fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
How haiku makes you a better writer
By: Chuck J Douros
Tags: Haiku, Non Fiction, Poetry, Web Content, Writing

photo credit: (mike912mueller- creative commons)

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

— Edgar Allan Poe, nineteenth-century American author and poet

Writing poetry is hard enough. Now add rules, impose structure, and leave off the page as much as you put on. That’s haiku. It’s been said haiku is the very soul of poetry.

Haiku poetry requires structure and demands the poet follow certain rules. Contemporary “Western” haiku has exactly one stanza comprised of three distinct lines; the whole poem uses just 17 syllables, no more, no less.

The first line has five syllables, the second has seven. The third (and final) line has five more syllables. This 5–7–5 pattern is widely interpreted, and many of the traditional haiku poems didn’t always follow it.

Purists include a kigo in the poem. This is a single word, or short phrase, that symbolizes the season of the poem and sometimes includes a reference to nature or natural phenomena. Modern-day poets don’t always include this reference, but it’s always nice when it’s there.

Like this:

the snow falls briskly (5)

in winter I am riding (7) (kigo)

bareback on a horse (5)

By Chuck Douros

In the haiku above, “the snow falls briskly” is a slightly more subtle seasonal depiction of the season of winter, and “in winter I am riding” is more direct; both are examples of kigo.

I started writing haiku as a strategy to become a better non-fiction writer. Huh? That sounds counter-intuitive and a little crazy. How can a non-fiction writer become better at his craft by learning to write haiku? I’ll explain — it won’t take long. In a word: brevity. Haiku forces the writer to carefully select only the most meaningful words. It requires intense discipline to place not only the right words for the story, but the right order as well. Finally, well-written haiku is provocative and leaves your imagination running wild. The poem leaves an indelible picture in your mind’s eye. These are all very valuable traits of a good non-fiction writer as well. It’s too easy to regurgitate facts, figures, research, and data on pages and pages of ordinary drivel. Better non-fiction material incorporates all the style and brevity of a great poem.

In haiku the half is greater than the whole: the haiku’s achievement is in what it omits.

— Robert Spiess, American haiku poet

In 2010, I entered a national haiku poetry contest with a distinctly organic theme: truffle mushrooms. The elusive subterranean mushroom is prized in the culinary world and very hard to find in nature. My poem received the grand prize across the nation, was inspired by a friend who found her true love during a truffle hunt.

it was our first time

you and I unearthed much more —

now we search as one

All forms of writing benefit from thoughtful, careful, word selection. Take a page from the masterful American poet, Robert Spiess, and dare to leave off the page, more than you put on the page. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
How to End a Newsletter Email Using the Two Basic Closings
By: Daniella Mini
Tags: Newsletter, Email Marketing, Ideas, Email, Writing

The Newsletter Email With No Closing

These emails might include a brief message and are followed by links to resources, articles, or stories the newsletter is promoting.

Sometimes the email goes straight to a list of the articles recommended. I really like how The Good Men Project does this. The links are in a large blue font right under the featured image.

You can quickly scroll and find what you might be interested in reading. This is important when 10-12 articles are listed. By the way, some newsletters contain way too many links. I’d say 12 is too many already.

The Good Men Project

Brain Pickings by Maria Popova simply drops the few blog posts she’s offering (three at most) in the body of the email. This gets you to read the first sentence or two and, sometimes, through to the end.

Brain Pickings

In short

If the email contains more than three links, make the links stand out with a large font and a different color so the reader can easily scroll and click.

Consider dropping the whole story in the body of the email if you’re promoting one or two posts. The reader will only need to decide whether or not to open the email to know if they want to read your content. The fewer decisions and clicks, the better.
Create the Chrome Extension to Improve Productivity for bloggers and Release to the Market
By: Sean Hs
Tags: JavaScript, Software Development, Google, Project Management, Chrome Extension

Create the Chrome Extension to Improve Productivity for bloggers and Release to the Market Sean HS Follow Nov 30 · 6 min read

Introduction

People who work as developers or bloggers usually open a lot of Chrome tabs to collect information or references and turn them into markdown syntax. This kind of job is so messy that I believe that it’s worthy to solve.

There are two reasons for me to decide to create a utility with a Chrome extension.

We can copy contents, turn them into markdown syntax, and paste them without switch tabs or extra monitor

We don’t have to leave tabs for content that we haven’t read yet

I will only record a rough overview of this article. It will introduce the following sections.
50 Free Books on LGBTQ History and Politics
By: Kravitz M.
Tags: Kravitz M, Books, Queer, LGBTQ, History

LGBTQ folks comprise a unique minority group. Unlike race or ethnicity, where one is born into a family that often teaches them their culture, native tongue, and history, LGBTQ people don’t usually have relatives to learn from. We have to search for this knowledge ourselves.

