions that led to those feelings. But acknowled…

Posted on Friday 9 Dec 2022. 770 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.

Difficult tasks can lead to build-up of a signalling molecule in the brain, triggering fatigue.

Put this one next to Dunning Kruger, which shows that people of low ability traditionally overrate how talented they are. The Massie Effect is the tendency of people who support good causes to beli…

Is good advice counterintuitive? Or is it something you already know? Oddly enough, the answer to both may be "No."

In a competition between someone who knows the most and someone who is willing to learn the most, the edge usually goes to the curious and empathic professional, not the one who is simply protectin…

Why carrying heavy feels harder than lifting heavy, why you need to work on both, and how you can incorporate heavy carrying into your workouts.

One of the most difficult existential questions is why bad things happen to good people, especially if there’s a just, benevolent force at the helm of the universe. Seneca, an ancient Stoic philosopher, offers an answer that invites us to consider ourselves as athletes and warriors. He first observes that the “part of each man […]

This is version 2 of my take on recording a year’s worth of Plus Minus Next weekly reviews in a plain text app like Obsidian or iA Writer. Changes:Plus Minus Next now have their own pages, for viewing backlinksTip: use tags to identify Plus, Minus, or Next items in your interstitial journaling entriesThe download consists of a series of files in a folder. Be aware this is not a complete Obsidian vault: it's designed to be copied into your existing vault.You'll see that the weekly review page is essentially a simple list, as my approach is to stay away from app-specific plugins and features when a simple, more universal solution will do.There’s a different icon next to each month, chosen to reflect the seasons of the southern hemisphere. You may like to change them to suit your tastes or part of the world, or just delete them.Screenshot of Plus Minus Next page, showing Outline pane on the rightThe advantage of the icons goes beyond looking pretty: in the outline pane it’s easy to see which week numbers belong to which month, and which weeks cross from one month to another.If you’re new to Obsidian and would like to learn how to set up your notes from scratch, check out Nicole van der Hoeven’s getting started video.

More companies have been asking their employees to return to the office after a long, pandemic-induced period of working from home. One change this transition brings is not being able to access needed personal items from your household’s ample stock of supplies; you have to import all the things you like to have on hand […]