Martin Cagan: Principles | Silicon Valley Product Group (more)

(Kinda a pun in my head, since it's meant to mean "Persona" but could also be used as "Person A, Person B, Person C" instead of "Alice, Bob, Charlie".) (more)

is the most important planning movement this century, and is about creating a better future for us all. It is an international movement to reform the design of the built environment, and is about raising our Quality Of Life and Standard Of Living by creating better places to live. New Urbanism is the revival of our lost art of place-making, and is essentially a re-ordering of the built environment into the form of complete cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods - the way communities have been built for centuries around the world. New Urbanism involves fixing and infilling cities, as well as the creation of compact new towns and villages. (more)

I just learned about Seth Godin's Carbon Almanac ISBN:0593542517 about climate change. (more)

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Seth Godin — The Pursuit of Meaning, The Life-Changing Power of Choosing Your Attitude, Overcoming Rejection, Life Lessons from Zig Ziglar, and Committing to Making Positive Change (#672). When I hit like 35, “You’re just going to have to keep confronting the fact that you’re afraid and you’re not going to get better at this.” So I switched to telemark skiing, which is twice the work and half the speed. And I did that for 10 years. And then I switched to skate skiing with Nordic skis. And I get to still do that. (more)

Malcolm Gladwell on Saturday Night Live, German philosophy, the Lunar Men, and other examples of the "social dimension of Innovation". When they were not meeting, they were writing to each other with words of encouragement or advice or excitement. This was truly-in a phrase that is invariably and unthinkingly used in the pejorative-a mutual-admiration society... One person's passion-be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks-fired all the others. There was no neat separation of subjects... What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it "philosophical laughing," which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence... Jenny Uglow's book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two states-the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity-you create an environment (the BlogWeb?) both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. Is this a Creative Network or Social Network? A Network Of Learning? cf Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress. (more)

aka CognitiveBehavioralTherapy, see ReBT, see also Behavior Change (more)

diet and exercise program company

It’s the Age of Ozempic. Do We Need Weight Watchers Anymore? ...the night I first met Sima Sistani. This was a decade ago, before she became the chief executive of Weight Watchers. Sistani was working at Yahoo. Sistani’s career has been a winding one. After jobs at Goldman Sachs, Creative Artists Agency, and a short-lived tech startup, she became the head of media for Yahoo-owned Tumblr. Then the VP of media for Meerkat, a buzzy livestreaming video startup. Sistani and a Meerkat founder decided to stealthily launch a second live-video app, called Houseparty. In 2019, Epic Games acquired that venture for a reported $35 million. Sistani didn’t need to work again, but in 2020 she contacted Weight Watchers and expressed interest in advising the company on its digital strategy—planting a seed that would eventually result in the chief executive role. (more)

GLP-1 and Obesity. Let’s have a look at a paper that came out recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. It shows strong results in a therapeutic area that a lot of people have spent a lot of effort on: obesity (more)

Paul Ford: A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite. What’s Left? A decade ago I lost 100 pounds. I did it in my web-nerd way—by building a custom content management system using the Django framework in the Python programming language. Every day I would enter calories ingested (more)

Those Weight Loss Drugs May Do a Number on Your Face. People using drugs like Ozempic are discovering an unwanted side effect: facial aging. (more)

Why the Rolling Stones Wanted to Silence Robert Frank (Hint: Group Sex). Frank, who died on Monday Sept. 9 at the age of 94... he was a photographer who, in mid-career, having cemented a reputation as one of the premier street photographers of the 20th century, turned his back on that and took up filmmaking and then in late life a sort of photo collage wherein handwritten text was scrawled across the images. (more)

Edward Glaeser focuses on the connection Joel Mokyr sees in his book The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 ISBN:9780300124552 between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age. “What is new here,” he writes, “is not an argument that the Enlightenment changed history, for better and/or worse, but that its economic effects on the wealth-creating capabilities of the affected societies have been overlooked.” Mokyr has long emphasized the economic value of new ideas and he thus emphasizes that “Britain’s intellectual sphere had turned into a competitive market for ideas, in which logic and evidence were becoming more important and ‘authority’ as such was on the defensive.” (more)

The Lunar Society was a discussion club, of a number of prominent industrialists and scientists, who met regularly in the latter half of the 18th century in Birmingham, England. The society's name came from their practice of scheduling their meetings at the time of the full moon (in that time of no street lighting, the extra light made the journey home easier)... Despite this uncertainty, fourteen individuals have been identified as having verifiably attended Lunar Society meetings regularly over a long period during its most productive eras: these are Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Samuel Galton, Jr., Robert Augustus Johnson, James Keir, Joseph Priestley, William Small, Jonathan Stokes, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, John Whitehurst and William Withering. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society see also Lunar Men (more)

The transcendentals (Latin: transcendentalia) are the properties of being that correspond to three aspects of the human field of interest and are their ideals; science (truth), the arts (beauty) and religion (goodness). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals cf Plato, Transcendentalist (more)

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States.[1][2][3] A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature,[1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism

US equivalent (but predecessor) of the UK Bloomsbury Group, at least as framed by Susan Cheever in her book American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work ISBN:0743264622. The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Transcendentalists...

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA),[2][4] commonly known as the Royal Society of Arts, is a London-based organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges.[5][6][1] The RSA's mission expressed in the founding charter was to "embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufacturers and extend our commerce", but also of the need to alleviate poverty and secure full employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Arts (more)

book by Steven Johnson ISBN:1594489254 (more)