Category: personal AnGoL

So what should you do if your social life is lacking? Here, too, the research is instructive. To begin with, don’t dismiss the humble acquaintance. Even interacting with people with whom one has weak social ties has a meaningful influence on well-being. [7] Beyond that, building deeper friendships may be largely a matter of putting in time. A recent study out of the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friend, an additional 40 hours to become a “real” friend, and a total of 200 hours to become a close friend. [8]

Source: How to Make Friends, According to Science – The Atlantic

Bourdain wrote about suicidal despair twice, to my knowledge. The first time was in his second crime novel, Gone Bamboo (1997) in which the philosopher-hit man Henry Denard finds himself in deep trouble with the mob, who’ve caught up with him on the island of Saint Martin.

Leaving the Mariner’s Club, he took the mountain route back to the pond, the scooter handling differently without Frances holding on in the rear… A few hundred yards ahead, the road took a steep drop down the other side of the mountain to the sea. The road was ungraded and unbanked; one could easily fly right off the side of that mountain, and Henry considered that option, toyed with the idea as if playing with himself, not serious, just to see how bad things were…
Bad manners to kill yourself. Realizing how drunk he really was, Henry started up the scooter and drove cautiously home.

Curiously, he wrote the same scene a second time, in a memoir, the 2010 Medium Raw; it had really happened. But the memoir relates the scene happening about eight years after the novel was published—in 2005 or 2006, after the crash of his first marriage to Nancy Putkoski, the high school sweetheart whom he’d followed to Vassar.

That’s where I was in my life: driving drunk and way too fast, across a not very well lit Caribbean island. Every night. The roads were notoriously badly maintained, twisting and poorly graded. Other drivers… were, to put it charitably, as likely to be just as drunk as I was… I would follow the road until it began to twist alongside the cliffs’ edges approaching the French side. Here, I’d really step on the gas… depending entirely on what song came on the radio next, I’d decide to either jerk the wheel at the appropriate moment, continuing, however recklessly, to careen homeward—or simply straighten the fucker out and shoot over the edge and into the sea.

Bad manners!? His manners were immaculate.
Bourdain was a very private man but there were things about him that could be intimated from his work. One of these things being that the real person, the man underneath, was troubled in some secret way, and that he needed to hide that trouble, to dress it up for public consumption.
I wonder whether this is not just one more bad thing about exceptionalism, the thing we are in fact not really getting away from. Parachuting in to enjoy the hole in the wall is still parachuting in. What if you still end up in the good hotel, the big house, the apartment on the 60^th floor? Maybe it’s the exceptional, special people with no faults, the people who have to perform “authenticity” flawlessly, all the time, for everyone, who are, who must be, the most troubled of all.
Did anyone ever ask him what that moment meant, or when it really happened? I wanted to, but I felt constrained, like it would be intrusive and rude to ask: Did you really almost drive off the edge of an unbanked road in Saint Martin? When? Why? How many times did you think about killing yourself? I think maybe your real friends knew something about that, but maybe not enough.
Even now with all I knew and have learned, I could believe anything about this gifted, passionate man’s death. Outrageous stories of every description came out after the reports of his suicide in an Alsatian hotel, and I could believe any one of them. I could believe that he was taken out by a hostile government or by some political enemy. That he just judged himself very hard one night and chose deliberately to end it. That he had a wild moment of uncontrollable panic. That he had a broken heart. Any of these things, or none of them.

Source: The Anthony Bourdain Interview

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” — John Meynard Keynes

Source: Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform

Anthony Bourdain had started smoking again, was the first thing I noticed as he sat down with me last February. He was a bit hung over from a recent working trip to south Louisiana for Cajun Mardi Gras; “Harder partying than I’m used to, I gotta say,” he said, laughing. Despite his great height his leonine head seemed just huge, and a little fleshier than I’d imagined; there was this slight dissipation to him.

But no—who could be troubled about the wellbeing of Anthony Bourdain? Just look at him, so debonair, so completely at ease. A veritable prince of savoir vivre. Sixty-one, and still very elegant in his looks; the word sexy came to mind. Almost an old-fashioned word now. The sort of person who seems to think with his hips, his hands. He was in love, he would later admit; he and his new girlfriend, Asia Argento, had started smoking again together. He was a little rueful about the smoking, had the air of someone who meant to quit soon.

