A surprising number of pregnant women—about 1 in 2,500— are in denial about their pregnancy until birth
Fascinating, but extremely hard to read, especially as my infant daughter slept on my chest.
From my friend Oriana: The more males and females of a bird species look alike (e.g. cranes), the more likely they are to mate for life. The more males and females of a bird species look dissimilar (e.g. mallards), the more likely they are to be promiscuous.
The oldest bond in the world dates from December 10, 1624; pays €13.61 of interest a year. From the FT via The Browser.
Worth your time
Ben James on Fusion. Can’t wait to read the rest of his guides.
Some thinking on how companies get penalized for trying to be more sustainable by the Green Beauty Community. I do think that one reaction to the backlash on greenwashing has been some companies pulling back from talking about what they’re doing.
My coding stack as of December 2024 looks like this:
I keep a running Google doc that functions roughly like a PRD:
What’s the product — what’s the vision, where does it stand today, what am I building towards
What’s the current project — e.g., set up a system for taking a pdf, extracting the text, and then organizing it in a way that’s useful to the rest of my app
What’s part of the current project am I working on — at the moment, squashing a bug related to super large files
Any files that I can’t upload directly to the Claude project (e.g., my prisma database schema)
I have this connected to a Claude project so it stays synced. In this Claude project, I’ve got the ~5-10 most critical files for the project at hand also uploaded.
In my Claude project, I’ve got some background information about my tech stack (e.g., NextJS app, I’m using yarn, not npm, I’m on a mac) and some guidance (I want you to challenge my thinking rather than flatter me; ask questions if you have them; I prefer simple solutions).
I sit down and start chatting with Claude on whatever I happen to be working on (at the moment, uploading PDF files and extracting key data). I chat through different considerations and then create or update a file. I’m using Cursor as my text editor, but really only rarely using the AI features at this point as I was running into too many places where it would spiral off and start making changes I didn’t need and couldn’t follow. Claude feels better at staying on the task at hand. I probably won’t re-up my subscription when it’s done.
I usually code in 2-3 hour blocks. When one of these blocks is ending, I ask Claude to summarize what we’ve been working on:
What we accomplished today
What the next steps are
What the 5 most important pieces of context would be for them to get started again
I then paste this into my Google doc and I’m done for the day, picking back up at the beginning the next day.
The first part of the book was too dense for me. But when the book gets into how the Montessori classroom works, the role of the child and the role of the teacher, it really shines. It is a continuous struggle for me not to expect my children to behave as adults.
Some gems:
Children are taught to speed up their performance by an emphasis on completing a task or test accurately within a fixed time. The young child has, in his own view, all the time in the world. And he needs this time. And he needs this time. The number of perpetually harassed mothers who tell their children to stop dawdling and get it finished, whether ‘it’ be supper or dressing, is legion.
The action has merit above and beyond the actual physical fact of the child’s accomplishment. It has the merit of allowing the child to participate in the society in which he finds himself, not at the level of an adult, but at the level of an emerging individual. The importance of a strong sense of self can be seen when we think of the tasks which will be demanded of an American child of three in a few short years. The ability to work independently, to continue to accomplish, whether or not the adult is physically present at one’s elbow at all times, the ability to initiate work because one has had previous successful experience, are important learning skills for a child. Many children are so conditioned by adults that they will refuse to attempt anything new until they have been given either explicit directions by an adult or, what is more frequent, explicit approval to do so by an adult.
The rhythm of the child is a rhythm different from the adult. The child works at a thing until he is satisfied. The teacher has no foolproof way of knowing when this point is reached. The teacher must constantly guard against over-teaching and over-correcting—correcting a child who is unaware that he has made an error, intervening to show a child how to improve a skill he has barely learned. Respecting at all times the child’s right to help himself, and to solicit help only when he feels it is needed, requires tremendous patience.
Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”
Reduce the bureaucracy to almost zero. Ideally, one person should have almost complete authority over day-to-day decision-making.
Keep the team ruthlessly small.
Whenever possible, only take on contracts where there is enough mutual trust with funders and subcontractors to work with them with a minimum amount of bureaucracy. If funder decisions cannot be made swiftly, the project is probably not worth pursuing.
