Wrote

None

Read

1. Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick, The Tragic Tale Of How NASA's X-34 Space Planes Ended Up Rotting In Someone's Backyard, The Drive (2019-02-19). The X-34B, along with the entire X-34 flight test program, never came to pass. Orbital Sciences never finished the X-34A-3, either.
2. Jeremy Littau, Media's Fatal Flaw: Ignoring the Mistakes of Newspapers, Wired (2019-01-30). The accidental brilliance of the newspaper business model is it commoditized all those information needs to an audience that, pre-internet, had no other choice. You want a weather report? The newspaper had it. Looking for a job? The newspaper had it. Newspapers owned their readership, which had many needs but few choices. Advertisers showed up in droves to capitalize on this holy grail—a captive audience that could be reliably delivered in a defined space. The internet changed everything. The weather became a website, then an app. TV guides went online and became interactive and customizable. Classifieds became searchable and interconnected across regions, then states, and eventually the nation.
3. Ivan Maisel, The South Stands at Armageddon': Breaking the Sugar Bowl color barrier, ESPN (2019-02-26). The officials understood that they would be inviting a black player to be a subject of Sugar Bowl hospitality. Grier would dress in the locker room. Grier would shower in the showers. He would play on the Tulane Stadium field, and after the game, he would be invited to the dinner and dance held for the two teams at the Saint Charles Hotel. [...] "If he shows up, I won't block his way," manager Mike O'Leary said of Grier. "But you know he would never come. Traditionally, the St. Charles Hotel does not allow Negroes at dinners or dances."
4. The adventurous life of first solo kayaker on the Yellow River, CGTN (2019-03-02). "The most dangerous part is where the Yellow River flows from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to the Loess Plateau. The altitude abruptly drops from over 3,000 meters to only 1,000 meters. With such an altitude difference, the rapids are thundering." At the moment, he received an anonymous call from someone who had participated in the first Yellow River rafting 30 years ago, warning him to skip the dangerous section because "theoretically, no one could survive that."
5. Kevin Levin, W.E.B. DuBois on Confederate Monuments, Civil War Memory (2017-05-29). DuBois pushes right back against the myth of the Lost Cause. He refuses to draw a distinction between the Confederate government and the men in the ranks. DuBois clearly understood that as long as white southerners were able to mythologize the war through their monuments, African Americans would remain second class citizens. Confederate monuments did not just occupy the Jim Crow landscape. For Dubois, they helped to make it possible.

Listened

1. Episode #200: Escaping Excel Hell with Python and Pandas, Talk Python to Me (2019-02-21). (notes) [45:33] One of the things I've wanted to do but I haven't really done a whole lot of is, what kind of user groups can you set up in your company so that you have some of these peer resources to help them work through the process. Your podcast about the Apple Python training was really, really interesting and certainly a much larger scale than what I'm talking about, but I think that that would be another option is to try and get four, five, a dozen people, likeminded individuals, together and over the lunch hour start to introduce these concepts and build a community where they can learn and share their learning.
2. 148 - Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, You Are Not So Smart (2019-02-25). (notes) [63:58] I think what is really important to understand is that these rise in populist leaders and mesmerizing personalities is not really that unique. There's nothing unique about this time period, about this particular cultural moment. What we can see in our data is that when people feel threatened, whether it's real or imagined, just like they do in the country level when they're facing diseases or disasters, they want stronger rules and they want more autocratic, independent leaders to help lead the way. It's something that's kind of deeply evolutionary, as I mentioned, and we can see that when you increase threat you tighten norms.
3. Graham Duncan — Talent Is The Best Asset Class (#362), The Tim Ferriss Show (2019-02-28). (notes) [44:41] What I feel like a really good coach can do is by listening to the way I'm making sense of something can observe, oh, you're actually assuming x, your grip--I think of it as grip--your grip on certain things is really tight. And if a coach can find what you're gripping really tightly, and that you're actually not--you can't articulate the opposite of this belief you have, that might be a sign that you have identity or ego caught up in that thing.

Watched

Queen - Live AID 1985 Full Concert

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