📚 How to use Twitter, 30 Useful concepts, Google doc newsletters, Remembering Daniel Kahneman, Innovations in juggling
I opened a grocery store + a lot more for the curious YOU
Hi, this is post #160.
This post was scheduled as well.
No new commentary to share. Allow me more space to share stories when I am back from the vacation. Let’s take a quick look at today’s post
And now, onto today's finds…
🐦 How to Use Twitter
Nabeel S. Qureshi terms Twitter (or X whatever you prefer) the serendipity machine.
It’s super easy to get bogged down by the ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ about this platform and ignore all the goodness it offers. Nabeel has attempted to share how to extract this positive value from the tool.
While he wrote this with Twitter/X in mind, you can take this approach to most other platforms or places of conversations.
A couple of noteworthy inputs:
Follow people who post insightful or interesting or amusing things. You can seed this list by just going through the list of a few 'index' accounts who have well-curated Twitter feeds and following the people they follow to start with … Don't follow accounts just because they're official or prominent on some way; … For some accounts, it helps to disable their retweets, especially they retweet a lot of stuff that’s irrelevant to you but otherwise have good insights.
Early on, replying > tweeting, if you want to gain followers and make friends. A lot of low-follower accounts try tweeting and get discouraged when nobody engages.
💡 30 Useful Concepts
Gurwinder shares a list of 30 useful concepts and ideas to spur our curiosity. I like two things about this list:
He goes beyond the usual viral ideas & themes that flood our feed.
He has provided a link to go down the rabbit hole for each of these ideas.
So treat this as a place to visit whenever you’re getting bored and are in the mood to explore. You’re bound to learn something new.
A couple of screen grabs from his post:
📝 Remembering Daniel Kahneman
Evan Nesterak curates a mosaic of memories and lessons from Daniel Kahneman. A lot has been published since his death last month, mostly in praise of his intellect and his contribution to behavioral science.
Evan just picked some simple yet profound memories that Kahneman left us with. These tell a lot more about Kahneman as a person & how he operated.
One of the many gems from this anthology.
What a beautiful read! I felt light & happy reading this one.
(via Readwise)
🪄 On Finesse
Wes Kao on the unspoken skill of finesse.
What’s finesse?
She has a good example to show it in action and why finesse triumphs.
And then there are some tips on how to build this finesse. I pick up a couple of them below.
I love this “improve your vocab” idea. We don’t realize this, but a lot of our ideas and our confidence in those get hindered by our choice of bad words. It always pays to become a better communicator by choosing the right words.
🏆 World of Quizzing
When I was a kid, I studied my GK books well, never missed an episode of BQC and regularly read the newspaper too. I appeared in the GK competition that happened at the School & City level. I won an award or two in those and started considering myself good at GK and quizzing.
In college, I experienced ‘Quizzing’ for the first time and realized that I was playing a different game. I was at the ‘vomit the facts’ level while the world operated at ‘connecting the dots’.
I’ve never gone back to quizzing since then. I do enjoy participating when presented with entry level quizzes. One of my teammates, Keerthi, organized a weekly quiz that became the highlight of our team huddle every friday. I miss those!
The following pieces take us to the world of quizzing.
1. The New Yorker who cracked the U.K.’s premier quiz show - An NYT piece about Brandon Blackwel who helped turn London’s Imperial College into a “University Challenge” powerhouse. The method to his madness is stuff from movies.
2. Talking about the movie, Quiz Lady depicts the heroic struggles of a game-show obsessed girl & her sister to cover their mother’s gambling debt. The movie gets absurd at many moments. Still, it's fun. How a TV show can mean so much to a kid (and a teen & an adult later) is a remarkable thing. I picked up an ear-worm in this movie - Watermelon Sugar. Try at your own risk!
Finally, India wants to know is my current favorite Twitter handle on the world of quizzing. Their newsletter is worth subscribing too.
🪦 Moodboard for Self Promotion
Sari Azout has shared another fantastic post in her Sublime newsletter. It’s titled “A moodboard for people who hate self-promotion”
It’s a mood board and it’s there to allow you to put yourself out there.
Simple, isn’t it?
There are two parts: 1) A compilation of card / snippets captured in sublime and 2) (and even more unique) a section for comments where everyone can comment & put themselves out there.
A couple of snippets from the 1st part.
You can explore the 2nd part yourself.
📄 Google Doc Newsletters
Alex Komoroske runs his newsletter “Bits and Bobs” in a unique fashion. It’s powered by Google docs & Groups. You can subscribe to his Google-group to receive updates when he ‘publishes’ a new post. The update mail usually gets the post, but he recommends accessing it on the ‘Google doc’ where he keeps updating the content as he learns more. The more fascinating aspect of this format is that it brings the power of collaboration & commenting that word doc promises to newsletter mode.
For a lot of newsletters (specially “Stay Curious”) I find that commenting is not an easy task. There are so many different ideas & themes that a reader has to 1) write different comments or 2) merge many different comments in one using bullet point or some such formating. Both of these are not super conducive for an engaging conversation.
I wish there was a comments feature more akin to google doc in substack, allowing us to do more micro engagement (highlight, comment etc) than at a post level.
What do you think?
And by the way, do check out his newsletter. Every post has at least one or two ideas worth noting down. His range of topics is fascinating as well.
🕯️ How Light Transformed Civilization
For nearly all of human history, fire was our only source of artificial light. Difficult to make and challenging to safeguard from wind and rain, fire was our first window into the darkness of night. Fire and the artificial light and radiant warmth it produced changed everything and helped catapult humans toward the modern age.
That’s the premise of Tony Morley’s BigThink piece “Genius and blood: How cheap light transformed civilization”.
He traces the journey of the source of light, and how their reducing costs made the speed of progress faster. A very unusual topic for most of us, but a fantastic read to put something in perspective.
Ask how much artificial light you can earn with an hour of work at the average wage. The amount has increased from 24 lumen-hours in 1750 BC (sesame oil lamp) to 186 in 1800 (tallow candle) to 4,400 in 1880 (kerosene lamp) to 531,000 in 1950 (incandescent light bulb) to 8.4 million lumen-hours today (compact fluorescent bulb). Put it another way, an hour of work today earns you 300 days’ worth of reading light; an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light.
(via Refind)
✨ Everything else
Michael Pederson’s street art is unlike any other. Imagination running wild! (via Rob Walker)
Innovations in juggling. Ironic Sans has a knack of finding super interesting topics and turning them into super fun posts.
And here’s the last one for today: I opened a grocery store. It’s like a heartwarming video transcribed to you as a beautifully written text. It feels like a warm hug! Grab your favorite drink, get cozy & enjoy this one, you will love it!
In case you missed, here’s the link to last week’s post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/8priteshj/p/moments-of-truth-anthology-of-reddit?r=2euf2
That's all for this week, folks!
I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.
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