June 2014 Articles

Do your work, your best work, the work that matters to you. For some people, you can say, “hey, it’s not for you.” That’s okay. If you try to delight the undelightable, you’ve made yourself miserable for no reason.

It’s sort of silly to make yourself miserable, but at least you ought to reserve it for times when you have a good reason.

It’s been about three months since things ended, and for the most part, I try to avoid the remnants of him. I threw out his toothbrush. I don’t go to our favorite bar where we had our first date. When I have to be in his neighborhood, I refuse to walk down his street. I don’t listen to the radio on Sundays, because that’s something we would do together and now the sound of our favorite announcer’s voice makes my skin crawl.

But for some reason, I just can’t delete this one digital file. This stupid reminder of a thing I don’t even remember in the first place.

Using #LikeAGirl as an insult is a hard knock against any adolescent girl. And since the rest of puberty’s really no picnic either, it’s easy to see what a huge impact it can have on a girl’s self-confidence.

We’re kicking off an epic battle to make sure that girls everywhere keep their confidence throughout puberty and beyond, and making a start by showing them that doing it #LikeAGirl is an awesome thing.

When two people cooperate, they move along a continuum to a spot that is not ideal for either but that is more beneficial for the overall result. The adjustment comes at a personal cost–professional, emotional, reputational or financial. The cost is by no means lessened by the possibility of sharing the benefits. To cooperate, people need to come together, understand each other’s needs and produce a result that’s more than the sum of its parts. When you try to accomplish that, tensions can rise and people’s emotions towards each other can intensify.

…we have three wildly disparate time scales in play: millions, billions and trillions. Rounding to the nearest 20, we have:

1. Time for intelligent life to fill a galaxy: super short 20 million years
2. Time for intelligent life to evolve in a galaxy: moderate 20 billion years
3. Time of universe to keep having stars: super long 20 trillion years

The first perspective shift is to step back in time, and realize the universe is very young. With 20 trillion years of star generation ahead, the universe has only covered 13.7 billion years or roughly .07% of its life span. Compare this to a person who expects to live 70 years, and you’d get .07% * 70 years = roughly 18 days. So in human terms the universe is a three week old baby. No wonder there’s not too much life out there yet.

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an organization dedicated to listening for signals from other intelligent life. If we’re right that there are 100,000 or more intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, and even a fraction of them are sending out radio waves or laser beams or other modes of attempting to contact others, shouldn’t SETI’s satellite array pick up all kinds of signals?

But it hasn’t. Not one. Ever.

Where is everybody?