Land Hurricanes (8/16/20)
Hey Friends,
Another week, another four lessons. Thanks for being here. If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, join Sunday School by clicking here!
I’m going to riff a little bit in this section today before we get to the lessons. Stay with me, here we go!
COVID Time
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we spend our time, and these days most of us have more time at home to be…not bored. Because of that, it’s time to use everyone’s favorite COVID phrase. Ready?
Now, more than ever, it’s important to think about the way we’re spending our free time.
One thing that seems to be true is that we all have a default when it comes to free time. There are activities we look to that naturally fill the voids in our days. It seems that we often think of these activities as afterthoughts, or things we only do once the rest of our lives have been tended to. This all makes a lot of sense.
But now, with more time to spend on default, that chunk takes up a much larger portion of our lives. The things we do on default actually do matter more here in the 2020 bubble than they did in any year before.
If we let default actions prevail without analysis, it’s really easy to lose valuable time to things that just aren’t yielding benefits for us.
So, my question to you this week is: what are your default actions? When you get free time do you plop down on the couch in front of the TV? Do you workout? Do you read? Do you play games? Do you clean? What is it that you do, and what is it that you’d like to do instead?
I don’t think there are many things we do in downtime that actively harm us, but there are TONS of things we can do that keep us from progressing.
Alright…on to this week’s lessons.
Homeroom
I’ve been working really slowly on my latest essay, but it should be ready to rock by next Sunday. If you haven’t read any of my personal essays you can check them all out here.
This week I want to share something I put together a few months ago.
Link: Best of Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers is a former business founder turned modern-day philosopher. He lives life so simply and devotes a lot of his time to reading, writing, and working on meaningful projects.
I put together a curation piece on some of my favorite posts that he’s written over the years. What I especially love about Sivers’ writing is that every post is really short and really meaningful.
Meteorology
If you live in the Midwest, you may have learned this word earlier in the week. Until now, I’ve been unfamiliar with the term “derecho,” but now it’s all I want to study.
Very simply put, a derecho is a wall of wind. It’s a straight-line wind storm that plows through everything and can cause just as much damage as a tornado.
The Midwest was nailed with a derecho this week with devastating effects. In some ways, a derecho is a “land hurricane” that can strike with almost no warning so it’s not really something you can prepare for. In Iowa, corn crops were badly damaged just before a harvest season that was forecasted to be a record-setting 15.3 billion bushels across the nation, with Iowa accounting for 18%.
What’s interesting about a derecho is how the wind wall is created. With a tornado, there is a varied amount of directional wind which causes the circulation and verticality, but with a derecho, the wind is only moving in one direction. This results in a horizontal spread of the wind creating this:
Biological Laws
In biology, there is something called Dollo’s Law of Irreversibility. The basic idea of Dollo’s law is that organisms can never re-evolve to a former state because the path that led to its former state was so complicated the odds of retracing that exact path round to zero.
In other words, many things are so complicated and have such messy “backstories,” that there’s nothing we can do to re-create them.
While this law is interesting, my interest in biology also rounds to near zero.
But good news, Dollo’s law has interesting applications elsewhere!
Think about how this applies to business or investing and there are two obvious points to consider.
Re-creating a complex business model is close to impossible. The complexity in events, people, ideas, timing, outside forces; literally everything that makes up the bones of a business, are so complicated that they likely cannot be re-created.
Things that are lost are often impossible to regain. Because we can’t re-create things (or situations), I think that makes holding on to the most important things that much more valuable.
My main takeaway with Dollo’s law is that we shouldn’t waste time trying to perfectly re-create something that used to exist in a past form. Any efforts would be better spent on a new version that’s applicable to today and tomorrow.
Art Class
Website/Artist: Mienar
I’m really into the animated art from this artist. This type of new-age art is so engaging. Although it’s digital, my thought is that it takes just as much creativity and vision to create as any classical piece of art. The digital medium brings in so many new possibilities that weren’t an option before, so the artist has to rise to that level of creativity to meet the expectations of art that moves.
Here are a few of my favorites:
These all make you feel something, more than a lot of art I’ve seen. It’s a cozy, rainy day vibe which is one of my favorite feelings.
Future of the Earth
Are you ready for one of the weirdest and freakiest videos you’ve ever seen? This video time-lapses the future of the universe and doubles in speed every 5 seconds.
Some interesting points along the way:
There are several large explosions/meteors/mega-volcanoes along the way
All life dies in about 2 billion years
The sun still has a lot of life left, but pretty much starts to give out in around 50 thousand trillion years.
Stars and particles in the solar system do a lot of weird stuff. There are huge solar events predicted throughout the rest of time.
Eventually, after 1 thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years (actual number), time becomes meaningless and the universe’s entropic decline is complete….there is nothing left.
What I just can’t wrap my mind around is where we fit on the spectrum of potential time in the universe. The amount of future time this model projects is quite literally unimaginable. There is amount of time we know to even contextualize the amount of time that the universe may have left.
Photo of the Week
This is the grand re-opening of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona where they had their first live audience since the COVID pandemic. The quartet played to an audience of 2,292 plants. What a way to come back! Here’s an aerial photo for effect:
Quote of the Week
"Whenever we learn about something, we learn to appreciate it." - Derek Sivers
That’s all for this week, thanks for attending!
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See you all next week!
-Ryan