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Articles to Read.
Cash is King: Flows, Balances, and Buffer Days
The median small business has average daily cash outflows of $374 and average daily cash inflows of $381, with wide variation across and within industries. The median small business holds an average daily cash balance of $12,100, with wide variation across and within industries.
The median small business holds 27 cash buffer days in reserve.
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Pro drivers are competing with gamers after F1 and Nascar Canceled Races
For many, the cancellation of major sporting events was the moment that made the coronavirus pandemic feel real for the first time. But while fans of baseball, basketball, soccer are left wondering when they’ll see players back in action, racing fans don’t have to wait — because many of their favorite drivers are already competing in online sim racing competitions that were spun up in the days since the first real world races were canceled.
The first few of these substitute sim races, held last weekend, were successful in ways that surprised even the organizers. Now, many of the people who put them on have spent the intervening week trying to figure out how to use that momentum to fill the gap left by real world racing, as fans around the world hole up at home in a collective attempt to slow the spread of a global virus.
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Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly.
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.
I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
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Breathing and Exercise: Strength Training for Your Diaphragm
The average person breathes more than 23,000 times a day, often without second thought. Breathing comes naturally to most of us, so we often don’t think about things like a proper breathing technique. However, using the correct technique can help maximize performance during aerobic exercises, such as running, cycling or swimming.
Breathing involves taking air into and out of the lungs. When you participate in aerobic activities your bodies uses this air to fuel your muscles so they can function properly. While all of your body’s muscles play an important role in your ability to perform, the diaphragm is among the most important. It’s the muscle that’s responsible for 80 percent of your breathing. This muscle’s main function is to support breathing, which can help your body adjust to increases in intensity during your workout. Like your other muscles, you can do exercises to train your diaphragm and boost your overall aerobic performance.
To get the most out of your breathing during these diaphragm exercises, make sure you focus on the following: The mode, The intensity, The frequency, The duration of exercise stress.
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Early newspaper printers had more interest in opinion and polemic than objectivity. There was little premium on facts—readers wanted the news, but they wanted it slanted. This began to change with the advent of wire services, where space was precious. In 1854, Daniel H. Craig, the head of the Associated Press, sent out a circular to his agents detailing a request for only “material facts in regard to any matter or event”—in as few words as possible. “All expressions of opinion upon any matters; all political, religious, and social biases; and especially all personal feelings on any subject on the part of the Reporter, must be kept out of his dispatches.” Wire reports couldn’t afford to expend wasted verbiage on opinion or local idiom—they needed to distill newsworthy content to its bare minimum. Doing so was a good business: the Associated Press packaged its content as the raw material that local newspapers could fashion into their own opinion and spin.
Facts sped up the rate at which news could be produced and consumed. This was a double-edged sword, since it led to an increased fear of “honest inaccuracies,” as Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, explained in an address at Columbia University in 1912. Soon after, the World established its Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play in an effort to reduce the number of errors in an increasingly complicated system of correspondents, writers, editors, and layout editors. Its work was mostly retroactive, focusing on catching deliberate fakery and printing apologies rather than fact-checking material before it went to print.
In 1923, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce revolutionized the role and purpose of facts. Their fledgling publication—Time magazine—would gather up other outlets’ work and edit it into bite-size reports and commentary. To ensure before publication that every printed word was objectively verifiable, they added another major innovation: a research department, or what we now call fact checking. (The working title of the magazine was Facts.) Editor John Shaw Billings crowed in 1933 that “We can ask what dress Queen Mary wore last Thursday and have an answer in twenty minutes.”
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To Get Good, Go After The Metagame
Real-world metas come in roughly two flavours: ones that are defined by external changes to the rules of a game, and ones that are shaped by a dynamic equilibrium of competition within a stable system of play. Unlike games, however, real-world domains have no set rules: they are vastly more complicated and interesting, because the rules change only when someone notices the rules have changed.
How do you balance between locating the meta and chasing boring fundamentals? The short answer to that is to do trial and error. If you can’t master a particular skill, drop back down to its component elements and practice each of them in isolation. If you don’t get good conversions in your content marketing, drop down to practice publishing at a regular cadence. If you can’t get a throw to work, break it down to arms, then legs, then body position, then into one complete motion.
How do you learn to do this? I think the best way to do so is to get good at a single, well-structured skill … and preferably, to get this experience as early as possible in one’s life.
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The Ingenious Way TV Logos Were Made Before Computers
It’s easy to forget that there was a time when every identity design or title sequence was made physically.
The 1969 BBC1 logo, nicknamed the “mirror globe” ident. The logo was made using a device created by the BBC to film its idents called the Noddy camera. With the novel system, announcers could control the camera remotely, directing it to pan and tilt or move both vertically and horizontally across a matrix of prearranged physical objects.
In another example, a 1983 video by HBO shows the behind-the-scenes making of an opening it made to introduce its new programming during the same year. It starts with a viewer watching HBO on his television in his apartment. Then the camera pans out through the window and through the entire city with an aerial view.
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More to Check Out:
- A cold outreach workshop/presentation
- New grad vs senior developers
- Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
- Record Rise in Unemployment Claims Halts Historic Run of Job Growth
- Letter to myself in late 2008 (Dalton Caldwell)
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My Update:
Working in SF.
Trying not to focus on the micro (long-term optimistic), but have worry about what will happen on the next payday. How many more people will be laid off? How many small businesses will close? Are we doing enough?
Finished a bunch of books: Three Women, The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone — (view my full bookshelf and recommend me books!).