Book excerpt I was thinking about:

“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.” (Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People)

Posters that changed the world:

The first one depicting a slave ship made me stare in disbelief for a couple of minutes.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2020/oct/07/posters-that-changed-the-world-in-pictures

Fall music rotation:

Some recent pics of my favorite music at the moment.

What my sled dogs taught me about planning for the unknown:

There is some parenting wisdom in here somewhere. I liked this.

One of the most surprising things about distance mushing is the need to front-load rest. You’re four hours into a four-day race and the dogs are charging down the trail, leaning into their momentum, barely getting started — and then, despite their enthusiasm, it’s time to stop. Make straw beds in the snow, take off your dogs’ bootees, build a fire, heat up some meat stew (for the team, but hey, you can have some too) and rest for a few hours. The dogs might not even sit down; they’re howling, antsy to keep going. It doesn’t matter. You rest. Four hours later, you rest again.

And you keep doing that, no matter how much your dogs want to keep going. In fact, if you’re diligent from the start, they’ll actually need less rest at the end of a trip — when their muscles are stronger and their metabolisms have switched from burning glycogen to fat — than at the beginning. It’s far easier to prevent fatigue than to recover from it later.

But resting early, anticipating your dogs’ needs, does something even more important than that: It builds trust. A sled dog learns that by the time she’s hungry, her musher has already prepared a meal; by the time she’s tired, she has a warm bed. If she’s cold, you have a coat or blanket for her; if she’s thirsty, you have water. And it’s this security, this trust, that lets her pour herself into the journey, give the trail everything she has without worrying about what comes next. You can’t make a sled dog run 100 miles. But if she knows you’ve got her back, she’ll run because she wants to, because she burns to, and she’ll bring you along for the ride.

Transformer-like vehicles are coming:

Seems like these should already be here.

How hops became the star of American brewing:

Hops are often likened to cooking spices. If so, today’s brewers have access to an enormous rack of choices. In 2018, America’s craft brewers reached for 163 different varieties grown here and abroad, their names often suggesting sleek sports cars: Mosaic, Azacca, Sorachi Ace, Strata. Though U.S. craft brewers make a bit more than 14 percent of the nation’s beer, they use roughly 32 percent of the U.S. hop crop. The rest goes to the mass-market brewers or is shipped internationally.

Over the past two decades, Perrault and his team have developed popular hops like Mosaic, Lorel, and Palisade and helped bring to market blockbusters like Simcoe and Citra. (Simcoe was famously used in Russian River Brewing Company’s Pliny the Elder double IPA, which for years was voted the Best Beer in America.) Last year, Citra became the most-grown aroma hop in the country, surpassing Cascade. (Citra has been featured in several beers made by Vermont’s Hill Farmstead Brewery, which some consider the best brewery in the world.) Sabro was one of Perrault’s team’s 2018 releases.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2417324/hops-craft-beer-popularity-future

The strange behavior and beliefs of Scott Adams:

In the past few years, Adams has gained some notoriety as a Trump supporter; having slowly moved from “vaguely all-over-the-place centrist who has some odd thoughts and thinks some aspects of Trump are impressive” to full-on MAGA guy, even writing a book called Win Bigly praising Trump’s abilities as a “master persuader”. Fellow Dilbert fan Miles Wray noted in The Awl that in recent years the comic has actually become more sympathetic to the Pointy-Haired Boss, reflecting Adams’ shifting allegiances. To me, this honestly seems like the logical conclusion of his strange syncretic belief system: this is a guy who hates drab corporatespeak but loves the ideology behind it, a guy who describes the vast powerlessness of life but believes you can change it by writing some words on a napkin. That blend of rebellion against the symptoms of post-Cold War society and sworn allegiance to its machinations couldn’t lead anywhere else but to Trump, a man who rails against ‘elites’ while allowing them to run the country into the ground.

I was previously planning to read some of Scott Adams work and still am, but I thought this was interesting background.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/10/the-adams-principle

Not as impressed as my friend, and I don’t understand:

Lastly, check out what we’re up to now.