Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #26
Tony's Pick
I’ve long supported the Long Now foundation’s clock project and the Rosetta Project. I deeply appreciate the focus on communicating millennia into the future. That’s probably why I loved this tweet thread about The Tripitaka Koreana. “52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss.” How can you not love that?
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Giancarlo Esposito enjoys a novelty-sized book |
Kyle's Pick
I listened to the audiobook of Good Strategy / Bad Strategy based on a recommendation from a couple of colleagues. The main thesis of the book is that most high-level strategy work is bad because it fails to offer a clear diagnosis, guiding policies, and coordinated actions to attack a problem head-on. Here is a longer summary from a UX designer if you’re interested in a slightly deeper dive.
My favorite story from the book is about building one of the first moon rovers. NASA engineers were arguing about whether the surface of the moon would be sandy, rocky, smooth, rough, and so on. One engineer who had grown up in the American Southwest said “The moon is most likely to resemble the Southwest, so let’s build and test our rover there.” This was at best an educated guess, but she saw that the team was stuck trying to account for many different environments and gave them a “proximate objective” to shoot for that was achievable.