Tools

One of my favorite phrases is “Deeds, not words.” It’s the 1903 motto of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU) in Manchester, England.

“A thousand songs in your pocket.” “Two great tastes that taste great together.” “JAWS in space.” Any of those sound familiar?

Maria Theresa was amazed. How could this “automaton” defeat her best chess masters? Was it magic? Or science?

Has anyone ever said to you, “The ends justify the means”? And then you said, either out loud or to yourself, “Oh no, they do not!”

In last week’s edition, I shared the nine posts of 2022 you read the most. I featured three of them from my #swipefile, but over the course of an average year, I share well over 300+. Not all of them stick around in my head, but some of them do.

Somehow it’s already mid-January, but this year’s brisk pace strikes me as a good sign. After all, the last couple of years have been…different, and decidedly not brisk. That said, there were any number of highlights, some even right here on this blog!

You may have noticed it: there’s a problem with storytelling.

It’s always fascinating to me when, despite our best technological efforts to “optimize” how things are done, the way humans already do something turns out to be the optimal model.

When you’re working to solve a big, complicated problem—it can be hard to explain why what you’re doing is important. At least, it can be hard to explain it in a way that doesn’t take credit for the whole solution or the whole effort.

Sometimes the things you find for your swipefile (where you stash interesting information for potential future use) are great for “here’s an interesting example of a point I want to make.” But then, sometimes, what you find is more “here’s information that changes or informs how I see the world