What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting
Kaiser Fung shares a Citizen Petition by a group of scientists against issuing a full approval to the vaccines:
The heart of the issue is about maintaining the standards of science. The authors of the petition explain their reasons. Fung’s reminder is simple:
Trust is a precious commodity. Once lost, it’s hard to earn back
Paul Graham’s reminder:
Many kids experience the excitement of working on projects of their own. The hard part is making this converge with the work you do as an adult. And our customs make it harder. We treat “playing” and “hobbies” as qualitatively different from “work”. It’s not clear to a kid building a treehouse that there’s a direct (though long) route from that to architecture or engineering. And instead of pointing out the route, we conceal it, by implicitly treating the stuff kids do as different from real work.
Peter Diamandis shares six tools and mindsets for any entrepreneur.
I can’t believe I didn’t know about this very handy tool to pick any color on to .
The Eyedropper in PowerPoint is a simple tool that can take your presentations to the next level. The Eyedropper tool in PowerPoint lets you find out an exact color reference (RGB) on different elements. The tool is used to retrieve a color and then color a highlighted text with this exact color. The Eyedropper tool was introduced with PowerPoint 2013.
Seth Godin offers some ideas for the challenge of culture shifting slowly:
That’s why the smallest viable audience is so important. Focusing on a specific group of people, understanding their beliefs, engaging with empathy, creating new social norms and then, peer-to-peer, spreading the new normal.
The Atlantic’s Ed Yong Wins 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting
If you’ve not yet read this – do yourself a favour.
“Reasons to be cheerful” shines a light always on the little – or not so little – things that give hope of a brighter future.
This one, in particular, caught my attention. Law, in its various forms, is often badly written, horribly enforced & rarely questioned – and sets up the background of our collective lives.
The U.S. has a whopping 54 million spare bedrooms. As cities and states liberalize their housing regulations to allow more people to live together safely and affordably, it is making a dent in the country’s housing crisis. Legislative changes like this one in Washington are ahead of their time — and a reason for some subdued excitement.
One of my favourite authors, Robert Fulghum, celebrated his birthday recently & revised his personal ‘declaration’:
Ever since that recent day in June, the man I know has been thinking about the advantages of having been around for quite a while. By now, one knows some things, or should. By now, one has come to some conclusions about the quality of life. And before plunging on into the future, it might be useful to consider what he knows that makes the time to come workable and wonder-full.
After such profound blurring in our personal and professional lives, code-switching is difficult. You’re aware that every moment you spend working is a moment you’re not spending with a child, with a parent who needs care, with your partner. Now a lot of employees are asking, “Does this job work for me? Do I care at all about what I do for a living?” Increasingly, the bar is rising, and people are saying, “My work has to be more than a job. It has to fit in with my life’s purpose.”
via McKinsey Publications
via Wendy M. Grossman, writing about the Fastly.com incident:
it’s more likely that stuff like this will also increase, will be harder to debug, and will cause far more ancillary damage – and that damage will not be limited to the virtual world. A single random human, accidentally or intentionally, is now capable of creating physical-world damage at scale.