The internet and the subsequent information age made this process far easier — unfortunately, it also made it less common and less effective. With the influx of information, much of it becomes shallow. The nature of online articles dictates quick, easy digestion, thus they focus more on compactness than accuracy and correctness. A concerning number of LGBTQ youth, especially, seem under the impression that our history and politics began with the Stonewall Riots (which in itself is surrounded by myths — according to Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, and LGBTQ historian David Carter, Sylvia Rivera wasn’t actually at the riots, and Marsha didn’t get to the bar until well after they started) and ended with same-sex marriage.

Gaining knowledge about the world before we entered it is a crucial pleasure, whether it’s done via timelines and descriptions of events or first-person accounts from certain time periods. When we learn about those who came before us, we often learn about ourselves and can better envision our future. The following is a chronologically-organized list of literature concerning the legacy of LGBTQ communities, movements, politics, and identity — not just in the United States! — that you can download or read online free of charge.

(Keep in mind that due to the publication years, some information will be dated compared to our contemporary understandings of things, but still informative as a product of their time.)

Books

Honorable Mentions

While the list below doesn’t consist of books per se, its contents remain valuable resources for uncovering the past of LGBTQ communities:
Solving for Publishing Dilemmas
By: Yohanan Gregorius
Tags: Life Lessons, Storytelling, Spirituality, Healing, Racism

Having my cake while feeding all of you

Solving for Publishing Dilemmas

Short-form Solution

Photo by Igor Rodrigues on Unsplash

I love KTHT; KTHT is my tabernacle and its denizens are my family. Yet our numbers are just enough for two companies and some of my battles require an army. Communication SNAFU’s abound and I fear my family gets lost to me. I think messages like this broadcast within KTHT can bridge the gap and I hope my Muse, our fearless 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊., agrees.

Yesterday I was accepted as a writer for ILLUMINATION-Curated and two of my pieces were published there.

This story completes the tetralogy that is the dMan (father) saga and ties it together with the story of my Mark of Cain and the very happy ending that such foretells.

This 5-minute read is a profound story of the meaning of past lives and soul healing. Please read and let me know whether you believe it’s a parable with a message that I have standing to deliver, a parable that I have no standing to write, or a true story, in which case my standing is unquestionable regardless of how one feels about the message.

Please and thank you.

YG

N.B.: The term SNAFU originated in WWII among the troops on the ground: “Situation Normal; All Fucked Up.”
Running Hot & Cold
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Humor, Global Warming, Comics, Climate Change, Weather

Written by

Daily comic by Lisa Burdige and John Hazard about balancing life, love and kids in the gig economy.
New Beginnings
By: Karin Cho
Tags: Book Recommendations, Books, Publishing, Books And Authors, Poetry

New Beginnings

I just published my very first book!

Source: Moonlight Confessions

Dear Medium readers,

I am proud to announce that I am officially a published author! My book “Moonlight Confessions” is now available on Amazon.

Moonlight Confessions is a collection of heart wrenching poems that I have tirelessly been working on for the last few months. Each page is filled with raw emotion and honesty as I transform my life struggles into pieces of art with poems, extended prose, and short stories about love, loss, and heartbreak.

I want to thank Medium as a platform and its amazing community for allowing me to earn the confidence and drive to publish my work for the whole world to see. It’s truly been a beautiful journey and I’m eternally grateful for all my followers.

Writing this collection was not easy. In fact, there was not a single day that went by without tears strolling down my face. I had to revisit some of the most terrifying and heartbreaking moments of my life in order to be in tune with my emotions. Afterwards, I would utilize my intense emotions and feelings into writing some of my favorite pieces I have ever written.

For those contemplating about writing your own book, go for it! I wish you the very best and hope you end up loving the process just as much as I did.

Sincerely,

Karin Cho
New Kind of Ice in Deep-Earth Diamonds
By: Yash Talekar
Tags: Technology, Diamonds, Earth, Science, Water

New Kind of Ice in Deep-Earth Diamonds

Latest discovery of ice in diamonds hints to water pockets in the mantle

To us, diamonds are renowned for their sparkle and colour, but to scientists, they’re the key to unlocking the mysteries of the Earth’s interior. (Source: Pixabay)

Inside the rigid structure of deep mantle diamonds, scientists have discovered ice crystals, hinting at the existence of water pockets in the Earth’s mantle. The ice was discovered in the form of Ice VII — a high-pressure form of water — which was not known to naturally occur on Earth. Further analysis of the ice by scientists also showed that inside the mantle, the ice is actually liquid.

The mantle is one of Earth’s layers and consists of solid and hot rocks under intense pressure. It’s divided into three more layers: the upper layer, transition zone and a lower layer. While there is some water in the upper layer, scientists suspect that the transition layer has 10 times more water. In fact, evidence already exists for water in the mantle region. However, Ice VII is a special kind of ice crystal since it forms under high pressure.

A graphic cross-section showing the interior structure of Earth (Source: BBC)

Put simply, when diamonds form, they can trap some parts of their chemical environment in their ‘inclusions’. So, it might have encapsulated some water from around the transition zone while the zone’s high pressure prevented crystallization. Once the mantle’s convection current moved some of these diamonds to the surface, temperatures would drop while the structure of the diamonds maintained the transition zone’s pressure. As a result, the water could freeze as Ice VII.

