12ft Ladder, Gravity as a Service, How to be Useful and Story of a Pickle Maker
#22 of 10+1 Things
⚡ Welcome to #22 of 10+1 Things!
Thanks to everyone who bought me coffee last week. Your support($1 or ₹75) keeps this newsletter up and running.
This issue is delayed as I was sick during the weekend. I also thought of it as a good opportunity to experiment with a different publishing schedule. If you have time, can you fill this survey so that I know what time works for you the best to read this newsletter?
Here are 10+1 Things that I thought were worth sharing this week:
🌏 Climate Shadows
Consider two people where A goes to work by walking to office whereas B takes a weekly flight to office. As flying is notoriously awful to the environment, in the first look A has a lesser carbon footprint and is clearly a winner. But imagine a case where B, the weekly flier is a climate scientist and A is a marketing professional for an oil company. In reality, who's contributing to the climate urgency? Clearly, in this context, B is the winner. Enter a concept called 'Climate shadow', that helps us to visualize how the sum of our life's choices influence the climate emergency. Unlike carbon footprint, climate shadow considers actions that are often forgotten like deciding not to have children, installing solar panels, giving up flying, or talking about climate change in everyday conversation.
This is a new concept coined by the author. What do you think about it?
❓ How to be Useful
The majority of us want to work on a project or a career that creates a real positive difference in the world. There is nothing wrong with that, but often the longing for doing good can get toxic and unproductive. Ondrej Markus has written a great article on how to be useful and make a positive difference without losing your mind. Prioritize on learning, play the long game, work on a project, quit faster and most importantly be selfish first to be useful.
Get good before you do good.
📱 Metals in our Phone
Smartphones have become an inseparable part of our world and are a common sight in the majority of households. In an amazing visualization, Visual Capitalist has broken down the critical metals that are present in a smartphone. Irrespective of the type of smartphone you have, 80% of the stable elements on the periodic table are present on all phones. But most of these metals are considered at risk due to scarcity, political issues and more. Also, many of these would have been mined from underdeveloped countries where people would have put their lives on the line, enduring horrifying conditions, in order to harvest the precious minerals needed to make your smartphone.
🚀 Micro-Gravity as a Service
Manufacturing on earth is subjected to a variety of constraints. For example, gravity prevents the perfect alloying in metals and the atmosphere on earth can sometimes contaminate various manufacturing processes. Manufacturing in micro-gravity gives companies and researchers many advantages like the ability to create near-zero temperatures, and a vacuum free from contamination. A company called Space Forge, from UK will be offering 'Microgravity as a service' by 2022. Once ready, the service will enable companies to conduct experiments, manufacture new materials or increase the purity or capability of existing materials in space, and then bring the results back for use on Earth.
In an era where Saas companies are ruling the world, here comes the next-gen of GaaS startups!
🏃♂️ The Hedonic Treadmill
As I've mentioned earlier, I'm exploring stoicism lately and came across the concept of the hedonic treadmill on Reddit, also known as hedonic adaptation. It is the tendency of a person to remain at the same level of happiness despite a change in fortune or the achievement of major goals. As a person makes more money, proportionally the expectations and desires rise, resulting in no extra gain in happiness.
🧗 12ft Ladder
While trying to do Covid-19 research, Thomas Millar was annoyed that 8 of the top 10 links on Google search results required some sort of signup/login or paywall. After a bit of hacking, he created a website called 12ft.io that bypasses any paywall or login prompt and gives you access to the site. These websites want Google to index their content and allow the Google crawler to cache the site. The tool utilizes this loophole and shows you a cached, unpaywalled version of the page.
Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.
The paywall is one reason why I stopped reading articles on Medium. It annoys me a lot!
🎬 Story of a Pickle Maker
This week I've enjoyed a short documentary titled 'Sandorkraut: A Pickle Maker' featuring queer farmer and food writer, Sandor Katz. The documentary explores how an HIV diagnosis in 1991 led Katz on an unexpected path from New York City to a queer community in Tennessee, and how he developed a spiritual connection with fermentation. Fermentation is a complicated yet simple process born out of the collaboration between people, time and microbes that make possible our favourite culinary staples like bread, pickles, beer, wine, kimchi and miso. According to Sandor, fermentation is a humble way of connecting with nature and he has even written a book titled ' The Art of Fermentation'.
🧵 Why Web 3.0 Matters
Web 3.0 is the future of the internet and will revolutionize the way we interact with the internet. One of my goals for 2022 is to equip myself as a developer for Web 3.0 and while learning, I found this interesting thread by Chris Dixon that explains why Web 3.0 matters. In Web 3.0, with the help of AI, machines will get along with users in content creation and decision making, transforming the way how we see the current internet infrastructure. Web 3.0 will be a human-centric internet that is owned and governed by its users, preserving privacy. The concept can be tricky to understand on the first go but Chris has done a wonderful job in distilling complex ideas into short tweets.
🖼 Parallel Universes
This week I'm exploring the works of a Turkish artist Uğur Gallenkuş, who creates dramatic digital collages to show the contrast between different parts of the world. Comparing a pair of side-by-side photographs often one of the Western World and the other from areas of conflict, he highlights how life can be so different for individuals despite living on the same planet in the 21st century. You can check out more photos on Instagram or buy his book online.
📚 What I'm Reading
Since I was not well, I couldn't read much and I'm still reading 'The Millionaire Fastlane' by M. J. DeMarco about getting wealthy and retiring in 10 years rather than 40 years.
I loved this quote from the book:
“Change creates millionaires. Those who observe and take advantage of change will be the new millionaires and billionaires.”
~ Resurfaced using Readwise (FREE)
🎧 What I'm Listening
Not a productive week, but I'm listening to Lazarus by Porcupine Tree on loop. I was addicted to this long in the past, but had forgotten that it existed until the YouTube algorithm did its magic!
[Listen on Spotify / Youtube / Apple Music]
📣 Shout outs
That’s Philosophical’s mission is to make the world we live in a more mindful place. The newsletter uses ideas inspired by thousand-year-old philosophies to help people live more intentional lives today.
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That’s 10+1 Things for the week.
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See you next week!
With Love,
Rishi
“Luck has nothing to do with it, I have spent countless hours on the court working for my one moment in time, not knowing when it would come.”
— Serena Williams
Moving forward, one out of 11 stories featured on 10+1 Things will be selected from interesting stories submitted by the readers of this newsletter. If you have an interesting story or article to share, please use this form or reply to this email. Every featured story will be credited with a shoutout link!