Source: The Anthony Bourdain Interview

“No man is an island,” the English poet John Donne once wrote. Nearly 400 years later, if you’re into creative, ambitious work, that sentiment is truer than ever—collaboration is often essential. It also might not feel like your strong suit. Maybe you feel weird without your headphones in and would much rather work alone. But even then, chances are your efforts are part of a greater whole that hinges on your abilities as a collaborator to succeed—so you might as well speak up. It’s an area where we can al

Source: How to Collaborate Effectively at Work | Grammarly

A jumbo aircraft literally requires millions of parts, and innovations in any component can have important implications for the plane’s overall design and efficiency. For example, 3-D printing may radically lower the number of parts required by turbine engines and thus significantly reduce their weight (and thus their fuel consumption). To exploit these possibilities, innovating companies need to be able to connect to manufacturers elsewhere in a secure manner.5

This is exactly the opposite of what a sunset clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement would accomplish. And it is why Airbus recently warned that Brexit will have severe negative consequences for the United Kingdom’s aerospace industry. Modularization requires the ability to tap talent anywhere in the world. In Silicon Valley, over half the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workers are foreign-born, and fewer than a fifth were born in California, a state that, with 40 million residents, would rank 36th among the world’s countries. With US President Donald Trump’s clampdown on immigration, the neighbor to the north put billboards in Silicon Valley that read “H1B Visa Problems? Think Canada.”

But implementing many technologies also requires ingredients that can be provided only through non-market mechanisms, and here governments play a critical role. Consider high-speed rail. Without government authorization and cooperation, no private company can build a rail line. Western Europe has more than 14,000 kilometers (8,700 miles) of high-speed rail, and China has over 25,000. The United States claims to have 56 kilometers, in a short stretch that covers less than 8% of the distance between Boston and Washington, DC. The reason is obvious: this is a technology that, like the electric car, requires a social decision and a government that enables that choice.

In short, technology requires a society that connects to the world, both through trade and openness to talent, in order to exploit the gains from modularization. It also requires a society that is able to develop a shared sense of purpose, one that is deep and powerful enough to direct the government to provide the public goods that new technologies require. The first requirement is facilitated by a society having a broader and more inclusive sense of who is a member. The second is facilitated by a deeper and more meaningful sense of membership.

Developing these attitudes is not easy. It requires a civic rather than an ethnic sense of nationhood. This is why the stakes in today’s policy debates in the West are not just about values. In a competitive world, societies pay dearly for being unable – or unwilling – to deliver what technology wants.

Source: Does the West Want What Technology Wants? by Ricardo Hausmann – Project Syndicate

Avoid the “tyranny of the articulate”

In many engineer-driven startups, world-class debaters end up making many of the decisions. Ben talked about why this is problematic:

There’s this tyranny of the articulate that happens at companies…But there’s only a loose correlation between how good people are at communicating and how good they are at actually building stuff.

I personally think debating is a horrible way to get to any solutions. There’s this idea that vigorous debate yields results, but in my experience, vigorous debate yields people who vigorously defend what they think. As a result, they’re unwilling to compromise at some point because it’s a debate and the objective is to win.

When it is necessary to have a debate, Ben offered this important reminder:

Most debates never get anywhere because there’s no clearly agreed upon goal. So scope what the actual problem is; articulate the goal.

Source: Pinterest Founder Ben Silbermann’s Lessons on Decision Making, Values, and Taking Time for Yourself

The same advice I give aspiring writers is relevant to anyone, in anyone industry, who wants to become successful.
You have to share your work. Regularly.
You have to practice in public.
You have to let people be part of the process, because it’s through sharing that you learn and grow the most.

Source: Most People Who Want To Become Successful Don’t Practice This 1 Simple Skill

Continuing the series of posts on how to connect DataGrip (or any other IntelliJ-based IDE) to various data sources, in this post we’ll show you how to connect to Google’s BigQuery. BigQuery is a low-cost enterprise data warehouse designed to handle data analytics at a massive scale. Currently, DataGrip does not come with a built-in connector for BigQuery, so let’s connect the IDE to it.

Source: Using BigQuery from IntelliJ-based IDE | DataGrip Blog

Library Rules means keeping to yourself, keeping your voice down in hushed tones, not distracting one another. If you do need to talk to someone at normal volumes, grab a room. A key to making open floor plans work is also having private rooms scattered throughout the space. A place where a few people who need to discuss something in real time can jump in, talk it up and work it out without bothering anyone on the outside.

Source: Library Rules: How to make an open office plan work