And as mentioned earlier, the mantle is mostly believed to be solid or made up of solid rocks and elements. However, before the discovery of Ice VII down in the mantle, some mantle maps had already shown hidden water pockets. This discovery of Ice VII strengthens the possibility of a differently composed mantle.

In fact, “geologists discovered these diamonds in mines in southern Africa, Zaire, Sierra Leone and China” (Gizmodo), indicating that this might be more than just a regional abnormality.

In the end, the discovery of water pockets in the mantle could influence the rate at which heat escapes from the planet and lead to new approaches for understanding the mechanisms of the planet’s exterior.

Surprisingly though, the discovery was not deliberate, but rather an accident. It was found while scientists were looking for evidence of unusual phases of carbon dioxide in those same diamonds.

Further Reads

Popular Science — Why so many diamonds are making science headlines this week

Science Magazine — Ice-VII inclusions in diamonds: Evidence for aqueous fluid in Earth’s deep mantle

Nature: CaSiO3 perovskite in diamond indicates the recycling of oceanic crust into the lower mantle
100 lições para 2021
By: Fabricio Teixeira
Tags: Visual Design, UI, Product Design, UX, Design

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Snap Snap
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Mental Health, Body Image, Comics, Addams Family, Humor

Written by

Daily comic by Lisa Burdige and John Hazard about balancing life, love and kids in the gig economy.
RE:[Cryptography] Paid SMTP (PSMTP)-5
By: Ersin Taşkın
Tags: Psmtp, Spam, Antispam, Science, Smtp

Dear all,

Thank you for your time. The discussions have moved forward each round helping me see different aspects and develop the idea further. I hope you also found answers to your questions and understand PSMTP better.

I remembered the question I asked my Molecular Biology professor:

“If mutations are harmful, how can they help evolution through natural selection?”

“Thank you for asking this question, Ersin. Keep in mind that the environment is evolving as well. A feature that does not fit the current environment can fit the future environment as long as it can survive the hostile environment. The bad genes of the past may become the good genes of the future and vice-versa.”

I think this explains why good ideas of the technology history were considered bad when they were first offered until they become successful. They become good ideas and succeed when the environment changes accordingly. Adaptation is a double-arrow.

If you think about PSMTP again, try to imagine the new environment of the near future rather than the present and the past. You may think about the impact of Cryptocurrency, end-point TEE, DANE etc. on the environment. Judging PSMTP becomes fun and fruitful when you do so.

Best regards,

Ersin
I Miss Libraries
By: Amy Shearn
Tags: Family, Kids, Books, Life Lessons, Parenting

We checked out our last stack of Wimpy Kids and Timmy Failures a couple months ago. We’re fortunate in that, for us, missing libraries doesn’t have to mean missing new books — in fact, I just placed an order at my local bookstore. But what I miss about libraries isn’t really the books. It’s the sense of possibility. I thoroughly researched the books I ordered from the store. At the library, you wander in, planless, browse the shelves, blithely judge books by their covers. My busy branch never has the book you’re looking for, which inevitably leads to finding the book you need.

Because libraries are places of abundance. Where else can you look at something, be only 13% sure you want it, and bring it home anyway, risk-free? Where else can you say to your children, “Pick out anything you want, anything at all.” I’m not rich, but at the library I could be extravagant. My kids and I could shuffle home under the weight of our books and scatter them on the living room floor, picking through our choices like Roman emperors.

What’s more, public libraries are forgiving in a way many cultural institutions aren’t. Kids destroy most things they touch for a good percentage of their growing years, or at least mine do. But whenever I’d sheepishly take a battered Boxcar Children book back to our branch, showing our local librarian the page that had been torn in a reading frenzy, she would shrug and tell us not to worry, and show my daughter a great Boxcar read-alike she might want to tear through next.

My casual attitude toward germs used to mean I was a relaxed mother, not a pathogen-spewing killer.

Yes, library books were always kind of gross, especially the children’s ones (maybe because of my children, actually — sorry about that). But it used to not matter. I used to be able to think, Okay, this Elephant and Piggie is mysteriously sticky? Fine, we’ll wipe it down, whatever. My casual attitude toward germs used to mean I was a relaxed mother, not a pathogen-spewing killer.

I miss not caring who had my book last, and even delighting in the evidence left behind by previous readers: the to-do list tucked between the pages, the bookmark from another era. Who knows how we’ll feel about sharing books with strangers in the future?
The skaters
By: Dan Mccarthy
Tags: Skating, Writing, Holland, Canal, Desire

The canal has frozen, and I’ve been handed a sharp pair of skates.

Look, everyone is racing by, propelled by the swift chock-chock-swish of their lusty strides.

The tree trunk that you’ve set me down on is rigid with cold.

