Welcome to the Weekend,
What an odd week it’s been! Historic snow storms and subsequent power outages are currently devastating my home state (and loved ones) of Texas, we are being deluged with rain here in South Carolina, polar vortices stretch across the majority of the continental US, and all of this finds us still in the middle of a dangerous pandemic. I hope this week finds you pivoting and navigating change well. We’re certainly being afforded plenty of practice.
Here are the best finds of the week:
Linda Besner’s short essay on the “ungoogleability” of things. I really like her ideas about the limitations of the internet and knowledge.
Here’s a crazy statistic for you from the Divided Growth Twitter Account: “If you invested $1,000 in Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, by 2009 your investment would have been worth $4.3 million If Buffett had set up Berkshire as a hedge fund, and charged a 2% annual fee plus 20% of any gains, the investor would have been left with only $300,000.”
This short video from Solar Sands on the flat animation currently popular with major brands. My favorite part is when the narrator contrasts the flat images we see today with the “maximalist minimalism,” celebration of life of the art deco styles from a century ago. His ideas mirror the trends I wrote about recently in What Comes After Minimalism?
I took a deep dive into the work and legacy of, the Lady with the Lamp, Florence Nightingale. Most interesting to me, I discovered her graphs which communicated to the general public just how serious sanitation was to the health of their soldiers.
An excerpt: “In her diagram, each wedge represented a month, and the area of the wedge showed the number of soldiers who had died that month. The blue area showed deaths from preventable diseases picked up in the terrible conditions at the Crimea. Red sections showed deaths from battlefield wounds. Black areas were deaths from other causes.”
This week I discovered the British philosopher Susan Stebbing, who wrote in support of the democratization of thought in 1930s England. She tackles the question of what public philosophy – as opposed to the sequestered philosophy of academia – should look like in a democracy.
Currently reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Have a safe and warm weekend!
