A poem for the autumnal equinox.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Hopkins: Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series) London: Everyman’s Library, 1995.
Category: amreading
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Beer incentivizes science.
From Will O’Brien’s piece in the Fitzwilliam
Taken over its entire history, Guinness may just be the most successful company Ireland has ever produced. In 1930, it was the seventh largest company in Britain or Ireland. It is one of our oldest companies of note. Considering that it predates the Bank of Ireland and the State itself, it could even be said that Guinness is the longest-running successful large institution in Ireland.
Will O’BrienThe Irish brewing company has relentlessly innovated on multiple fronts.
- Workplace benefits
- Annual leave
- Free meals (today would be a company cafeteria)
- Family trips
- Healthcare
- Pension
- Housing!
- The creation of a Guinness Research Laboratory
- The Easy pour system (1959) – Invented by mathematician Michael Ash. Allowed lesser skilled bartenders to serve a quality pour.
- Project ACORN (1969) – Advanced. Cans. of. Rich. Nectar. The first attempt to improve the can or bottle pour.
- “widget” – a gas filled, tennis table sized ball at the bottom of the can that releases a gas that creates bubbles. This greatly improved the taste of home-served pints.
- Branding – Guinness is good for you, Guinness is bad for you, The Guinness Book of Records, producing a Nigerian action film.
Guinness is proof that companies who endure, innovate across multiple areas of their business over an extended timeline. Innovation doesn’t pause.
A must read piece if you’re interested in history, economics, marketing, or beer.
- Workplace benefits
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Morale is real. Don’t dismiss it.
Brilliant weirdos Alexey Guzey and Brian Timar explain morale. Worth bookmarking this one for discouraging moments. It could help you figure out why your morale is low.
First, ponder this idea:
Morale is your motive force, and you live or die by its maintenance.
Brian Timar & Alexey GuzeyAlexey and Brian go on to share a list of 10 + things that increase and decrease morale.
ThreeFour morale boosters from their list that resonate:11. doing
35. making a decision
3. going outside
13. stopping a thief
Three morale sappers to be wary of:
4. being a coward
5. punting decisions
9. spending time on a task and not feeling closer to finishing it
Consider morale booster #11 – doing. Don’t only read these, go on and create your own list of morale increasers.
Some increasers (sunlight) are perennial, but many more will be personal. Same applies with morale sappers (sleepiness).
Read the piece in full here. Also, pair with Guzey’s post: Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now
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Whatever the work is that you are doing, love it, and commit to it. – Zohar Atkins
“Love work” is different than “Love what you do”—for the injunction is less about finding the right work to love and more about finding any work to love. If romanticism suggests that there is only one thing that you can do and be happy, Shemaiah’s approach is closer to the logic behind arranged marriage: once you are prepared to love work your work becomes lovable. Meanwhile, the FOMO caused by wondering “Am I in the right line of work?” leads to restlessness. As the average time in any one job or company declines, one contributing factor may be the grass is always greener effect. A person who eschews status will not be as prone to this fallacy.
Atkins, Zohar. “Love The Work.” What Is Called Thinking?, 2023.
https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/love-the-work. Accessed 16 September 2023.Read Zohar’s full piece here. And pair with Dorthy Sayers opening paragraph from her essay Why Work?
I have already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thoroughgoing revolution in our attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon, not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.
Sayers, Dorothy. Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2004.I think both Dorthy and Zohar would agree on the idea that work is a noble pursuit on its own. But Dorthy takes the idea a step further, proposing the argument that work shouldn’t be taken on for only the purpose of earning money, but rather as an essential part of bringing glory to God.
Challenging and encouraging throughout.
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Accepting who we are is a relief
having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled “Saunders Mountain.”
“Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.”
Then again, that was my name on it.
This is the big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too –it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.
What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.
And–to belabor this already questionable metaphor–what will make that shit-hill grow is our commitment to it, the extent to which we say, “Well, yes, it is a shit-hill, but it’s my shit-hill, so let me assume that if I continue to work in this mode that is mine, this hill will eventually stop being made of shit, and will grow, and from it, I will eventually be able to see (and encompass in my work) the whole world.”
Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York: Random House, 2021. pp108-109Own your shit-hill. It frees you to make progress.
David Perell calls it a “mark of maturity”
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Finally reading Self-Reliance
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Self-RelianceEmerson is someone I often hear quoted and mentioned on podcasts, but how many have truly read him?
