3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: More Everything Forever by Adam Becker
Listening: Talk It Up by Sammy Rae & The Friends
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
New App: Okie dokie, I made another app—this one’s for iOS, it’s free, and it’s called Just Birthdays. It’s a place to store birthdays so you don’t forget (and so you don’t have to go to Facebook to remember). It’s ultra-simple and has some widgets that’ll help you keep tabs on today’s (and upcoming) birthdays. Consider leaving some stars/a quick review if you dig it, and please let me know if you run into any bugs or have ideas for additional functionality.
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Operation Rising Lion
Yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was on Commodity Fetishism & the pod was about the Marriage Premium
Why Not This Way?
Many norms, folkways, and standards exist because they’re (almost always) the best way to do something (by some metric).
The USB-C standard isn’t the most bleeding-edge option that technology and manufacturing can offer, but it’s a really solid, relatively high-performing default that’s a significant upgrade compared to what came before.
The three act story structure, similarly, isn’t always going to be the absolute ideal way to present a narrative, but a lot of the time it’s better than the relevant alternatives.
Some defaults are natural evolutions of what came before, while others are standards of convenience: trains often use a given track gauge not because it’s optimal, but because there’s gobs of existing infrastructure that uses that standard, and it would be too expensive and time-consuming to switch to a new one.
The TED talk format has become the de facto template for presenting talks on all sorts of subjects, while tech-world product demonstrations and releases have mimicked Apple’s format since the early 2000s. Sometimes these approaches become the common template (at least for a while) because they’re genuinely better than other available options, but sometimes they attain dominance because it would be inconvenient to do otherwise (because YouTube’s algorithms incentivize a certain type of content, perhaps).
It’s possible to deviate from existing standards, but it’s often an uphill climb, and that can be true even if your approach is obviously better in some clear and measurable way.
That said, sometimes we’ll diverge from the prevailing path out of ignorance (not knowing how it’s ‘supposed’ to be done), sometimes we’ll do it because we personally believe our way is better or we don’t like something about the typical approach, and sometimes we’ll just want to experiment or break something or fool around in less-trodden spaces.
I tend to like learning how things work, and that includes learning the rules (spoken and unspoken) and norms of the context in which something I’m learning about exists.
It can be both thrilling and rewarding to fumble through such spaces like a child, though, learning everything from first principles and being forced to imagine and invent our own reasons for doing all the things we might do there.
Being forced to answer the questions, “Why this way? Why not this other way?” for ourselves—rather than leaning on someone else’s reasoning—can be a mind-stretching exercise. And though it won’t always be feasible or appropriate to approach something new from that angle, it can be a truly valuable (if often effortful) experience when we’re able to make it work.
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Interesting Links
Race Car Drivers Turn Lemons (and $500) Into an Endurance Contest Like No Other
The U.S. Nuclear Base Hidden Under Greenland’s Ice for Decades
If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.
What Else
It’s finally starting to get hot and humid here in Milwaukee, mid-80s F yesterday and it’ll be in the mid-90s next week (that’s around 30-35 C). I’m not a fan of this kind of weather, but the bright side is that it’s warm enough that I can consistently run outside a few times a week, which I missed during the chillier months.
I’m continuing to progress through the app-making learning curve and having an absolute blast, even on the days where I feel like I’ve mostly just slammed my head against a wall over and over again, rather than making real progress (often due to some small, fiddly little detail that no one else will notice, but which I want to get right).
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One astronaut, many cameras and 220 days of amazing images from space.