Look for thin slices of joy

Notice the joyful moments in your day, however small, however fleeting. Notice how good it feels to have that first sip of your drink. Or how tasty that first bite of food is. The pleasurable feeling of your skin in warm water when you wash your hands or take a shower. The moment of delight and comfort when you see your friend.

These thin slices of joy only last a few seconds but they add up! The more you notice joy, the more you will experience joy in your life.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/happy-happy-joy-joy-1.3804787/joy-on-demand-the-three-second-fix-1.3804789

Cherish the “garbage time”

Every minute can be “quality time.” All time with your kids — all time with anyone you love — is created equal. What you do with it is what makes it special. Not where. Or for how long. Or at what cost. Eating cereal together can be wonderful. […] There is no such thing as “quality time.” Cherish the “garbage time.” It’s the best kind of time there is.

https://dailydad.com/cherish-the-garbage-time/

Pull yourself together

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year…

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

CS Lewis, 1948. https://fscsmn.org/email-article/very-applicable-to-today-written-by-cs-lewis-in-1948/

“The world doesn’t owe you a living”

He didn’t judge a man by how many times he got knocked down but by how fast he got up. ‘Get up!’ That was his phrase, and it has echoed through my life. The world dropped you on your head? My dad would say ‘Get up!’ You’re lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself? Get up! You got knocked on your ass on the football field? Get up! Bad grade? Get up! The girl’s parents won’t let her go out with a Catholic boy? Get up!

Joe Biden – Promises to keep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promises_to_Keep_(Biden_book)

A 15 years-old girl living in one of the poorest regions in one of the poorest countries in Europe is abducted, sexually abused and eventually killed while hitchhiking on her way home. Authorities took 19 hours to locate her and secure unnecessary search warrants.

Yet somehow, a brainless Romanian politician finds it appropriate to avoid talking about the difficulties the people in rural Romania face when trying to commute or about the surreal delay of responding to an emergency call in an EU country. In an effort to shift the blame to the victim, EA says that she “learned at home not to get into strangers’ cars“.

Following the same logic, here are some more gems yet to be delivered by our genius politician:

• the 0.8 billion people on Earth living in hunger should better eat their food. EA learned at home to finish her plate
• the 0.6 billion youth people living in war zones should simply stay inside. EA learned at home to stay out of trouble
• the 44 million European people suffering from depression should simply get over it. EA learned at home that depression is not a disease

I could go on, but I’m afraid she learned everything at home and there’s no more place left for her to learn new things.

Biohack is just a fancy buzz-word for common-sense advice about improving your life. The most important ones are:

• sleep well
• eat well
• move
• spend time in nature
• socialize

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I am currently reading Solenoid, by Mircea Cartarescu, a surrealist novel that shows, among others, the challenges of growing up in Bucharest during the communist era.

In a nutshell, the novel is presented as a manuscript of a failed writer who teaches Romanian at an elementary school in Bucharest, hates his job and wishes to find an escape route from the confinement of his body and the three-dimensional world around it.

https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/solenoid-solenoide-solenoid-by-mircea-cartarescu/

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MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) seem to be the faulty mechanism behind the Boeing 737 Max recent failure.
If an outside sensor measuring the angle-of-attack reports that its nose is aimed too high, the MCAS is programmed to automatically lower it, allowing the plane to regain speed and lift. But if this sensor is broken (and it looks like there was no redundancy), then the MCAS will be incorrectly trigerred, causing the aircraft to dive.
A longer explanation here.

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– If you could convince an organization to take only one action to be more secure what would it be?
– Collect less data and get rid of it faster.

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That’s why I love the dark theme: pic.twitter.com/3iLD5VhEiK

— Dorin M. (@dorinmoise) March 14, 2019