In 2019, after years of effort, the I.E.T.F. released a standard for Network Time Security, a mechanism which adds capabilities atop N.T.P. in an attempt to make it more secure. (Time underlies much of the Internet’s cryptography infrastructure.) The expanding Internet of Things will only contribute to the ever-growing need for synchronization. Sharon Goldberg, a computer scientist at Boston University who worked on the Network Time Security effort, told me that she thinks time synchronization should have a cryptocurrency-like buzz around it (ideally with less controversy)—coders who contribute to it, she said, should feel proud enough to declare, “Everyone uses the software, it’s in everything, and I wrote it!” It’s striking how few people know Mills’s name, given how many know the pseudonym of whoever created Bitcoin.

It’s amazing how fragile our fancy pants civilization actually is, and this story is a wonderful case study into how hard it is to build a thing that can satisfy all the needs of our species.

It also serves as yet another reminder of how much it sucks dealing with time. Giving credit where credit is due: “leap smear” is a brilliant phrase.

This is preposterously nerdy stuff, but if you are into understanding how you could run Windows software on a Linux machine, this article is for you!

I have a habit of listening to podcasts and jotting down reminders to check out stuff that the hosts recommend, and then never ultimately getting back to consume that content.

I stumbled upon this video today while spelunking through my reminders app, and I felt like it was fitting considering (a) an upcoming thing that I’m really excited to share soon, and (b) it helps tie together the two most recent posts on this blog.

The part that made me go “ah, damn” was when she mentioned that most people who go through this exercise end up with some form of communication as their climate action.

After completing the exercise, the two things I wrote down were:

1. Do the podcast idea, build your network of “doers” in various climate fields, leverage the network to institute policy change and inspire others into action.

2. Do the podcast idea, discover a company doing something cool in climate (terrible pun), join that company.

The other thing Ayana warns in this video is to not start with your solution in mind, but dang, that’s just not fair, is it?

Either way, going through this venn diagram exercise gave me a lot to think about, and I’m quite curious to hear what you think if you end up doing this as well.

Rebecca Solnit, writing for The Guardian:

I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis. You can feel absolutely devastated about the situation and not assume this predicts outcome; you can have your feelings and can still chase down facts from reliable sources, and the facts tell us that the general public is not the problem; the fossil fuel industry and other vested interests are; that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, and that the obstacles are political; that when we fight we sometimes win; and that we are deciding the future now.

Another great friend sent me this last night after reading my Shatner post, and his comment was “it’s too easy and too unsatisfying to give up entirely.”

This article gave me the shot in the arm I’ve been needing. Maybe I need to start saying “okay, doomer.”

At the tail end of my full time involvement with JMG, I was pushing into the idea of climate work within mobile app development. As I was thinking of my next side hustle, climate work was the first thing that came to mind.

But as I started to consider where I wanted to go with focus, I started getting overwhelmed. There is so much that is being done in climate, and in addition to feeling unapproachable, it also felt like “what’s the point?”

My big idea was to start a podcast where I chatted with folks in the climate industry to hear the stories of what work is being done to clean up our planet.

Some companies I’d want to start with would be Ecosia (who is building a sustainable search engine), Treecard (which is a debit card that plants trees), and The Ocean Cleanup (which uses this dope-looking boat to get plastic out of the ocean).

This is supremely cool shit that’s being done, yet thanks to doomerism, I’ve felt paralyzed from starting.

Maybe this article will be the shot in the arm I need to start helping in just about the only way I know how: helping others make sense of the work that’s being done to solve this seemingly insolvable problem.

I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others.

Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”

It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart.

In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.

I had a chance to grab some drinks recently with a good friend of mine who I consider to be the absolute smartest person I’ve ever met.

As is often the case, our chat devolved into a brutal critique of the current state of affairs: the real threat of nuclear war in Europe, dealing with the ramifications of climate change, the weaponization of artificial intelligence, and so forth.

As we were wrapping up our chat, I got the sense that both of us were looking to each other for a glimmer of hope. Something that would allow us to go to bed thinking, “yeah, the world sucks right now, but we’ll figure it out.”

Wiliam Shatner’s observation about our species’ ability to be aware of such things might be the thing that we could have potentially used.

Our awareness is what gives us such existential dread in a moment in history that is otherwise the undisputed best time to be a human.

We need to balance our innate ability of detecting danger with our other innate abilities of strategizing and inventing.

After all, what’s the point of stressing about the future if there is no hope? What’s the point of fixing the future if we can’t also appreciate the present?

Seidel went to Eugene in late June, during the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships, for what is known as team processing, an administrative session to prepare athletes for international competition. They fill out paperwork and get sized for uniforms. And, new in 2021, athletes undergo a mental health screening.