I had not.
As you make your way through the classics you begin to realize, they’re classics for two reasons.
One, their themes, envy in this case, are timeless. This is true for novels, essays, or epic poems.
And two, they are typically more readable than you’d first imagine. See tip #6: Read Western canonical literature.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Illustrated Emerson: Essays and Poems. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. 2018
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Every. Word. Matters.
Sami theorizes that Anderson’s fine grained visual style came out of his writing, which is similarly exact. There’s not much room for verbal improvisation in a Wes Anderson picture because the dialogue is written to mirror, complicate, or intensify Anderson’s filmmaking choices. Every ellipsis, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation point, parenthetical, and period in a line of dialogue complements the camera movements, lighting, visual effects, sound effects, and music. It’s all of a piece. Filmmaking is screenwriting, screenwriting is filmmaking. All is text. The discrete shots are phrases, sentences, or paragraphs within the larger manuscript of the film. Words matter. Punctuation matters. Sentence length matters. The longer more elaborate camera moves in a Wes Anderson picture could be compared to a monologue in the theater, or a run-on sentence in an essay or novel that keeps going and going till it finally stops.
Scripts can be dismissed in terms of how a movie looks visually. We typically think storyboards and dailies communicate the visual direction the filmmaker desires.
But as Sanjay Sami theorizes, the preciseness of Anderson’s scripts, e.g. word choice, punctuation, the location of a colon or exclamation point, all contribute to the look.
Screenwriting is filmmaking. Akira Kurosawa agrees:
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Gwern lays it out for you to play it out
Your only search guaranteed to fail is the one you never run
GwernUse Verbatim mode for literal matching.
Who knew? Gwern.
Explore the Internet’s attic. I didn’t even know the Internet Archive existed!
The Internet Archive (IA) deserves special mention as a target because it is the Internet’s attic, bursting at the seams with a remarkable assortment of scans & uploads from all sorts of sources—not just archiving web pages, but scanning university collections, accepting uploads from rogue archivists and hackers and obsessive fans and the aforementioned Indian/Chinese libraries with more laissez-faire approaches.5 This extends to its media collections as well—who would expect to find so many old science-fiction magazines (as well as many other magazines), a near-infinite number of Grateful Dead recordings, the original 114 episodes of Tom and Jerry, or thousands of arcade & console & PC & Flash games (all playable in-browser)? The Internet Archive is a veritable Internet in and of itself; the problem, of course, is finding anything…
So not infrequently, a book may be available, or a paper exists in the middle of a scan of an entire journal volume, but the IA will be ranked very low in search queries and the snippet will be misleading due to bad OCR. A good search strategy is to drop the quotes around titles or excerpts and focus down to
site:archive.organd check the first few hits by hand. (You can also try the relatively new “Internet Archive Scholar”, which appears to be more comprehensive than Google-site-search.)View your Evernote or OneNote stash like a personalized search engine. Excellent way to think about those tools.
Clippings: note-taking services like Evernote/Microsoft OneNote: regularly making and keeping excerpts creates a personalized search engine, in effect.
This can be vital for refinding old things you read where the search terms are hopelessly generic or you can’t remember an exact quote or reference; it is one thing to search a keyword like “autism” in a few score thousand clippings, and another thing to search that in the entire Internet! (One can also reorganize or edit the notes to add in the keywords one is thinking of, to help with refinding.) I make heavy use of Evernote clipping and it is key to refinding my references.
Snore. Snore. I know, everyone is tired of the AI conversation. But how do these search techniques change with Chat GPT 4 or tools like Perplexity?
Read all of Gwern’s Internet Search Tips here. Table of Contents included!
h/t Tyler Cowen?
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From his essay, How to Do Great Work.
The entire essay is noteworthy, but this small section of quotes made me look at questions in a new way.
#1 – Really good questions are partial discoveries:
One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question.
Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they’re used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel territory.
#2 – Revisit the questions from your youth.
Do you remember yours?
People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it’s just as important to keep your youthful questions alive.
#3 – After answers, more questions.
This excerpt reminds me of the Haitian proverb, after the mountain, more mountains.
It’s a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don’t just lead to answers, but also to more questions.
Graham, Paul. “How to Do Great Work.” Paul Graham, 2023. http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html. Accessed 3 July 2023.
Floodlights and Goalposts 