100 Ways, Chief Excel Officer, Extreme DIYs and Living Coffins
#30 of 10+1 Things
⚡ Welcome to #30 of 10+1 Things!
A huge thanks to Aleem and Younes for buying me coffee last week. Your support($1 or ₹75) keeps this newsletter up and running.
Usually, I sent out this newsletter to you on Mondays, but considering the learning I'm engaged in and the fitness routine I'm following, I've been struggling to publish this newsletter on Mondays. So instead of struggling, I've decided to reduce the friction and send out the newsletter on Thursdays, instead of Monday. If you're curious enough to know what I'm up to this year, check out my annual plan for 2022 covering my priorities and goals.
Here are 10+1 things that I thought were worth sharing this week:
🕺 100 Ways
Jacob from 'Put a Number on it' has written an interesting article exploring 100 ways on how you can live a better life. This is a collection of random life advice that is quirky, yet useful. Some of my favourite ones from the thread are "In any giant museum, your goal should be to spend 5+ minutes with 10 amazing works, not 5 seconds with 1,000" and ''buy 20 colourful pairs of socks and don’t worry about matching".
Not a single hungry child in Africa was helped by you finishing a meal you didn’t enjoy.
💻 Carbon Footprint of 4K Netflix
As the world is streaming more and more content they watch, it is important to have a look at the carbon footprint of streaming content. Science Focus has done an interesting analysis on the climate impact of streaming content online. The carbon emissions of streaming content mainly consist of emissions from the energy used by the devices we are streaming, emissions from the internet network we are connected to and also the emissions related to the data centre where the content is hosted. To give you a perspective of the impact, binge-watching the whole Breaking Bad series will generate carbon emissions close to 4.382 kgs of CO2, equivalent to travelling 44kms in an electric car.
👣 How to Care Less
Another great piece of wisdom by Brian at Tiny Wisdom on how to care less and enjoy more of your life. As we grow older, we start caring about what others think of us. We end up doing things just for the sake of getting everyone's approval. People often have good intentions, but what works for others might not work for you. So it's high time we do whatever we want and forget about these bystanders by caring less.
"I realised that people do not think about myself as much as I'd like to think. Because they're not the one who's living my life, I do."
👩 Chief Excel Officer
I'm not a great fan of TikTok (it's also banned in India!) and Instagram (I don't use it anymore!) as I really don't resonate with the content posted there. But never in my wildest dreams that I thought there would be someone who is a Microsoft Excel influencer. Kat Norton, who goes by the name Miss Excel, has over a million followers on social platforms. She uses an iPhone to make fun excel videos on TikTok and Instagram. She uses these social channels as a funnel to drive her software training business that is generating six figures a day!
⚰️ Living Coffin
Loop Biotech, a company based in the Netherlands is on a mission to make burials sustainable. Unlike traditional coffins that are made of wood, the company's coffin called Living Cocoon is made of a living mushroom called mycelium. Mycelium which is also called as world's best recycler will transform the dead organic matter into key nutrients, providing a source for new life. A dead body in a traditional coffin can take one to two decades to break down, whereas the Living Cocoon can fully decompose a body in two to three years. This is a great sustainable alternative to the traditional burial industry as the cemeteries in the US alone each year consume 30 million board feet of hardwoods, 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete for burial vaults, and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid.
🖨️ Scan of the Month
Ever wanted to have a look inside popular products out there? Scan of the Month is an interesting website that shares fascinating computer tomography (CT) scans of popular products every month. So far they have done CT scans of AirPods, Lego, GameBoy and instant cameras. I loved the AirPods scan and also the instant camera one as I own an Instax Mini!
📷 Waste Not
This week I'm exploring a photography project called 'Waste Not' by Aliza Eliazarov. Close to 40% of food in the United States goes uneaten. This waste is generated throughout during the journey of food from the farm to the plate. To create awareness about this issue considering widespread food insecurity and climate change factors, Aliza created these photographs inspired by 17th-century food paintings. All food items photographed in the series are rescued from dumpsters or streets and were consumed after the shoot.
