Weeklinks: color wheels, living in space, and how toilets work
8 things I found worth sharing this week.
5 COLORS: You may or may not be aware of Magic: the Gathering. It’s a card game where you build a deck of cards and essentially play a very complicated version of War against one or more other players. One thing that makes it complicated is the fact that there are 5 colors, or suits, or philosophies, for playing the game. White wants peace, Black wants power, Blue wants perfection, Red wants freedom, and Green wants acceptance. Each has its own ideology for how the world should be, and sees the other colors as potential obstacles in the way of that vision. ANYWAY, the thing I want to share is this fascinating article about how it’s possible to represent these 5 colors in a color wheel that cover a wide swath of ideology in a pleasant way, but what does the wheel look like from within each color? Surely Black doesn’t interpret White as just wanting peace, but rather see the desire for peace as a flawed strategy for gaining and using power appropriately. And, while it’s nice to see the color wheel from above, we’re each in the wheel seeing it from our location on the wheel, interpreting other colors from that perspective and also blind to how others see it from other perspectives. If that’s interesting, you’ll also love this article by Magic’s head designer, Mark Rosewater.
WANING AMBITION: The 5 colors led to a discussion about age and ambition and Meep shared this Atlantic article. Many of us are somewhere in our late 30s to late 40s and are experiencing first-hand this feeling of career ambition losing its momentum. From the sampling of people in this group it seems like more of us are feeling this than have an outlet to talk about it.
LIFE-PLANNING SYSTEMS: Jon Bell shared this amazing work-in-progress titled Cadence, by William Van Hecke. William describes it as: a pamphlet about my personal productivity and life-planning system, tentatively titled Cadence and jokingly titled Fetting Things Done. I love things like this, and also appreciate not taking them too seriously.
ART-MAKING BOT: A question: “What if I wrote some code that would automatically make a square of art every hour? How could I make it interesting?” Jon got to work and called the experiment ArtBot.
LIVING IN SPACE: I’m reading Wool (which is great) and recently came across the author, Hugh Howey, on Twitter. He’s had a couple threads about space travel and colonization recently that are both super contrarian and seem to be obvious at the same time.
Thread 1 (click on it and read it through):⛵️ A THREAD ABOUT SAILING ACROSS VAST DISTANCES ALONE ⛵️ I'm lying here on my sailboat in New Caledonia, having just sailed 800 miles across from Australia, and I figured I'd share some thoughts about going to sea alone.Then come back and click on Thread 2 and read it through as well:
I'm expanding on my thread about living in space for a blog post, and I'm realizing how very little of the argument against living in space has anything to do with the actual difficulties of living in space. Instead, it has to do with two great fallacies:🚀 A THREAD ABOUT LIVING IN SPACE 🚀 We aren't going to do it. Not by the millions, and probably not even in the thousands.Hugh Howey @hughhoweySince he’s a science-fiction writer, I had to ask:
@hughhowey Do you think science fiction has done an inadvertent disservice by relying on space travel and colonization as a given for so many stories? Or is there another reason why we collectively misunderstand the challenges of space?Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction also creates strange truths sometimes.
HOW TOILETS WORK: We sometimes think we know how things work better than we really do. Read this article below and then actually look up how toilets work, it’s not uninteresting!
WEEKNOTES It’s the Week of the Elephant 🐘 for me, and this week will be good if I write to 3 more people about potentially offering blurbs for my book, I get in some exercise, and I make some progress on 750 Words. Nothing too ambitious on the plate this week, which is nice. Full #weeknotes here.
BONUS: Oh, and I’m gonna finish watching Good Omens too. What a great show.
Thanks for reading. If this list of things isn’t interesting to you, you can unsubscribe here. If it is interesting, I’m always open to feedback and suggestions for improvement.
Have a great week!
Buster