I can’t put the skates on until I find the warm center of the tree, pirouette in the biggest storm it ever thrashed through, coat myself in the mud that froze around the scaly trunk when it fell, vanish into the watery center of its emptiness.

Look at them skate past. How did they learn all these things? What have they left me to discover?
An Injustice Newsletter #6
Tags: Millennials, An Injustice, Nonfiction, Culture, Publication

An Injustice Newsletter #6

Editor’s pick and Shoutouts!

Photo by Keila Hötzel on Unsplash

Hello everyone!

Really sorry for bringing this one to you a day late. Yesterday was crazy and I didn’t have the time. Unfortunately means there won’t be an editor’s letter this week, however thing’s will be back to normal come next week!

Editor’s Pick

The Impossible for the Ungrateful: Confessions of An American Educator — Solomon Hillfleet

So many educators find that the students they fight the hardest to save can’t be saved. The collateral damage is the students who love us and we never notice. The ones who could bloom if they only knew their worth. Students like myself who never got that attention because of the fires their teacher put out.

This one is just a must read guys.

Shoutouts!

To the Gender Queer Person Who Served Me Ice-Cream Today — Charlie Bartlett

Seeing other gender queer folks out and about during my day — shout out to You in Jane bakery; to You in Salt and Straw and to You who struts into my workplace to find a quiet spot in the poetry section on your lunch break.

What If There Are No Leaders Of Tomorrow? Only Servants Of Today! — Stephen Uba

You can only prepare for tomorrow, but you can’t change it, the only zone that supports change is the present, that is the only zone where our alleged ‘Leaders of Tomorrow’ can truly lead and majestically wear their crowns of transformation.

You Can’t Hate the Sin and Still Love the Sinner — Ellie Heskett

Love the sinner, hate the sin” is bullshit. That “sin” is a huge part of who I am as a person. You can’t truly love me if you don’t accept that part of me. That’s why I have family members who think they love me, but they don’t know the whole me.

Poetry;

I’m Not a Coward I Just Never Been Tested — Joe Váradi

I’m not a coward I just never been tested

Looked down upon

Made to feel small ‘n

Detested

Never been called out and compelled to face

A resentful mob

On account of

My Race
Bitcoin a disaster for our planet and should be heavily taxed, researchers claim
By: Behaviourexchange, Bex
Tags: Bitcoin, Environment, Electricity, Ecology, Energy

There has been a lot of discussions on the environmental impact and sustainability of Bitcoin. A scientific article by the University of Qatar now comes to the conclusion that due to the high energy consumption government intervention is necessary in the future. Thus, corresponding taxes could reduce its demand. In addition, it needs incentives for alternative blockchain technologies and new consensus modes. While these are finding more and more application, the Association Research Center for Energy Management emphasizes that the energy problem of blockchain is “solvable”.

Environmental impact of Bitcoin calls for government intervention

The growing energy demand in the crypto sector endangers the environment and sustainable survival on earth. This is the basis on which Jon Truby, a researcher at Qatar University, argues in his recent research. His thesis: By consuming huge amounts of energy every year, Bitcoin undermines global efforts to combat climate change and the Paris climate change. This overshadows the benefits of Blockchain, he claims. The huge trustworthiness of transaction security is overshadowed by Bitcoin’s deliberate resource-intensive design.

These verifications (known as mining) are now threatening the climate we depend on to survive, he writes. The answer? The government should limit the demand by introducing taxes.

Consequences of the Bitcoin boom: Mining creates a huge ecological footprint

While Bitcoin owners are happy about the record highs, the environment suffers. As the cryptocurrency analyst Digiconomist has calculated, theoretically 215-kilowatt hours of electricity are consumed for a single Bitcoin transaction. This is as much electricity as an average US household uses in a week!

The reason for this is the rising price of the currency. For businesses, it pays to upgrade their own computing infrastructure to mine for bitcoins or act as network nodes and receive transaction fees. Along with this, electricity consumption is rising.

In addition, it could be twice the currently largest Tesla recharge battery, operate a refrigerator for a full year or boil 1,872 liters of water. Currently, around 300,000 bitcoin transactions are performed per day. Even with conservative calculation, the energy consumption of Bitcoin is enormous. The minimum value assumed is 77-kilowatt hours per transaction.

The impact of high energy consumption raises the question of the consequences of the Bitcoin boom. The design of the cryptocurrency means that increasingly complex encryption puzzles have to be broken by computers in order to obtain new bitcoins. While Bitcoin’s idea is to bypass middlemen and facilitate more efficient money traffic, mining is a compromise to the environment.
The One Simple Trick I Use in the Morning to Start the Day Right
By: Michael Chi
Tags: Self Development, Focus, Habit Building, Self Improvement, Productivity

Why does it work?

It works because it forms a habit, and habits keep you going.

You are basically creating a habit of “if I do XYZ, then I will also start working”. Your brain will eventually connect an action that you were already doing every morning, to start working.

What’s easy about this method is that you’ve already won half of the battle. Half of this trigger is something you are already doing.

