Someone noticed hermit crabs using plastic for their shell. They created an organization that cleans beaches and offers hermit crabs actual shells.
Author: Patrick
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Home run swing off
When the Major League All-Star game ended with a miniature home run derby, it felt like something out of Banana Ball.
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Roland Garros French Open poster art
Roland Garros has been creating posters for the French open since 1981. It’s interesting to see the aesthetics and styles change over 40+ years.
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Jordan Harper – She Rides Shotgun
She Rides Shotgun will soon be a movie. The book that it’s based on tells of Nate McCluskey and his daughter, Polly, attempting to escape an Aryan Nation branch in Southern California. Jordan Harper writes a taut, propulsive story with hard boiled lyricism, mixing violence and pathos. Definitely recommended as a quick, engaging, easy read.
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Deleting a second brain
Joan Westenberg writes:
For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.
I suppose the challenge is finding a balance of keeping track of ideas and then executing or developing the worthwhile ones.
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Solar Sponges: Turning Sunlight Into Freshwater
Scientists have developed a new type of solar sponge that can turn salt water into freshwater.
Reporting in ACS Energy Letters, a team of scientists created a sponge-like structure filled with long, microscopic air channels that harness sunlight to turn saltwater into fresh, clean water. In an outdoor test, this simple system—just the sponge and a clear plastic cover—successfully produced drinkable water using only natural sunlight. It’s a step toward making low-energy, sustainable desalination more accessible
This will come in handy during the water wars.
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Praise for the expert generalist
So over the last year or so we have started to resist this industry-wide push for narrow skills, by calling out this quality, which we call an Expert Generalist. Why did we use the word “expert”? There are two sides to real expertise. The first is the familiar depth: a detailed command of one domain’s inner workings. The second, crucial in our fast-moving field is the ability to learn quickly, spot the fundamentals that run beneath shifting tools and trends, and apply them wherever we land. As an example from software teams, developers who roam across languages, architectures, and problem spaces may seem like “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none,” yet repeated dives below surface differences help them develop durable, principle-level mastery. Over time these generalists can dissect unfamiliar challenges, spot first-principles patterns, and make confident design decisions with the assurance of a specialist – and faster. Being such a generalist is itself a sophisticated expertise.
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Have AI attend that meeting for you
AI bots are attending meetings in people’s stead.
Some of the AI helpers were assisting a person who was also present on the call — others represented humans who had declined to show up but sent a bot that listens but can’t talk in their place. The human-machine imbalance made Sellers concerned that the modern thirst for AI-powered optimization was startingto impede human interaction.
“I want to talk to people,” said Sellers, who runs a content agency for entrepreneurs out of Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t want to talk to a bunch of note takers,” he said — before adding that he hasoccasionally himself sent an AI note taker to meetings in his place.