- Birds have been known to follow roads
- Birds can hear infra sounds and smell really well
- Most pigeons do not get lost, they either die or go home with someone else
- Starlings track their seven nearest neighbors, Starling of metric distance
- “Was math invented or discovered?”
- Vulture defecate on their legs to disinfect them
- Hummingbirds
- Smallest warm blooded animals (except some shrews)
- Aztec God of War
- Beaks are very flexible
- Go into suspended animation for sleep because they cannot get enough to eat to stay alive
- Are not social and do not flock
- Can become too heavy to fly
- Most animals live for one billion heartbeats
- Fear invokes a range of responses, not just Fight or Flight
- Water fowl spoke easier and flee further during hunting season
- Penguin ditch circadian rhythms in the summer but keep them in the winter
- Vocal mimicry is a limited in animals
- Chickens
- Have a strongly enforced pecking order
- An egalitarian coop tends to be more violent because no one knows their place
- Have better color vision than us
- Are insighted to violence when they see red
- Art and utility used to be synonyms
- It is best to be nice in the wrong run
- Cooperating sometimes benefits the kids and sometimes the parents
- Generosity satisfies a primal need
- Albatross
- Mate for life
- Can lock its shoulders to hold it’s wings without using muscles
- Fly an estimated four million miles in its life
Category: Reading
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“The Thing with Wings” by Noah Stryker
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“Smart Brevity” by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz
- “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter. So, I wrote you a long one.” Mark Twain
- Short, not shallow
- Core Four
- Muscular tease (6 or fewer words)
- One strong sentence or lead (tell me something I don’t know or want to know)
- Context (explain why this matters)
- Choice to learn more (on their time)
- Listen to the readers and the data
- “All you can do is the next right thing.”
- What we want to say vs what they need to hear
- Write to someone in particular
- Say what you want to get across. Then stop.
- Guide
- 6 words tops for the subject line
- 10 words or less for the reason you are writing
- Active verbs always
- Trumpet one big thing
- Answer the question: What is this? Is it worth my time?
- Tips
- “Why it matters?”
- “It’s hot, I’m going inside”
- “Who doing what”
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“The Book of Boundaries” by Melissa Urban
- Boundaries are for managing our responses
- “This is the limit of behavior that is acceptable to me.”
- Boundary setting is not mean
- In order to set the boundary, you need to spell them out
- “Clear is kind”
- Make an “incoming boundary” sound to signal a change in the conversation to add some distance between the offense and setting the boundary
- “Uh”, “huh”, “opps”
- Do not be afraid to ask to circle back to correct inappropriate behavior
- Healthy boundaries come from the self; they do not seek to control others
- “Unearned guilt” is feeling guilty for not behaving like someone else wants
- Avoid oversharing or excusing why you are creating the boundary
- (It is also easier to negotiate the conditions or satisfy them, which is often not what you want.)
- Avoid setting consequences when you first set the boundaries
- Be okay to adjust boundaries over time as things change
- Periodically ask yourself if a boundary is still needed
- Be sociable on your time to be proactive
- Communicate your feeling clearly and accurately, expect your partner to do the same
- Boundaries are not replacements for communication
- Try having tasks being owned end-to-end (recognition, conception, and execution) so no one has to nag and to avoid splitting the cognitive load
- Put chores on a schedule
- Consent must be respected without excuses
- Outline and emulate boundaries that of the behavior you want to see
- People can feel bad about what they are doing
- “I don’t talk about food over food.”
- “I’m not drinking right now.”
- “The Ring Theory”
- Grief flows out
- Comfort flows in
- People at the center of an event have no obligation to comfort those outside their ring
- Give people space to save face
- Be graceful when people come back
- Provide face time to talk
- Accept the boundary and follow up later
- Provide face time to talk further
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“Love by Design” by Sara Nasserzadeh
- We pack so much on the “magic” of love
- Couples need to have a shared future facing vision
- “We expect love to hurt”
- True love can overcome everything
- Coupledom is fairly universal
- Courtly love (“love” for peace) became romantic love
- Increasingly, we want to marry for love and love alone
- Happy couples are all the same, miserable couples are all miserable for different reasons
- “Love” works better when thought as a range of actions than a feeling
- Quirks are an advantage to us but others might not appreciate them
- Thinking
- Abstract thinking, big picture, connecting dots
- Information processing
- Organizing things
- Facilitation happens through doing something Sikhs
- Attachment
- Anxious
- Avoidant
- Secure
- America is a low context society, where detail needs to be communicated frequently
- Attracting can be built over time
- We reference “people like us” to predict future behavior earlier
- More of a “Puzzle of Attraction” than a law
- It is important to understand why someone is attractive to you so you can track those needs as they change over time
- Losing attraction can happen because we no longer need the things they offer or they no longer offer the things we need
- (We see this often as couples “grow apart”, literally picking up new things that are not aligned with their partners)
- “I respect others because I am a respective person”
- Trust is earned
- Physical associations can be important
- Dropping the ball us more damaging than asking for help
- Work together to manage your ‘couple brand’
- Avoid self-identifying with other people’s pain
- Compassion is about feeling in their behalf
- “What you cannot tolerate in yourself, you won’t be able to tolerate in others.”
- Avoiding conflict is not ideal
- Ask your partner to talk about the thing, include why it matters to you
- “Authenticity” is often an excuse to be rude or mean
- The opposite of pleasure is comfort
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“How to prevent the next pandemic” by Bill Gates
- There is really no substitute for preparation
- WHO should have people embedded in government agencies to closely coordinate efforts
- Being able to survey local health is critical to detecting hotspots
- “If it looks like you are overreacting, you are probably doing it right”
- Context matters, so adapt as needed
- Contact tracing has been around for a while
- Vaccines are a lot harder to prove quality than a drug
- Generally, a vaccine requires biological processing to prove it works; regular medication can use a simple chemical reaction
- We should plan to flood the market with a given vaccine so we do not have to worry about who is getting it
- Not having wide spread diagnostics impairs the ability to get good data
- Laying the ground work is very important before things happen