Well I thought a nice bit of color and niceness would go over good. Spent the weekend in the hospital getting IV-antibiotics for a foot wound, and am home now doing great. My shortest hospital stay in a long time. Today is for being home and making a grocery list (haha). But you all should watch the nice videos, and look at the pretty art, hopefully it starts your Monday nicely.

Sometimes all it takes is someone to listen, and a cup of tea.

“I enjoy the process of freely imagining myself, following the inspiration I get from everyday life. It is a process of forming new creations by connecting various ideas and images encountered in the process of work, like solving a guess or puzzle. Exploring this infinite world of imagination and feeling energized through this process fuels my passion for my work, and I find unique and vibrant traces in the results.”

Check out more from Junwoo Park below!

 

Source: suzi long

That’s from Suzi Long’s portfolio, of fun birds with fun shoes. Starting off your week.

It’s currently welded shut. But if you could open it, you would find the deepest hole that has ever been drilled into the earth.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is 12 kilometres deep (7.5 miles). For context, the deepest mine is 4 kilometres deep. Cruising altitude for a passenger jet is 11 kilometres up. The bottom of the Mariana Trench is 11 kilometres down.

I really want you to understand that if you jimmied open that tiny rusty cover, there would be nothing between you and a hole that is deeper than the Mariana Trench.

They began drilling in 1970 and stopped in 1995 when they ran out of funds. The aim was just to try and drill as deep into the earth’s crust as they could. (Wikipedia says the company was liquidated due to low profitability, but surely no one thought “dig as deep as possible for no reason” was going to make a profit?)

Anyway, they made it almost halfway through the Earth’s crust. It’s hard to know how much further they would have got. Their instruments kept melting. (“At those depths, rock began to behave more like plastic. [The temperature] rises 25 degrees for every kilometre you go down.”)

We cannot even get to the Moho!

The Moho is what you get when someone named Andrija Mohorovičić discovers something (“MOH-huh-ROH-vuh-chitch”). It’s the boundary between the crust and the mantle, and is technically the Mohorovičić Discontinuity, but it just gets called the Moho. (Wikipedia page)

(A different attempt to drill through the thinner crust on the seafloor was called “Project Mohole”. It made it about a hundred metres.)

As an aside, I found out about the Kola Superdeep Borehole after reading about Theia and saying out loud, “I’m pretty sure this is a dumb question but could we get iron from the core?” so a point in favour of asking dumb questions.

Here’s some music.

That’s it for today. nothing profuound, since I’m too tired this week. Love you all.

Happy New Year!

Don’t Make a “New” New Year’s Resolution

You don’t have to wait until the New Year to make a resolution. And you also don’t have to make a new resolution because it’s a new year. You can choose to have less stress and more success anytime by updating the meaning behind old goals, picking a quick win to cross off your list, and by helping someone achieve something that matters to them.

That’s my advice for you all (and Psychology Today’s).

I’m hoping this will be a better year than 2023. Spent a lot of time in the hospital. Don’t like that. My energy levels have sucked, especially towards the end of the year. Got to figure that out. Part of the problem is chemo drugs, part is that food doesn’t always taste good to me. Even trying to choke down a scrambled egg is hard sometimes. No resolution will fix that, but I’ll figure something out.

I am starting a new thing though. 30 days of drawing for 10 minutes, each morning. I belong to a group that’s doing this so hopefully we can keep each other on it. I may post the drawings here also.

Release Thoracic Spinal Cord, Open Approach 14NOV2017.

This week is the sixth anniversary of my Multiple Myeloma diagnosis. It started on Sunday 12Nov2017 with an MRI that showed tumors in my T7 vertebrae. They sent me to the emergency room,, and admitted me to the hospital. That’s where I met my angel surgeon, Dr. Joanna Swartzbaugh, who, literally, saved my life. Or at least my ability to walk, such that it is. Two days later (the 14th) I had that thing in bold up above, Joanna couldn’t get an operating room before then. She took out a tumor the size of two golf balls from my spine. The scar from that surgery is the most wonderful scar in the world.

Three days later Dr Catherine Chodkiewicz did a bone marrow biopsy and confirmed my diagnosis of Multiple Myeloma cancer.

And that was the start of this journey. It’s had its up and downs, but six years later, I’m still here. I “endeavor to persevere”. And I will.

From Charles Hugh Smith on Self Reliance:

In my experience, these eight soft skills (as opposed to the hard skills of tradecraft) are useful because they help us organize working with others. I cover these skills in greater depth in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy (2014).

1.​Learn challenging new material.

2.​Creatively apply new skills to a variety of fields.

3.​Be adaptable, responsible and accountable.

4.​Apply entrepreneurial skills to any task, i.e., take ownership of one’s work.

5.​Work effectively with others, both in person and remotely (online).

6.​Communicate clearly and effectively.

7.​Build human and social capital, i.e., knowledge and networks.

8.​Possess a working knowledge of bookkeeping, spreadsheets and project management. Those with hands-on skills and these soft skills will be optimized for an economy that favors flexibility—skills that can be productive in a variety of environments.

That’s it for this week. Always have a plan B, C, etc. … As Mike Tyson said; “Everyone has a plan until they get hit.” Plan for the best, but have back up plans for when the worst happens.