Links, quotes & articles (Week 23, 2024)

Trys Mudford explored scaling projects to allow them to grow sensibly while also being sustainable for the maintainer. The quote below, especially, sums up how I sometimes feel about working in open source. A lot of the time we have some amazing ideas for what we want to do with CO2.js, but as a non-profit we often have to sit on these ideas in the hope that we can find a funder to pay for the time required to build them. It's frustrating, but I feel it's increasingly part of the dance of open source.

Conversely, it’s frustrating sitting on a project with so much potential but so little time to give to it.

A fascinating Freakonomics Radio episode with Tom Whitwell, who publishes as yearly list of 52 things he learnt over the course of 12 months. It covered a host of interesting topics, but one that I found both humorous and interesting was a discussion debunking the notion of "Blue Zones" - geographic areas with longer life expectancy. Okinawa, Japan, is considered to be one of these blue zones, but when Tom dove into the data he found that it contradicted almost everything in the published research.

People in blue zones consume very small amounts of meat, around five kilos per year, contrasting with Okinawan residents who consume 40 kilos annually. Additionally, Okinawans consume an average of 14 cans of spam per year.

Another one from the Freakonomic Radio Network, this time from a 'People I (Mostly) Admire" episode with psychologist Ellen Langer. I'm a firm believer in ones mentality being able to play a significant role in shaping ones surroundings and also health. This episode with Langer dove into that topic, which has formed the core of her research.

The best way to learn is to learn conditionally. Rather than is, you should learn could be, would be, possibly. It would seem that, might be. And when you know that it could be, you're open to possibilities that otherwise won't occur to you.

But things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So what do we have? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame and then forgive, which to me seemed hardly divine. If you blame, you certainly should learn how to forgive. But as I talk about in the mindful body, if you understand it, it obviates the necessity for blame. And if you don't blame, then you don't need to forgive. So we have lots of things that sound good, that have another side to them. When you say to somebody, try. You don't try to eat an ice cream cone, you just eat it. Now, trying is better than giving up, but there's an even better way of being, which is just to presume everything is going to be fine. Presume you can do it and go forward and don't waste your time. We did a little research on trying versus doing, and even with the doing of things, people get themselves crazed. People think they want perfection, and you can either do perfectly mindlessly or imperfectly mindfully. Let's say you're a golfer and oh wouldn't it be wonderful if you could get a hole in one each time you swung the club? Well no. After the first couple of times you'd see there's no game there. What makes the game is the imperfect performance. If we recognize that it's the challenge that's exciting for us, we'd possibly enjoy the so -called challenges more.