“My goal was to elevate food that was considered waste to works of art”
📚 When I talk about Running
This week I'm reading a book called 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' by Haruki Murakami. When I started running recently, I had this thought inside my head shouting ''Why are you doing this and pushing yourself so hard!". I was researching about it and found that the thought even occurs to seasoned marathon runners and the fun part of running is overcoming that emotion. I came across this book randomly on Reddit and I've fallen in love with it. It is a memoir, a collection of dairy like essays written by Murakami about his passion for running. When Murakami sold his jazz bar in 1982 to pursue a career in writing, he started running as a way to keep him fit. The book is a reflection of his passion for running and the impact it had on his writing career. This is a must-read if you like running or if you ever plan to run someday.
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”
~ Resurfaced using ReadWise(FREE!)
🧵 Civilian Resistance
Things going on in Ukraine is quite unfortunate and I never expected something like this to happen in this 21st century. John Spencer, a retired US army major and the chief of Urban Warfare Studies at US military academy has shared an interesting thread on effective civilian resistance for someone who has no training. Urban defence by fighting smart can be tricky for any soldier to defend. The key to effective resistance in cities is by building obstacles, using Molotov cocktails and forming groups.
🎬 Extreme DIYs
This week I've enjoyed the video titled 'DIY to the Extreme' by Great Big Story. I have always loved the concept of DIY, but this is a story of people who have taken DIY to another level. These are the stories of people who are building small fusion reactors in their backyards, detailed replicas of air crafts using files and setting up hydroelectric plants made out of scrap metal! Nevertheless, an interesting watch to explore your curiosity and see these extreme DIY cases.
❓ Social Feeds, Search Engines and Future of Web
This last section of the newsletter explores an original thought I had, an idea I'm exploring, a dream I remember or a question I have:
I don't know about you, but I really hate social feeds on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. I think these platforms lost the magic when they started to introduce popular and promoted posts versus the original chronological feed. The chronological feed was so classic as it always used to show the latest posts or updates by your friends or family. Things have changed and promotional targeted advertisements have taken over. The same trend I have seen on Google search. Day by day I feel like google search results are bloated with irrelevant sites that are having better SEO or are promoted. These days instead of relying on Google search results, I usually add a Reddit tag onto my search query and research on topics there. I think the future lies in the hands of community-driven and moderated social media platforms like Reddit.
I feel like there is a market for web products that rely on subscription revenue over advertiser money. I would be happy to pay for a service that would be dub as Netflix for Google. I would be grateful if such a service exists that provides me with relevant results rather than promotional content. Think of Instagram or Facebook. What if we could pay an optional monthly fee to fix their broken feed so that it shows only relevant reason information. Does any service like this exist in the market? I'm in the process of writing an article on the future of the web and if you have any thoughts on the same, I would be happy to connect with you.
📣 Shout Outs
Thinking Bat: A thoughtful amalgamation of philosophy, psychology, and thinking!
Time Machiner: Deep dive into fascinating corners of the internet you never knew existed.
The Daily Breather: Local air quality info each day, along with fun facts, trivia, tips, and more.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week.
This newsletter is free, but not cheap. It takes a lot of effort and time from my end (7~8 hours) to deliver this newsletter every week. You can help me in keeping it going by forwarding it to someone you like, leaving a testimonial, buying me a coffee ($1 or ₹75), sending me some crypto, visiting my blog or following me on Twitter.
See you next week!
With Love,
Rishi
Rome didn’t fall in a day. It was a decades-long crumble that saw a disbursement of power in Europe and a steady dismantling of the Roman infrastructure.
Quote from, Great Mental Models by Shane Parrish(Farnam Street!)
Resurfaced using ReadWise(FREE!)
How do you add a Reddit tag onto a search query?
Regarding next generation of search engine check out Neeva (https://neeva.com).
Also this article provides a good overview as well:
https://sariazout.mirror.xyz/7gSSTJ96SEyvXeljymglO3zN4H6DCgVnrNZq8_2NX1A