Lucas Cherkewski

Let’s learn some cool things

Hit and Miss #437

Hullo!

I spent much of the day at Ottawa City Woodshop, finishing a side table build. They moved to a new space late last year, and it’s spectacular—there’s a separate, upstairs room for hand tool work, with wooden floors, high ceilings, and big windows. I’m not sure which of those I love most. (While light is important, never underestimate the feeling of a good floor!)

Anyway. It was great to be back, but I’m wiped from a full day of woodworking and a few nights of poor sleep. Straight to the links, then:

  • I love Winnie Lim’s reflection on getting better at the skill of learning, and how physical stamina is also important for enabling our brains. Relatedly, on learning, Nicky Case’s “How To Remember Anything Forever-ish” remains a fundamental piece for me—spaced repetition is such fun (lol, nerd), I genuinely enjoy opening Anki and working through the day’s stack.1 Anyway, here’s to a love of learning.
  • Anil Dash wrote an epic history and cultural analysis of Markdown. Even if you don’t know what Markdown is (it’s a set of text conventions for formatting writing), you can intuit its meaning just by reading it—brilliant.
  • Jeremy Keith’s telling of the three-day workweek sounds very appealing.
  • Ben Werdmuller imagines the “Zurich Protocol”, an anti-censorship mechanism for global newsrooms. And he does it by writing a story—an under appreciated format for sharing new ideas.
  • Christoffer Stjernlöf (kqr) writes in praise of keeping a slide rule in your kitchen, which: a) blew my mind; b) sent me down a delightful slide rule rabbit hole (I can see it being quite useful for furniture design and woodworking, with its ability to easily work proportions). That brought me to Eric’s Slide Rule Site (a .ca domain, go Eric Marcotte!), one of those delightful early-web sites that’s been maintained essentially untouched.
  • Epic video showing how a (quality) book is printed and bound. Those guillotine cutters are awesome / terrifying.
  • Oh, a 7,000-year-old wall buried underwater off the coast of France? Hell yeah.
  • If you’re looking for a book recommendation in these slow, quiet winter months, I’ll re-up my recommendation for Sam Wilket’s newsletter Forests in Her Mind. Sam recommends Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler, in her latest issue, which I picked up last weekend and am looking forward to enjoying.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

  1. Part of my love for Anki, I think, is that it gives you the lightest elements of gamification (here’s a queue of tasks to work through, you can feel yourself getting better at them as they come and go!) without the worst parts of it. Crucially: Anki has no social features, and there’s no “streak” to speak of; if you skip a day, it presents you your modified stack without judgement, and on you go. ↩