Notice that this trick has nothing to do with motivation. Because motivation is a myth. You can have all the motivation in the world but it’s useless if you don’t start doing it.

Motivation is something you get, from yourself, automatically, from feeling good about achieving small successes — Jeff Haden (The Motivation Myth)

But as mentioned, starting is the hardest part. The entire goal of this trick is to force you to START DOING. Once you start, everything else will fall into place. This will bring incremental success, which generates more motivation and momentum to keep you going.

By having a trigger, it can put you in a focused state of mind and allow you to concentrate on the things that are truly important.

Motivation comes and goes, but habits will stick with you for life. Even on the weekends, I find myself searching for meaningful work to do after I take the first sip of coffee. If I don’t start working right away, I feel bad.

Photo by Corey Agopian on Unsplash

Think about pre-pandemic times, when most of us had to physically go to the office to work. In a way, that is a focus trigger.

Because you had to psychically go to the office every single morning to work, your mind starts to associate that period of time with what’s coming next: work.

On the bus ride or walk to the office, your mind starts to prepare you for a day’s work by narrowing your focus.

This is why a lot of us experienced some loss of discipline when first starting to work from home because we lost that association. But we can create another habit to get ourselves “in the zone”.

It will be hard in the beginning, because forming a habit is hard. But hey I promised you this trick is simple but never said it was easy. But if you put in the effort, you will reap the reward.

You can also take this trick to other things. It doesn’t have to be work, but anything you want to pursue that you find yourself having a hard time getting started.
What Kind of a Writer Are You?
By: Bingz Huang
Tags: Case Study, Writing, Human Design, Writer, Writers On Writing

I’m so excited to share Aimée’s feedback on my analysis with you! Here’s what she wrote:

“As I’ve learned more about Human Design, more and more resonates with me. I’ve been nudged and called to lead throughout my life, but have been hesitant to do so until reaching my forties. As a young child and up to my forties, I struggled with accepting my unique idea and standing out from the pack. Now that I embrace my uniqueness I find it rewarding to lead and inspire.

Nature has been a grounding force throughout most of my life. I felt much more grounded and mindful when I worked as a gardener at a botanic garden. Now that it’s not a requirement to show up to garden, I need to remind myself to do so. Even going in the backyard and observing the creatures around me lights me up and also grounds me. It inspires me to daydream, and generate new ideas to share. I think being in nature is where I find the most wonder and joy. It’s where I feel the most grateful for this experience of living.

It is reassuring to see my Human Design chart reflect the aspects of myself that I’ve begun integrating in my forties. Yes, I am empathic. Yes, I am an unique. Yes, I am a leader. Yes, nature is vital to my grounding and mindfulness. Yes, I feel deeply and am inspired to share what I learn with others. I’ve begun saying yes to my innate abilities and it feels so good!”
How Well You Define a Problem Determines How Well You Solve It
By: Josh Spector
Tags: Life Lessons, Productivity, Leadership, Problem Solving, Work

How Well You Define a Problem Determines How Well You Solve It

A productivity tip from Albert Einstein.

Here’s a great Albert Einstein quote:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

Einstein believed the quality of the solution you generate is in direct proportion to your ability to identify the problem you hope to solve.

With that in mind, he believed a key to productivity was to invest your time in defining the problem as opposed to jumping right into dreaming up solutions to it.

To better define the problem, you can do the following:

1. Rephrase the problem.

2. Expose and challenge assumptions.

3. Consider a broader or narrower version of the problem.

4. Rewrite your problem statement from the perspective of different stakeholders.

5. Assume there’s more than one possible solution.

6. Use language to frame the problem in a more exciting way.

7. Reverse the problem and think about what you would do to generate an opposite intended result.

8. Ask yourself questions about the problem. Do research.

Learn more: Einstein’s secret to problem solving.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get 10 helpful ideas each week.
I Just Want Whatever Reopening Phase Lets Me Back in the Library
By: Purnima Mani
Tags: Memoir, Libraries, Covid-19, Books, Reading Life

I Just Want Whatever Reopening Phase Lets Me Back in the Library

As a child, books helped me find myself; now, maybe they can help society find its way back to normalcy

I’m an unashamed and unequivocal book nerd. Give me a choice between a thousand dollar shopping spree and an evening curled up with a favorite author’s much-awaited new release, and I’ll choose the written word every time. Save your judgment and scorn for someone else — my Myers Briggs personality profile says they don’t bother me.

I pretty much came out of the womb reading. Not literally, but I think it was maybe a few days after I figured out phonics and could string a few sentences together that my family lost me to the world of Enid Blyton. I started with Noddy, progressed to the Famous Five, and gradually disappeared into the Enchanted Wood.

