spacecowboy

[spacecowboy @_fatah_]

Gonna make it or die trying.

[Firefly Aerospace @Firefly_Space]

That feeling you get when you look out the window and realize you’re almost home! T-4 days until we land in the Moon. Blue Ghost will reach her final destination no earlier than 2:34 am CST on March 2. We’ll start the joint livestream with @NASA at 1:20 am CST, approximately 75 minutes before we touch down on the surface.

Set your alarms here: https://t.co/H6BSNuYQMi

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Starship launching for the third time from the gateway to Mars

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Starship will take humanity to Mars

[Nathan Baugh @nathanbaugh27]

In 2016, researchers at the University of Adelaide tested Kurt Vonnegut's theory that, "There’s no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers."

They took the emotional arcs of 1300+ novels from Project Gutenberg, turned that into data, used modern tech to analyze the emotional arcs, and then identified 6 patterns seen over and over again in western storytelling.

Here they are:

1. Rags to Riches (rise)

Your classic underdog tale. A humble, hardworking peasant climbs the mountain to pull the sword from the stone.

• Rocky
• King Arthur
• The Pursuit of Happiness

2. Riches to Rags (fall)

Maybe the saddest story of them all. A journey from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.

• King Lear
• Citizen Kane
• Scarlet Letter

3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)

A character’s doing fine, gets herself into a huge problem, but figures out how to overcome it. They often end up better than they started.

“You see this story again and again,” Vonnegut says. “People love it, and it is not copyrighted.”

• The Martian
• The Hunger Games
• Shawshank Redemption

4. Icarus (rise then fall)

The hero goes on a meteoric rise up New York (or some other) society, calls everyone “old sport,” and throws the wildest parties in town. Then reality sets in, and he realizes he’s too close to the sun.

• Macbeth
• Great Gatsby
• Death of a Salesman

5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)

I’ll leave this description to Vonnegut:

“We’re gonna start way down here. Worse than that, who is so low? It’s a little girl… the shoe fits, and she achieves off-scale happiness.”

• Red Rising
• Slumdog Millionaire
• The Count of Monte Cristo

This is my personal favorite.

6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)

Up until the ~70% mark of the story it looks like things are sunshine and rainbows. Walter White goes from high school teacher to king of the drug lords, if you will. Then all goes wrong. The original fall is often not their doing while the final fall is.

• Hamlet
• Gone Girl
• Breaking Bad

My 3 takeaways:

1. Rags to Riches, Oedipus, and Cinderella rank as the three most popular with consumers. AKA, those books sold the most copies.

2. When you think through a story, give it an emotional shape. Literally draw it.

X axis: Time
Y axis: Ill fortune to good fortune

You might be surprised how much it helps you craft your plot (I was shocked).

3. Vonnegut was a damn genius.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Starship will make life as we know it multiplanetary for the first time in Earth’s ~4.5 billion year existence

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

Flying horses, incest, giant serpents, patricide, talking goats, eternal punishment, & divine war...

A Brief Guide to (some) Greek Mythology:

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Whenever I get to know someone who seems perfect, I end up disappointed. Whenever I get to know someone who I think is the worst of the worst, I'm pleasantly surprised. Angels and demons aren't real.

[Sam Altman @sama]

born too late to explore the earth, born...at the absolute coolest time in history, about to be able to explore absolutely everything else

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

"The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday."

-- Erwin Schrödinger (1887 - 1961)

[Gagan Ghotra @gaganghotra_]

Haha 😂 Google started to index share conversation URLs of Bard 😹 don't share any personal info with Bard in conversation, it will get indexed and may be someone will arrive on that conversation from search and see your info 😳

Also Bard's conversation URLs are ranking as snippets for some queries as well 🤣🤣

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Steve Jobs had his best ideas while walking—this Stanford study explains why...

In 2014, a team of Stanford researchers examined how creativity levels were impacted by walking.

