How to Live
• Check out this cool article from Ryan Holiday, reviewing several famous sayings on how to approach life. You’ll find Carpe Diem of course, and one of my favorites, Amor Fati. But he includes several I was not familiar with. Fatum Ingenium Est (Character Is Fate), Per Angusta Ad Augusta (Through Difficulties To Honors).
• Most provide a lens through which to look at challenges / obstacles differently.
Examples First
• For all of you teachers out there (which inherently includes parents and anyone in a hospital seeing patients), this post makes an excellent point on how to teach using specific examples before you delve into abstract reasoning.
• Humans learn through stories, and we can conceptualize difficult, general rules when we first see the phenomenon as part of a story. This is why fairy tales are often more memorable than the rules they try to teach. We don’t say ‘better not try to convince us something bad is happening because if it isn’t then the next time we won’t believe you,’ we say ‘don’t cry wolf.’
• Think about this when you are teaching.
Flavors
• Now that you have incorporated maple extract into your low carb pancake and oatmeal recipes, get ready for keto cornbread. “Bread” made out of almond flour crumbles just like cornbread (and therefore is nothing like real bread). But apparently they sell corn extract that you can add to an almond flour (or coconut flour) recipe to create cornbread. I haven’t tried this keto sample pack, but the 4 different flavors look good. Thanks Lisa Shoff for the recommendation.
Winter
• It is winter in Louisville (sort of, 65 degrees this week). We have covered many times the importance of exposing your body to extreme temperatures. This paper from Ray Cronise introduces the Metabolic Winter hypothesis. He talks about cold exposure, fasting, and sleep / artificial light. Not sure I can summarize the article any better than the author’s conclusion:
Our 7-million-year evolutionary path was dominated by two seasonal challenges—calorie scarcity and mild cold stress. In the last 0.9 inches of our evolutionary mile, we solved them both. Refrigeration and transportation have fundamentally changed the food to which we have access and the environments in which we live. We also sleep less and are exposed to considerably more artificial light, particularly in the winter months. Obesity and chronic disease are seen most often in people and the animals (pets) they keep warm and overnourished. Similar to the circadian cycle and like most other living organisms, it is reasonable to believe we also respond to the seasons and carry with us the survival genes for winter. Maybe our problem is that winter never comes.
Productivity Music
• If you have enjoyed This Will Destroy You, Album Leaf, and Explosions in the Sky, check out Ludovico Einaudi. He is an Italian composer and pianist with several albums. Perfect music to play in the background while you meditate, take a nap, or write a paper. Diverse tracks within each album.
Decaf
• For anyone who has adopted half-caff coffee, or even enjoys a pot of decaf in the afternoon / evening, this is the best decaf bean I have found on Amazon. Locally, Heine Brothers has 2 decafs (Peru and Honduras), neither of which is over-roasted. And I just tried Safai decaf (Columbia), which is excellent.
When Books Went to War
• This book by Molly Manning covers a lot of ground before, during, and shortly after World War 2. The book had patches of monotonous listing of people and events, but I just was not able to give up on it. She essentially tells the story of WWII from the perspective of printed books.
• Though the Civil War was the first war in which soldiers received books, in World War II the US essentially weaponized books. Librarians, military leadership, politicians and citizens all responded with passion to the Nazi book burnings (>100 million volumes). The Council on Books in Wartime printed 123 million Armed Services Editions books, and the Victory Book Campaign procured 18 million donated books. The final sentence of the book: “More books were given to the American armed services than Hitler destroyed.”
• The Nazi’s used radio and print media as propaganda, sending both over the ocean to the US even before we entered the war. US listeners would realize certain channels were propaganda when the Germans forgot to include commercials. The book details the very harsh, improvised conditions in the domestic military bases as we recruited the most ever US citizens for an armed conflict.
• World War II was responsible for the subsequent popularity of 1) paperback books (little respect prior to the war) and 2) The Great Gatsby (even less respect prior to the war). The rich quotes from injured and traumatized Americans, often from letters sent to authors, are inspiring. Soldiers would sneak in a few pages in a foxhole between blasts. British troops “gasped at the books and begged for the privilege of reading them.” Manning describes the battles in the Pacific Islands, and how they just would not end.
• Particularly uplifting were the sections on preparation to assimilate and care for the military on their return; and the influx of “damn average raisers,” troops who enrolled in college and frustrated students with their work ethic and passion for learning.
Quote
“America of today will never be a danger to us.
Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in the US.
No other country has so many racial and social tensions.
We shall be able to play many strings there.”
– Goebbels, September 1941