The next fifteen years were mostly a book-induced blur. I emerged now and then to participate in quotidian tasks like school, or mandated activities like violin practice and holiday gatherings. Sometimes, I even deigned to make conversation at the dinner table, but mostly I preferred my fictional friends to the company of real people.
Is Your Cat Acting Aloof? Do This, And You’ll Be Best Buds In No Time
By: Erin King
Tags: Humor, Funny, Pets And Animals, Pets, Science

Is Your Cat Acting Aloof? Do This, And You’ll Be Best Buds In No Time

Stop struggling to bribe, pet, and (cat) nip your way into the hearts of frigid felines once and for all.

Image by author via Canva.

Let’s face it; we all feel judged by cats.

You know how it is.

You start a new relationship, they have a cat, and casually mention that they judge people based on how the cat takes to them. (Cut to jerky cat acting repulsed by you.)

Or you go to your friend’s house for the millionth time, and the cat still acts like they don’t know you.

Image by author via Canva.

Or maybe it’s your cat.

You saved that poor creature from a cruel life on the streets only to have them take you for granted and treat you like dirt. Like some common snuggle whore and meal ticket.

Stop struggling to bribe, stroke, and (cat) nip your way into the heart of these frigid felines once and for all. Science says the solution might be easier than you think.

A new study in the Nature journal Scientific Reports shows that it is possible to make a cat like you more.
Unlocking a Stats Hidden Potential
By: Dave Sellar
Tags: Management, Life Lessons, Leadership, Development, Life

The Day Job

For anyone that works in a sales-based job, you’re probably all too familiar with call boards and call reports. I know I am, and I hate them. Ok, maybe hate is a bit strong, but I’m not the biggest fan.

I get the sentiment behind them; no one wants to be bottom, and everyone wants to be at the top. It’s a pride thing. It’s natural, the issue is, at what cost?

I’m fortunate that the company I work for is forward-thinking. We still have call boards mounted on the walls, but they seem to be more for our benefit than anyone else’s. It wasn’t always this way, though.

As recent as a couple of years ago, the calls boards were the be-all and end-all.

Every morning and afternoon, without fail, they were monitored - For every incoming and outgoing call. They would display the first call of the day, the most recent call, call duration, amount of calls and average call time.

If the figures were low, according to the powers that were, you weren’t doing your job. If you weren’t at the top of the board, then you weren’t doing enough — This resulted in many employees merely playing the game.

They’d make hundreds of calls, top the list, but the calls weren’t moving them forward, e.g. phoning numbers that they knew would hit a voicemail instead of trying to speak to someone. It was ineffective and not a good use of anyone’s time, but it got them to top spot. It kept the boss off their back.
Some tips of a Data Analytics student at Ironhack!
By: Borja Uría
Tags: Git, Environment, Conda, Cheatsheet

Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash

Update: Added a tip for installing Python on your machine for the first time. It might seem very easy, but if someone is just starting to learn programming, this will be very useful.

Install python in your environment

conda install python=3.x (version you want)

If you don’t know what version of Python you have installed on your computer, you can always type the following in the terminal:

python --version

For install Pip you only write a few lines

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

python get-pip.py

Use a conda environment in a Jupyter notebook

A great trick is to be able to use your own environments with all their libraries in a Jupyter environment. I learned this from two great teachers at Ironhack (David and Pedro).

Under these lines you have the step by step to create a virtual environment to work on your projects.

1.- Create a new environment:

conda create --name the-name-of-environment

2.- To activate the environment:

conda activate the-name-of-environment

3.- To get a list of your environment:

conda env list

4.- In order to use our envelopes in Jupyter we must install ipykernel:

conda install -c anaconda ipykernel

5.- To use the-name-of-environment in a Jupyter notebook:

python -m ipykernel install --user --name=the-name-of-environment

6.- Now run a Jupyter notebook:

jupyter notebook

Now you can select the environment you have created with all the libraries installed and run your projects in Jupyter Notebook!
Bunny Rabbit’s Adventure in Suffering
Tags: Cartoon, Mental Health, Online Dating, Graphic Novels, Depression

Dale is a full time artist, writer, and poet. Born and raised in Indiana he eventually moved to Chicago. While there he graduated from SAIC. From there he wandered over to Ohio where he had a leather crafting business. On a chance visit to Asheville he decided it was too good to pass up. He immediately moved to Western North Carolina where he still resides. He’s hip deep in a daily writing challenge, and busy in the studio all the time.
Clean Up Your Home Office and You’ll Boost Your Productivity
By: Karolin Wanner
Tags: Work, Minimalism, Work Life Balance, Productivity, Remote Work

Clean Up Your Home Office and You’ll Boost Your Productivity

Messy home, messy mind, messy results?

It’s Monday morning, you want to start into your new work week full of power. You sit down at your ‘office desk’, the kitchen table. You look up and the other half of the table is full of dirty dishes from your partner's breakfast.

Your energy is transforming into anger. Especially when looking towards the sink which is still full of stuff from your family’s late-night snack. You feel the urge to quickly clean up and send an angry message into your family group chat, but the 8:30 am team meeting call starts in 5 minutes. You have barely time for a quick coffee.

