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"The life of society can only be improved by the self-denial of the individual" -- Tolstoy

They say that one swallow does not make summer. But is it not precisely because one swallow does not make summer that the swallow which cannot sense the onset of summer but simply waits for it to arrive will never fly? If you had to wait for every bud to blossom and every blade of grass to grow, then you would never have a summer. In just the same way, in the process of establishing God's kingdom on earth we don't need to think whether we are the first or the thousandth swallow. -- Tolstoy

Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part! should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.

The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

James Baldwin

This guy's walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can't get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, "Hey you, can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up "Father, I'm down in this hole, can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey Joe, it's me, can you help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here." The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before, and I know the way out."

John Spencer as Leo McGarry on The West Wing

Scalzi has a way with words

Vox's Best Advice from 2023

As with any of these lists, I like some more than others. Here are my favorites from their list.

Have one meaningful face-to-face conversation every day

I love this advice and I'm going to try and pursue this as much as I'm able.

Start a niche, ritualized social activity

This is an interesting one. Basically it is about starting a "group" and using that as a vehicle for building friendships. It's easier to invite someone to your "thing" rather than to one on one hang outs.

Apologizing is more than saying you’re sorry

While I think I am good at apologizing, it is a continued practice and not something you just are. So a reminder of how to apologize properly and not performatively is important.

Make purposeful activities a regular part of your life

This echoes something I've said for a longtime, about the ease with which we consume content and purposeful things other people do rather than doing them ourselves. (This is not against enjoying media, just that it is very easy to binge and watch and ignore doing other things.)

Give yourself permission to quit

A hugely important lesson. My enjoyment of reading books has increased immensely when I gave myself permission to abandon books I wasn't enjoying. Same for TV shows, and projects.

Delight vs. Joy

Delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting. - Ross Gay

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design

1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .
3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.
4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.
5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.
6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.
8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.
9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.
10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.
11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.
12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.
13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.
14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".
15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.
16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.
17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.
18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.
19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up.
20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
21. (Larrabee's Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.
22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)
23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.
24. It's called a "Work Breakdown Structure" because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.
25. (Bowden's Law) Following a testing failure, it's always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.
26. (Montemerlo's Law) Don't do nuthin' dumb.
27. (Varsi's Law) Schedules only move in one direction.
28. (Ranger's Law) There ain't no such thing as a free launch.
29. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.
30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.
31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
32. (Atkin's Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don't show up.
33. (Patton's Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.
34. (Roosevelt's Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.
35. (de Saint-Exupery's Law of Design) A designer knows that they have achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.
37. (Henshaw's Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.
38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.
39. Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.
40. (McBryan's Law) You can't make it better until you make it work.
41. There's never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there's always enough time to do it over.
42. If there's not a flight program, there's no money. If there is a flight program, there's no time.
43. You really understand something the third time you see it (or the first time you teach it.)
44. (Lachance's Law) "Plenty of time" becomes "not enough time" in a very short time.
45. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit because most of the analysis was right...)

Italian Wisdom

A tavola non s’invecchia

Translates to:

At the table, one does not grow old

Wisdom

A friend of mine shared this wonderful sentiment from another person's social media post. While I don't have any children, I do have an aging dog who requires more care:

Whenever I'm having a tough parenting day I like to pretend I've traveled back from the future to spend just one more day with my baby. It always helps me gain perspective.

"You are a perishable item. Live accordingly."

Had that quote pop up from when I posted it on Facebook ten years ago. A good reminder for us all.

Unwritten Rules from Reddit

Threads like this come up from time to time and they are mostly regurgitations, but these are a few of my favorites:

Surround yourself with people who will mention your name in a room full of opportunities.

Your mental health isn't your fault, but it is your responsibility.

If a kid has a lemonade stand set up, stop and buy a cup. Or two.

Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. - Kevin Kelly

An importand reminder

Don't sweat the small stuff.

P.S. - It's all small stuff.

I don't know who originally said it, but it's a quote I try to live by.

"The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on the Art of Noticing and What Artists Can Learn from Naturalists"

Maria Popova's blog is among my favorites as she highlights wisdoms, insights and takeaways from great minds. Today's post from John Burroughs is no exception:

Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often amused myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on opening eye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What would he see? Perhaps not the invisible — not the odours of flowers nor the fever germs in the air — not the infinitely small of the microscope nor the infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not more eyes so much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but would he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of vision? At any rate some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a spent or impotent bullet.

Please go read the full entry for her highlights and quotes from the great naturalist.

DARPA's Heilmeier Catechism

DARPA operates on the principle that generating big rewards requires taking big risks. But how does the Agency determine what risks are worth taking?

George H. Heilmeier, a former DARPA director (1975-1977), crafted a set of questions known as the "Heilmeier Catechism" to help Agency officials think through and evaluate proposed research programs.

• What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
• How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
• What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
• Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
• What are the risks?
• How much will it cost?
• How long will it take?
• What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?

Four years since his death. My brother reminded me of this tweet and it is so important to remember and believe.

Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness

Shuvomoy Das Gupta went and distilled and collected a lot of advice from Donald Knuth, noted mathematician and computer scientist. I don't agree with everything Knuth puts forward, but a great deal of it resonated with me.

On scheduling daily activities. "I schedule my activities in a somewhat peculiar way. Every day I look at the things that I'm ready to do, and choose the one that I like the least, the one that's least fun — the task that I would most like to procrastinate from doing, but for which I have no good reason for procrastination. This scheduling rule is paradoxical because you might think that I'm never enjoying my work at all; but precisely the opposite is the case, because I like to finish a project. It feels good to know that I've gotten through the hurdles."

The Value of Mentorship

I got turned onto Van's YouTube channel through his brother Casey, as I'm sure the vast majority of his audience did. Van's videos are hit or miss for me, but this one was super interesting. He discusses working for Tom Sachs. I particularly liked this insight from Tom to Van:

And probably the most valuable technique that Tom taught me was that that is where your best work is going to come from. This unintentional subconscious like utility to solve a problem, a series of problems. It's not intellectually driven the way that the art historians would have you believe.

Found on my Facebook memories from eight years ago, it's an excerpt from an AMA Neil deGrasse Tyson did on Reddit at the time. These days I find him more and more annoying, but what he says here is still good advice:

Q: What can you tell a young man looking for motivation in life itself?

A: The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.