Snacks
• If you are trying to restrict calories, do not buy this incredible peanut butter. 11g net carbs per serving but hard to not eat the whole container.
Writing
• Get yourself a fancy notebook and check out these precise ink pens.
Sugar substitute
• You can buy allulose at some groceries, but it can be hard to find. Just order from Amazon. Use as you would regular sugar.
Turbulence, Dark Matter, Tardigrades, and more
• Read this article about the 7 biggest unsolved mysteries in science. Thanks, John, for the recommendation.
Do atheists really exist?
• Read this short piece on stories as religion. Maybe we are all at least supernaturalists.
Sleep
• REM sleep is like shivering for the brain.
“This isn’t to say that emotional intelligence is useless. It’s relevant to performance in jobs where you have to deal with emotions every day, like sales, real estate, and counseling. If you’re selling a house or helping people cope with tragedies, it’s very useful to know what they’re feeling and respond appropriately. But in jobs that lack these emotional demands—like engineering, accounting, or science—emotional intelligence predicted lower performance. If your work is primarily about dealing with data, things, and ideas rather than people and feelings, it’s not necessarily advantageous to be skilled in reading and regulating emotions. If your job is to fix a car or balance numbers in a spreadsheet, paying attention to emotions might distract you from working efficiently and effectively.
Even in emotionally demanding work, when it comes to job performance, cognitive ability still proves more consequential than emotional intelligence. Cognitive ability is the capacity to learn. The higher your cognitive ability, the easier it is for you to develop emotional intelligence when you need it. (This is one of the reasons that emotional intelligence and cognitive ability turn out to correlate positively, not negatively.)”
Creative geniuses or literary labourers?
“Recent studies in ‘computational humanities’ – a discipline that merges computer science with the study of literature and the arts – have aimed to research such strategies empirically, by analysing massive amounts of visual and textual data. In one study, a team of researchers lead by the professor of English (and data scientist) Ted Underwood at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign built a ‘topic model’ of almost 11,000 works of fiction published from 1880 to 1999. Topic modelling is a technique of computational text analysis that provides a rough idea of the content of books – without actually reading them – by counting words and measuring their co-occurrences. In their study, the researchers explored historical changes in literature.
This picture of artistic history as relatively repetitive and conservative may seem gloomy. But apparently the picture isn’t complete. Another recent study of exploration and exploitation adds important nuance. A team lead by the management professor Dashun Wang at Northwestern University in Illinois aimed to explain ‘hot streaks’ in arts and sciences: the periods in individuals’ careers when they produce several high-impact works in close succession. For example, Verne kept writing ‘voyages extraordinaires’ throughout his 40-year career, but his most popular novels were created during the first 10 years: his hot streak.”
Quotes
“The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
– C.S. Lewis
“The worst thing a son of a bitch can do is turn you into a son of a bitch.”
– Frank Oppenheimer