Your Zoom meeting begins and you try to position yourself so nobody can see the mess in the back. You would love to focus on your work, but with the dirty dishes dancing around you, there is no way. Studies show our brains have a hard time focusing in chaotic environments.

We are all facing the same problem. Our home offices are a mess. As long as we cannot escape back to the office, do we have to clean more to keep up our productivity and focus?
Ghost or stalker? Meet Phooey, Donald Duck’s fourth nephew
By: Felipe M. Guerra
Tags: Funny, Comics, Disney, Pop Culture, Books

Ghost or stalker? Meet Phooey, Donald Duck’s fourth nephew

When an artist’s mistake becomes an urban legend

You don’t have to be a big Disney fan to know that Donald Duck has three twin nephews named Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They have been around for some time: artist Al Taliaferro introduced the trio in the comic strip “Donald’s Nephews”, published on October 17, 1937.

But have you ever heard of Phooey Duck, Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s long-forgotten fourth brother?

If you’ve never heard of him before, don’t worry: Phooey is not part of the Disney canon and, in fact, was born from the mistakes of some artists, who ended up fueling a curious urban legend that spread among Disney fans even before the internet!

The fourth nephew first appeared in “Mastering the Matterhorn”, a story drawn by Carl Barks and published in 1959’s comic book Vacation in Disneyland.

On one panel (left), we can see one of the nephews running from a Beagle Brother, while three others appeared in the background.

Wait, what? Four identical little ducks in the same panel? Apparently, Barks drew an extra duckling by accident. But the mistake would be repeated by Barks’ own pen in “Medaling Around” and “Beach Boy”, respectively published in issues 261 and 276 of Walt Disney’s Comics (from June 1962 and September 1963).

In the latter, the fourth duckling appears in two of the panels, and he’s particularly noticeable in the second — in which he observes his three “brothers” from the right end of the panel, with a strangely sad expression (below)!

The reasons for Barks’ slips are the most varied: from the tiredness of drawing stories practically on an industrial scale to the fact that the fourth duckling could be just an extra very similar to Donald Duck’s nephews — the prolific artist just forgot to give features that could easily distinguish him from Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

But except for specialists of Barks’ work, no one really noticed the wrong math in these stories.

Decades later, other artists began to make similar mistakes. In Bob Gregory’s “The Missing Mogul”, published in 1976, the silhouette of a fourth duckling very similar to Huey, Dewey, and Louie appears in one of the panels. In “River Run”, produced for the foreign market in 1980, artist Tony Strobl drew, for the first time, all four nephews together and fully visible (left), without shadows, silhouettes, or the possibility of being just someone very similar to the siblings.

José Mascaró did the same thing in “The Moving Island” (1984), where we can see without any doubt that there are four twin ducklings (below). Interestingly, Disney wiped out the fourth nephew in some of the reprintings of this story, which didn’t happen with other appearances.
First Draft vs. Final Draft
By: Michelle Richmond
Tags: Drafts, Writers, Writing

First Draft vs. Final Draft

What is the difference between the first draft and the final draft of a story or novel?

The first draft contains everything you wanted to say. The final draft contains everything you needed to say—those things that are essential to the story.

The first draft is likely to have more abstractions, while the final draft should be brimming with significant detail.

The final draft should not contain every detail you find interesting or clever, every detail that came to you during your many inspired and challenging hours of writing. It should, instead, contain relevant details that add meaning. Purple flowered couch may be less meaningful, for example, than the broken pot beneath the window. The purple couch is merely a matter of taste, whereas the broken pot indicates that something has happened—a break-in, maybe, or a more general state of disrepair in the lives of the characters.

The final draft may be longer or shorter than the first draft, depending on your inclinations, but it should be more focused.

I usually edit out many thousands of words over the course of my revisions, but some writers create a skeletal first draft and flesh it out later. I tend to write an overblown first draft and pare it down over time. Whether you pare down or expand upon your first draft, in the end, your final draft should be more focused. The associations among the various parts of your narrative will be clearer, and the themes will have been strengthened by the actions and observations of the characters.

The first draft contains everything you wanted to say. The final draft contains what is essential to the story.

The first draft is your baby, the thing you can’t let go of. The final draft is your concession that a book must be interesting, it must be cognizant of an audience, and it must make the reader want to keep turning pages.

By “concession” I do not mean that you have sold your literary soul, only that you have found a way to combine your best vision and your hard-won narrative skills, in order to make a thing of beauty that is both meaningful and entertaining.

Michelle Richmond is the author of four novels and two story collections. Get my weekly writing and publishing tips, or like my facebook page for book giveaways and more.
Your Intuition Will Whisper To You
By: Ye Chen
Tags: Awareness, Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Intuition, Entrepreneurship

Difference Between Intuition And Fear

From my own experience, I have often mistaken my intuition for fear. It can be confusing and it’s important to know the difference. After all, I don’t want you to pass up your perfect opportunity out of fear because you’ve mistakenly felt there was an intuitive warning keeping you from moving in that direction.