They conducted experiments with 176 participants that placed them in different situations:

• Walking on a treadmill facing a wall
• Walking outside
• Sitting inside facing a wall
• Sitting outside

In each situation, the participants were asked to complete a range of tasks that are typically used to measure creative thinking. For example, a test of "divergent thinking" asked the participants to come up with as many uses as possible for a set of objects.

The results were incredible:

Participants were dramatically more creative while walking than sitting.

In fact, one group of participants who took back-to-back tests, first sitting inside and then walking inside on a treadmill, saw a 60% improvement in creative output while walking vs. sitting!

Walking, indoors or outdoors, had a similar robust positive impact on creative thinking.

The authors concluded, "Many people anecdotally claim they do their best thinking when walking. We finally may be taking a step, or two, toward discovering why."

Many of history's greatest thinkers, entrepreneurs, artists, and athletes have believed in the power of walking.

It's a simple, free tool we can all use to dramatically improve our lives. Schedule more walks into your weeks.

Simple challenge for all of you:

Go for a 30-minute tech-free walk every single day this week.

• No phone
• No music
• No podcasts
• No articles
• No audiobooks

Just you, your thoughts, your gratitude, and the fresh air.

It’s a simple reset that will unlock new creativity and shift your perspective.

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it." - Søren Kierkegaard

If you enjoyed this or learned something, follow me @SahilBloom for more in future!

[spacecowboy @_fatah_]

It's been 4D chess all along ♘

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Elon Musk founded https://t.co/qgrrhkmGpj in 1999 during the dot-com boom era as an online payment company with a vision to revolutionize internet transactions. Despite facing challenges, including the dot-com bubble burst, https://t.co/qgrrhkmGpj thrived and later merged with Confinity in 2000, rebranding as PayPal.

Under Musk's leadership, PayPal quickly became a preferred choice for online payments, particularly with eBay users, and expanded globally, solidifying its position as one of the leading online payment platforms.

In October 2002, just two years after its rebranding, PayPal was acquired by eBay in a deal worth $1.5 billion in stock, providing Musk with approximately $165 million. The acquisition proved to be a strategic move for eBay, as PayPal's popularity and adoption among online buyers and sellers significantly enhanced the user experience on eBay's platform.

In 2017, Musk was able to buy back the domain https://t.co/80lHbrG8j8 from PayPal for an undisclosed amount tweeting that he bought it back because it had “great sentimental value” to him.

It wasn't until today, July 24, 2023, that he put it to use, rebranding Twitter to "X," marking one of the biggest major shifts since his takeover of the social media platform, which he acquired in October 2022.

[Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman]

A headline from 23 years ago:

[Sam M @samerps]

You can use Blender's geometry nodes to solve physics and electromagnetic equations such as Biot-Savart law. You can calculate the magnetic field of a coil anywhere in 3D space and visualise the magnetic fields. Additionally, you can see in real-time how the magnetic field lines change as the coil gets deformed and twisted! #geometrynodes #b3d #blender3d #electronics #Engineering #Science #physics #kicad #circuits

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Deployment of PSN SATRIA confirmed

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

The Statue of David is perhaps the most perfect work of art ever created, and yet it was carved from a rejected block of marble.

This is the story of the Renaissance masterpiece 🧵

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

On this day 2,346 years ago Alexander the Great died in Babylon after a night of heavy drinking.

But what made him so great? And why was he mentioned in both the Bible and the Quran?

This is the story of the man who conquered the world before he was 30 years old...

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I recently came across data on how we spend our time over the course of our lives.

The insights are simultaneously inspiring and depressing.

Here are 6 graphs everyone needs to see:

[spacecowboy @_fatah_]

if (!φιλία) {
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} else {
(πρᾶγμα);
}

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

We can use two trains to visualize how bias distorts our thinking. When you're free of bias, it's like being an unmoving train.

In this state, you have a clear view of others. Someone else's bias jumps out at you—you can see their train "moving."

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