Seidel answered the questions on the screener honestly—and her responses raised red flags. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) doctors, who administer the screening, referred her for treatment.

A USOPC spokesperson wrote in an email to Runner’s World that the test screens for anxiety, depression, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and sleep disorders, among other things. The results athletes provide are then flagged for follow up by a USOPC licensed mental health provider. From there, the athletes are connected to mental health resources.

“The screenings are not intended to screen athletes out of competition or off Team USA, but are a part of a broad approach to intervene and provide support to athletes who struggle with mental health, so they are able to achieve their goals,” the spokesperson wrote.

Seidel said she was connected with a new team of specialists, many in Salt Lake City. “USOPC set up everything for me and they’re continuing treatment for me,” she said. “Honestly it was so much easier being able to have them take the reins on it. And feel very much like, ‘Okay, they’re going to help me out on this.’”

I recall sitting with my therapist for the first time during my big depressive episode in 2021. I hadn’t said a word yet, and I started welling up almost immediately.

“I have no idea why I’m crying,” I said to her. I hadn’t even explained why I was there.

“It’s probably because you are feeling relief,” she said.

She was completely right. I hadn’t really appreciated the need to unload your trauma and to allow someone to help you unpack and sort through your anxieties.

I’d still say that 99% of the tears I’ve shed in the past three years came after being vulnerable and letting others help me.

I felt those same tears well up when reading this piece about Molly Siedel, particularly the section in the pull quote above.

Say what you will about our Olympic committee: this policy is a walk off home run. Kudos to them for offering help, and mega kudos to Molly for being strong enough to take it.

I’ve had the fortune of getting to hang around several Olympians, and hearing them share stories of the pressures they face is incredible. I’m glad they have an opportunity to get relief when they need it.

Moving your body, even a bit, has enormous benefits – again to almost all people towards reducing the probability and severity of almost all diseases. So can you imagine the benefit of moving your body for several hours per day in a natural environment, and including heavy load bearing and bits of extreme exertion?

These things are not speculative pieces of alternative medicine. They are known, easily and reproducibly tested, and proven to be the most effective things we can possibly do with our time.

So why, the actual fuck, are people still sitting inside, watching Netflix, driving to work, and then driving to the doctor’s office to get deeper and deeper analysis of a neverending series of exotic and mysterious and unsolvable problems with their physical and mental health?

Okay, okay, this got me to put the book on hold at the library.

What I find is that those who lean too much into this logic of optimization are the ones that suffer from a (literal) maddening degree of alienation.

It’s an easy trap to fall into as it is so very sensible: Why would you spend six hours cleaning (doing a chore you hate and doing it badly) if you could just work an additional hour and outsource that? So you hire a cleaner. And a cook, a personal shopper, an interior designer and a nanny. But if you don’t watch out, all your little self worth eggs, so to speak, are kept in the same work basket – and, step by step, you start to live the life of a stranger. You eat the food of someone else, wear the clothes of not-you, in an apartment that might as well be a hotel room, with kids that are more attached to their nanny than to you. Your vacations are glamorous, but there’s little connection to anyone or anything in them.

At this point you might start to feel a little unease. You might start to wonder why you’re unfulfilled and try to treat yourself better – so you double down. You get a PA because dealing with a schedule is annoying, you get a personal trainer because mens sana in corpore sano and while you’re at it, you also start therapy, where you learn techniques that help somewhat and where you analyze childhood events. But what somehow is kept at bay, in a fish-not-having-a-word-for-water-way, is that you identify with your job of optimizing processes to maximum efficiency to a degree that you treat yourself like any work project.

Boy, this pull quote within the bigger article here really struck a nerve.

Fortunately, I’ve been trying hard to not always make the optimaly decision lately. It’s tough to break the habit, but “good enough” often is just that.

"You become more resilient, and your body learns that the anxiety and stress isn't needed because there is no threat to losing anything when there's always more ways to gain what you want or need," says Papetti. "The only thing that's certain in life is uncertainty, so embodying an abundance mindset that trusts you'll be safe in the uncertainty is the secret to living a life of greater gratitude, ease, and satisfaction." 

Great advice in here for helping you to adjust your mindset. The journaling tip and the celebrating the wins of others tip are resonating with me as of late.

Style Guide Liberalism is only loosely connected to progressive politics. Really, it’s an expression of the worst kind of cynicism—the notion that we don’t really need to reform society or power structures but merely slap new labels on things. It’s a dodge, a pathetic sop to the left from corporations and other powerful institutions who at bottom don’t give a shit about any of this but assume that invoking on-trend progressive words and phrases will make up for all the injustice and misery they cause. As with any use of language, context is key.