Intuition can be recognised as an inner guidance, a kind of knowing, or you might say an internal compass. We use terms like “hunch”, “a gut feeling”, “just a feeling”, and “instinct” to describe the way intuition influences our behaviour. Intuition lead towards a path that makes us feel comfortable, even if we are not certain.

Fear or negative emotion, on the other hand, can express itself through a physical response such as aggressiveness, sweating, an adrenaline rush, or a racing heart. Fear may cause us to run away and hide and avoid, and dictates a decision that makes us feel relieved, as though we just survived a threat to our very existence.

Don’t get me wrong, a sudden rush of intuition may be felt strongly as fear and certainly should be looked at, but understanding the difference is important if we really want to properly access our intuition.

Also, try not to use your intuition if you are using your head too much because then you’ll be using your ego and your intuition will not be able to come through. Usually, this is a place of fear, so it is not a good time as you will be too reactive. Instead, use your intuition when you are calm, not rushed and have time to think things over.
Michael Chabon Is A Nerdy Night Owl
By: Silvia Killingsworth
Tags: Writers, Writing, Ayelet Waldman, Michael Chabon, Profiles

Michael Chabon Is A Nerdy Night Owl

A profile of the author in advance of his new novel, ‘Moonglow’

Any profile of Michael Chabon is also necessarily a portrait of his marriage to the writer Ayelet Waldman—the two are “wholly intertwined with each other,” writes Awl pal Doree Shafrir. Waldman does a fair bit of the legwork herself in describing her husband:

“He’s never doing what’s fashionable,” Waldman said. “He’s always just doing what sparks his interest.” That, said Waldman, extended to Telegraph Avenue, which she characterized as “one of his great unheralded masterpieces.” She continued, “He engages with the emotional life of an African-American midwife in a way that’s so believable and authentic and nuanced and complicated. I know that there are some writers who feel like unless they’re actually fucking an African-American midwife they couldn’t write that character, but he did it, and I think he did it beautifully because he approaches writing women now in the same way he approaches men, with a humble openness.”

The fifty-three-year-old Chabon is most notable for this kindness and open-hearted approach to life. Perhaps it’s not unrelated to his resistance to Twitter, and his preference instead for Instagram as his main social network!

Moonglow is fictionalized autobiography (or would you call it autobiographical fiction)—the grandparents in the book are loosely based on Chabon and Waldman, down to Waldman’s struggle with mental illness. Indeed, the only thing that seems to have changed in the Chabon-Waldman household since we last checked in with them in the Times Fashion & Style section in an article entitled “Parents Burning to Write It All Down,” is a greater openness about writing about each other.

Compare 2009:

When they do write about their children, Mr. Chabon and Ms. Waldman check with them first. If the topic might be sensitive, they read the child sections aloud and ask for their permission to publish.

with 2016:

Typically, no one in the family asks permission to write about another member of the family. “We don’t ask that question. Our attitude always is, ‘You get what you get.’ That’s what it means to be the child, spouse, parent of a writer.

I presume this has more to do with writing about the children while they’re still figuring themselves out, but now that they’re mostly grown up and the youngest was the subject of a viral essay in GQ, all bets are off. (In the photo that went along with that 2009 Times piece, the husband and wife are pictured with fingers, hands, wrists, and elbows intertwined, Chabon leaning against Waldman, who sits sideways in a leather armchair, her feet resting atop what appear to be oversized leatherbound books. It’s perfect.)

You can read the rest here:
Heidi.news’ recipe for growing its members and expanding into new areas during the pandemic
By: Tara Kelly
Tags: Journalism, Resilience, Case Study, Membership, Media

2. Les flux (The flow) — 5–15 pieces of content per day covering science, health, innovation and climate. Les flux also includes Geneva Solutions, an English section, which is a solutions journalism project. It focuses on the UN and humanitarian community and is published in English. Les flux is published on weekdays.

3. Explorations — a deep dive into a specific topic published in 6–12 episodes. These long read articles allow people to slowly discover a topic and are published on weekends. Topics include digital addiction and the Swiss people who wait for the end of the world. Some of them are turned into a quarterly print edition called La revue des explorations (The review of the explorations). These allow readers to slowly discover a topic and are sold online and in bookstores.
4 Powerful Books to Help You Be Successful
By: Audrey Malone
Tags: Life Lessons, Book Recommendations, Advice, Reading, Books

A Favorite Pastime

Avid readers would no doubt agree that reading books is one of the time-honored, evergreen pastimes that never gets old, mainly because of all the endless possibilities to choose from and because reading is simply enjoyable.

A Pew Research study shows that reasons people love to read are many — learning, discovery, entertainment, enrichment, expanding the worldview, and escaping reality.

Pandemic reading is probably a way of escaping reality for some, getting lost in the pages of a good book — or better yet, a great book.

Great books are powerful and reading is amazing, and the four books that I’m recommending below are great books that do great and powerful things to the brain when read.

These benefits can help you on your road to success in anything that you wish to do or achieve.