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Good tokens 2025-09-05

2025-09-05

Worth your time

Replacing lawns with wildflowers 💐. When I’ve made it, I won’t tell anyone, but there will be signs.

Cate Hall on how to increase your surface area for luck, which is one of the biggest things I learned from Henry Oliver’s book on Second Acts. Cate is quickly rising up the list of people whose work I rush to read. Along the same lines: How to Get Ahead in DC.

“Even the context has context”. Wherein Soren blows my mind and sells me on decentralized edge intelligence.

Should I have kissed her? Some how I missed this one in August of 2022. It’s my favorite type of Uri post.

How can you not love this? A 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet holds a trigonometric table more accurate than any today. Humans are amazing and beautiful.

Drones are downing helicopters.

Yucca man. I’m a sucker for “does this Bigfoot like creature actually exist” stories (see season 1 of the Wild Thing podcast), but this one also has so many great Southern California places in it. Like taking a mini vacation.

Nuclear batteries. “A 157W Voyager-based RTG that launched in 1977 will produce about 88W today.” The clean up problem seems insurmountable.

Noah Smith, Dan Wang, and James Cham talk about Dan’s new book Breakneck.

Why Swiss Kids Walk to School Alone. This is one of the things that made me fall in love with Switzerland. They do this as 5 year olds! Part of it is safety but part of it is teaching agency. The walk to school is a part of the education. This should be our aspiration for American neighborhoods.

Your idea sets the ceiling for your videos potential and other good advice from Paddy Galloway.

The sex recession continues.

Musings

Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.

What’s the steel man case for formality?

What does our society overemphasize now in a way that will seem silly in 25 years?

The secret to engineering is embracing that getting new errors equals progress.

Good tokens 2025-06-14

2025-06-14

Worth your time

  1. How to Live on $432 a month in America
  2. How to read coffee tasting notes
  3. Einstein and relativity. His path of generating the theory stood out to me: in 8 years of thinking about the problem, he cracked it when he signed himself up for a series of lectures where he had to articulate it to others. “Finally, in the week before his last lecture, Einstein cracked it. At the end of the week, he stood up at the Prussian Academy and announced to the world the general theory of relativity he had figured out just days earlier.”
  4. The SCARF Model: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness

Things I learned

More Romans were killed at Cannae than Americans in Vietnam or British on the first day of the Somme — The Rest is History

Musings

“To create anything worthwhile, you have to put God in it.” — Nabeel Qu

Notes on "How Will You Measure Your Life"

2025-05-12

I keep a semi-secret list of great reads that I periodically revisit during a period of change or when the spirit moves me.

One of my favorite on this list is Clayton Christensen's "How Will You Measure Your Life", which I revisited this week.

Some things that stood out this time:

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

And:

When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

And:

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

I think this is the first time I've read this one closely since I've had children. At the very least, the first time since my youngest one was born. The grind of parenting is much more real to me now than when I've read this previously. I've described my life recently as a "5 on 3 power play where I'm the 3 and it doesn't reset when a goal is scored." It's good to have the reminder to keep some of my energy for my children and not to spend it all elsewhere.