Links for March 6, 2022

Tomorrow is the six month anniversary of the start of this blog, so I wanted to take the opportunity to briefly reflect, as well as announce some changes to my publishing format going forward.

Six Months of Writing

So far, I've published 173 posts, not including the weekly digests or more technical guides. That adds up to 37,081 words, or about half the length of a short book. (!)

Clive Thompson recently created a tool that lets you extract all the questions from a piece of text. I thought it'd be interesting to take a look back at the last six months through the lens of just the questions I asked or quoted, so I dumped all of my writing into it.

Here are a few questions that stood out:

What can I remove so that this needs no instruction?

Would I talk to someone else this way?

Are the ghosts real?

You can browse all the questions I asked or quoted here.

Changes Moving Forward

It's a privilege to be able to show up in your inbox on a regular basis. As such, I want to make sure I'm only sending you things I'm excited to share, and not just publishing for the sake of having something to say each day.

After tomorrow's post, I'll be taking a couple weeks off, then switching to a weekly format. This will give me chance to focus on longer posts that I don't have time to work on when maintaining a daily publishing cadence.

You can expect a similar range of topics, just diving deeper into each idea. I'll send these posts out weekly in the Sunday Digest, along with the usual links of interest.

On to this week's links:

Links

👷‍♀️ Why Your Boss Wants to Know Your Love Language — NY Times

The pandemic has fundamentally reshaped many people's relationship with work, and employers are starting to lean into showing appreciation more. One result of this? Love languages are starting to enter the workplace:

It’s a question that plagued Shakespeare, Hallmark, Sappho and Taylor Swift, and these days it has even reached the workplace with surprising urgency: How do you show someone you care?

There’s a mining company in South Dakota that has sought an answer with a bold approach. The miners of Pete Lien & Sons, in Rapid City, S.D., spend their days drilling, blasting and loading shot rock into trucks. Their hard hats protect them from flying debris. But they also serve a subtler purpose: Each hat has a colorful sticker whose icon symbolizes either quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service or gifts — what are broadly known as love languages.

🦻 Making Sense: How sound becomes hearing — Unexplainable

Vox's excellent podcast Unexplainable recently explored just how subjective our hearing can be. The episode features a couple auditory illusions that are 🤯:

In the same way optical illusions trick our eyes, audio illusions can trick our ears. This raises a fundamental question: What is hearing, and how much of it is made up by our brains?

🥔 How do they make potato chips? — NFB

In case this week's post "Working On Vs. In" made you wonder how potato chips are really made, here's an oddly calming video that shows the process:

🐦 An amazing image

In this picture from circa 1960, you can see Frank Rosenblatt ’50, Ph.D. ’56, working on the Mark I Perceptron machine – what he described as the first machine “capable of having an original idea” [full story: https://t.co/SCSK9sGPKg] pic.twitter.com/jT6DyDmA1C

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) February 6, 2022

I'll be back in your inbox on 3/20!

Have a great couple weeks,‌‌

John