Medley 135: Parties, Glimpses, Nectar, Aspirin, Cards, Capital, Cam Girls...
Happy Monday! I hope you've been staying warm and dry, unless you like doing cold plunges or something.
Let's see what's in the Medley this week...
New Notes : This week I added my notes on “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got,” a book on growing your service-based business, and “Unconventional Medicine,” a book on how we can better heal and take care of ourselves by stepping outside of traditional medicine.
Philosophy: This is a fun summary of “Being and Time” by Heidegger by Philosophy Bro, telling the philosophy of how time allows us to find meaning in our lives through the lens of a party.
Forecasting:Glimpse looks like a very cool project. They take data from Google Searches, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon, YouTube, and more in order to predict upcoming trends by extrapolating forward past search history. I’ve thought about doing something similar based on search volume data, so it’s cool to see someone actually doing it.
Matcha: My friend Mansal launched a company called Oyasin (they organized the hunting trip from a few weeks ago), and they have this really tasty drink called “Nectar” I’ve been having in the afternoons. It’s sorta like a supercharged matcha latte, with caffeine, prebiotics, and MCT oil powder.
Aspirin: This is surprising data: sustained aspirin use in old people did not prolong disability-free survival, but it did lead to an increase in major hemorrhages. Not good for the “baby aspirin for heart health” common recommendation.
Magic: I went down a card trick rabbit hole last week and found Shin Lim. The guys’ tricks are insane, especially when you realize that most of it is just extremely well done slight of hand.
Finance: I signed up for Personal Capital a couple weeks ago and absolutely love it. It’s like what Mint should be, but with more of a focus on growing your net worth instead of budgeting. They’re pretty aggressive with the up-sells since it’s free, but aside from that, it’s great.
Cam Girls: There are some great marketing, sales, and entrepreneurship lessons in this piece on cam girl economics. One of the most surprising parts is just how much good cam girls make, as much as $50,000 per month.
Coral : We did a Made You Think episode on Happy Accidents a while ago and this is a perfect example of it: A man accidentally discovered how to make coral grow 40x faster by breaking it into smaller pieces, and now he’s postponing retirement to use it to save the reefs. Pretty cool.
Design: I love this idea of “tiny wins” in design. Once you start thinking about them, you can see where they’ve been done all over the web (and in devices), but I imagine they’re extremely difficult to think up. This is the kind of stuff designers don’t get enough appreciation for: little ideas that we never notice that make our lives better.
Did you find anything particularly interesting last week? Send it my way :)
Have a great week!
Nat