Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

One of the things you quickly learn from any engineering career is that most things are optimizable. When you are a software engineer, you generally believe that it can only be done through technology. With the ubiquity of smartphones, nobody can argue that tech haven't augmented our reality.  Whether it has brought about more chaos than order into our everyday life depends greatly on who you ask. 

In my quest of optimizing my day-to-day, I’ve done my share of trying out hot, new, slick apps that often promise to change your life forever and other nonsense. I’m after all no exception to Douglas’ law [Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it]. But as it turned out, I’ve come to the simple conclusion that, when dealing with technology, “Less is often more”.

If you’re struggling to find the right tools, know that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Some pen and paper hacks are pretty awesome, maybe they would do the trick for you. Still, there are a three principles I like to share with my friends whenever they ask me how to get the best out of all these apps.

Disclaimer: All examples are for illustrative purposes only. Again, there are no silver bullets.

Source: The Correlation Between Arts and Crafts and a Nobel Prize

The average scientist is not statistically more likely than a member of the general public to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But members of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society -- elite societies of scientists, membership in which is based on professional accomplishments and discoveries -- are 1.7 and 1.9 times more likely to have an artistic or crafty hobby than the average scientist is. And Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85 times more likely than the average scientist to have an artistic or crafty hobby.

I guess now would be a good time as ever to pick up those piano lessons. 

Source: The National Geographic Buyout: Evolution or Assassination?

 For my forty years on this earth NatGeo has been an important part of my education. I’m going to guess that it will still produce incredible content moving forward. How honest with the evidence some of that content will be, however, is something we all now need to take into consideration. 

And that is exactly what's sad about the whole thing.

“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.”

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space