I’d add: Build ambitious things on short timelines. And a bonus quote from Kelly Johnson: “The theory of the Skunk Works is to learn how to do things quickly and cheaply and to tailor the systems to the degree of risk. There is no one good way to build all airplanes.”
More typically, among today’s ~U.S. high school students~, 60 percent say they have considered killing themselves, and 14 percent have thought about it seriously in the past year.
Panda related merchandise made up half of all Atlanta Zoo merchandise sales — AJC
Between 1986 and 2018, 12.3M hectares of cropland in the United States was abandoned. Note that this figure does not include urbanization or development. Environmental Research Letters.
Musings
“It wasn’t that Dario had the best ideas, although he had plenty… he just ran 10 to 100 times as many experiments as anyone else. That’s when I knew he would do amazing things.”
My latest AI hack for getting out writing more quickly (company project docs, blog posts):
* Record an audio file where I dictate as much as I can about a project
* Add that + any other relevant documentation to NotebookLM
* Ask NotebookLM to write a first draft for me
* Edit that into the shape I want it
I still end up editing out ~50-75% but it gets me passed the empty page as quickly as possible. I estimate I turn a ~half day writing block into something I can do on a 15-20 minute walk + a little computer organization.
People only decide to buy something when they really, really care about it. Otherwise it’s not worth the friction of getting out your wallet.
“The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.” — Marshall McLuhan via Gordon
“If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space.” — Stephen Hunt via Ade Oshineye
Pisgah National Forrest, North Carolina, USA. My favorite place I visited in 2024.
I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. You can read his 2024 version here. I didn’t make it to 52 things this year, but I stayed curious.
Transplant recipients can inherit memories from their donors — Adaobi Adibe
The March 2011 earthquake in Japan was so strong that it shortened the length of a day — Earth Sky via my friend Graham
Plants probably have memories. “On one plant, the touch-me-not, feathery leaves normally fold and wilt when touched (a defense mechanism against being eaten), but when a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience.” — Scientific American via The Browser
US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years — Melissa Lott
A banana contains the same amount of radiation that a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year — New York Times via Jim Pethokoukis
Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkenness — Upworthy
Lebron and Bronny James are the highest scoring father and son duo in NBA history without Bronny ever scoring a point — @georgemikan
There are more deaths from alcohol in the US each year than all illicit drugs combined — Charles Fain Lehman
France last used the guillotine to put someone to death in 1977 — The Rest Is History
The Barnum effect is when people give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their own personality that are in fact general enough to apply to a wide range of people — Simon Wilson
Predator-prey models have two stable equilibria: one where predator and prey are in approximate balance and the other where both are extinct — Paul Kedrosky
A correction from my 2023 things I learned: working moms today probably do not spend as much time with their children as stay at home moms did in 1960 — Lyman Stone
“Soccer” as a word for the game of football came from the English, not Americans — Duolingo
Quantity precedes quality. Students graded on the quantity of the art they produce make higher quality art than students graded on the quality of art they produce — Perhaps apocryphal via Austin Kleon
Jalapeño peppers are getting less spicy over time —D Magazine via my friend Mark
Electrons within gold atoms are moving at 58% the speed of light — Will Kinney
Lake Superior is about the size of the state of Alabama — Wikipedia
The Milky Way builds between two and six sun-size stars a year — Quanta Magazine
The increase in driving due to 9/11 led to ~1600 more traffic deaths than otherwise would’ve been expected — David Epstein
A correction to my 2022 list: Men whose wives are diagnosed with a terminal illness are not significantly more likely to get divorced — Retraction Watch
In 1990, 5% of Americans had a passport; today that number is 48% — Devon Zuegel
Fernet Branca uses 75% of the world’s saffron — Eater
Making TB medicine sweet rather than bitter reduced a child’s risk of developing multi-drug resistant TB by over 50% — Bloomberg via News Minimalist
More than 50% of US couples now meet each online — Eric Klineberg
The Eiffel Tower’s lighting is protected by copyright — Tour Eiffel
If you think we’d have an interesting conversation about kelp, local news, our anything else, send me an email (jdilla.xyz@gmail.com). I’d love to meet you!
