27 Lessons, Arctic Weatherman, How to Survive an Asteroid and Tip of my Tongue
#27 of 10+1 Things
⚡ Welcome to #27 of 10+1 Things!
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Here are 10+1 Things that I thought were worth sharing this week:
💡 27 Lessons
I turned 27 last month and I thought of reflecting upon various lessons I've learned over the last 27 years in a short blog post. It's really interesting to see how my perspective and philosophies have changed over time. I had a drastic shift in my thought processes, priorities and philosophies in the last year as I read more books and met more people during my travels.
🧬️ Milestones in Human Evolution
Patrick Doncaster, Professor in Ecology at Univesity of Southampton has created a wonderful timeline showcasing the milestones in human evolution and history. The timeline starts with BigBang that happened 13.8 billion years ago and ends with the COP26 that happened in Glasgow in Nov 2021. At the end of the page, the whole timeline is rescaled to a calendar year with Big Bang at 00:00:00 on 1st Jan. Sun forms around September 1st and early signs of life appear around September 13. We humans just appear in the picture just 2 hours before the year's end!
🏭 Forgotten Ads
In an interesting read, Guardian has collected some deceptive ads by oil companies from 1984 to 2021 denying climate change. Over the years fossil fuel industry players have shelled out billions of dollars for orchestrating deceptive campaigns to delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis and its solutions. Some of these advertisements have headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our children” to “Oil pumps life” – creating an impression that the climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not solvable. Surprisingly, some of these campaigns continue to this day!
🌠 How to Survive an Asteroid
An asteroid strike in a now small-town Mexico killed all dinosaurs and all larger mammals on earth in a flash. In an interesting guide, Wired has explored the possibility of how humans can survive an event like that. To survive such an event from history, you have to be at the right place with the right plans. An event like that would freeze the earth and the only chance of survival is at tropical islands where you can find some plants and animals that eat them. Proximity to a river or any other water body is your best bet to survive at these places!
👅 Tip of My Tongue
Reddit is the only social network that I actively use these days and I found an interesting subreddit called Tip of My Tongue. Tip of My Tongue helps you to find things that you remember, but cannot name. Over the last 10 years, the community has managed to figure out things like movies, games, songs, articles, etc., no matter how obscure the description is. Currently one of the most popular unsolved mysteries from the forum is a fight scene where Jackie Chan accidentally makes and serves a pot of tea!
🙎♂️Person of the Year
Time's Magazine has named Elon Musk as the Person of the Year 2021 calling him a 'clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars'. Musk is a key player in a range of domains like robots, solar, cryptocurrencies, climate, brain-computer implants, underground tunnels and more. It is an interesting read to find out what made Elon Musk, the person who had the most influence of events of the year, for good or for ill.
📷 Arctic Weatherman
This week I'm exploring a photography series called 'WeatherMan' by Evgenia Arbugaeva. In the series, the subject is Vyacheslav Korotki, a meteorologist who is a specialist in the polar north. He lives in Khodavarikha, an Arctic outpost, sent by the state to measure temperature, wind speed and precipitation for the last 13 years. With a portrait of Yuri Gagarin from 1961 newspaper and a morse code machine, the place looks frozen in time and Arbugaeva has done a wonderful job in capturing those emotions. This is one of my favourite projects I have explored in a while and I don't know why, but I get this feeling of nostalgia when I go through the pictures.
“I came with the idea of a lonely hermit who ran away from the world because of some heavy drama, but it wasn’t true. He doesn’t get lonely at all. He kind of disappears into the tundra, into the snowstorms. He doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.”
📚 How to Find Fulfilling Work
I'm currently reading a book titled: How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric. This is a quick read (160 pages) that gives a roadmap for achieving the goal of finding fulfilling work. According to Krznaric, the 5 dimensions of meaningful work is money, status, passion, making a difference and using our talents. The book clearly examines each dimension in detail, pointing out its pros and cons with the help of references from philosophy, literature and history.
“Simply by devoting ourselves to work that gives us deep fulfilment through meaning, flow and freedom (though a fourteen-hour day might be overdoing it a little). Over time, a tangible and inspiring goal may quietly germinate, grow larger, and eventually flower into life.”
~ Resurfaced using ReadWise (FREE)
🎬 Becoming
I've enjoyed watching a short film titled Becoming by Jan van IJken, about the miraculous genesis of animal life. With the help of a trinocular microscope and time-lapse photography techniques, Van IJken captures the making of an Alpine newt in its transparent egg from first cell division to hatching. The first stages of embryonic development are roughly the same for all animals, including humans and the film observes this universal process; the very beginning of an animal's life.
🧵 Time Billionaire
In an interesting Twitter thread, Joe Portsmouth has explored the concept of a Time Billionaire. Average human lives for 79 years and if you're 47 or younger, you'll likely have 1 billion+ second left in your life, making you a time billionaire. Our society doesn't think this way and places more value on being a dollar billionaire. Even though Warren Buffet is worth billions of dollars, no young person in their right mind would switch lives with him. Time is the only thing in our lives that we can't reacquire once it's gone.
❓ Question
This is a section where I ask you a thought-provoking question:
This week's question is:
How important are book covers to you? Do you buy books based on book covers?
Comment your answer in the comments or by replying to this email. Like being anonymous? Use this form to submit your response anonymously. Curious enough to know my answer? Read it here.
📣 Shoutouts
Learn about classic vignettes of obscure stories from various cultures through Berkana.
Remember the old days and rediscover the magic of the internet with Land of Random.
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That’s 10+1 Things for the week.
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See you next week!
With Love,
Rishi
Thank you for the shout out Rishi. ☺️❤️