Essential Habits Sleep enough Exercise regularly Generally eat healthy foods Keep your weight down Avoid burnout Connect socially with other people Sufficient sleep You should wake up feeling fresh. Your body and mind require a good night’s sleep. If you deprive yourself sufficient sleep, you will suffer for it in both the short and long term: Why Do We Need Sleep?. Many of us aren’t getting enough sleep: 1 in 3 adults don’t get enough sleep (US Centers for Disease Control) ...

Data obsolescence vs. laziness Years ago, I had a blog I enjoyed posting to. One day, something made the software I used to power my blog annoyingly hard to use. Most likely, something changed that required me to upgrade or update something else and I was too lazy to do so. The longer I waited to make the change, the harder the change became, and I just never bothered. Besides, my original posts still showed up. I simply couldn’t create new posts. My blog got locked in place, frozen. Over time, I even forgot on which virtual machine at which cloud provider my blog ran on or how to connect to it. ...

When scientists are baffled by facts that contradict their strongest theories, science is likely on the cusp of new insights. That’s why I was saddened when scientists discovered the Higgs boson – or “god particle.” It meant CERN’s $20 quadrillion (or whatever) Large Hadron Collider did not uncover new facts that would force physicists to re-think their theories and provide clues how they might bend those theories closer to reality. It merely provided greater support for what physicists already believed. ...

Studying Latin in high school, I was perplexed by the phrase festina lente (“hurry up slowly”). On its face, it’s an oxymoron, but it became an aphorism – and has stuck in my head for a quarter century – because it expresses a profound truth. We should aspire to achieve our goals quickly but without moving so fast that we trip ourselves or drift off in the wrong direction. We must regularly adjust our course and run slowly enough that we don’t run off a cliff or twist an ankle stepping in a rabbit hole. I mention this because I failed to do this on my PowerMandarin project and am now suffering the consequences. First, the good news: Every change I’ve made to my website has been stored in a “version control system” (Git), so I have been able to roll back in time to February and am now going through all my subsequent changes and re-applying the good stuff. I’ll then go back again and look carefully at possibly problematic changes. But I should have avoided this whole nasty mess. I made two inexcusable mistakes. I’ve read a number of excellent books on how to program (including: Ship It!, The Pragmatic Programmer, Code Complete, Practices of an Agile Developer, etc.). They all stress: 1) Write a solid test suite with broad coverage of your program; and, 2) Change your code in small chunks and test each chunk before moving on to the next chunk. ...

The founder of Atari has interesting thoughts on how to improve education and prepare students for the future: Nolan Bushnell once almost destroyed his family’s garage. As a youngster in Utah, he went tooling around with a liquid-fuel rocket on a roller skate and things went awry. He (and the garage) survived, and Bushnell went on to be a lifelong innovator — from Pong to Chuck E. Cheese’s…. “If you look at [Steve] Jobs and [Steve] Wozniak, they were makers,” Bushnell said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “The more we can turn the nation into a nation of makers, they will be smarter, they’ll be better problem-solvers, and they’ll be more equipped for the problems of tomorrow.” ...

I’m awed by the heroism of “the Fukushima fifty” – the brave men (and women?) working to prevent nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima Dai-Ichi. Their efforts may well prove too little, too late, but that’s no fault of the heroes who fought on, despite the high probability that doing so would kill them: “Five are believed to have already died and 15 are injured while others have said they know the radiation will kill them.” ...

A week ago, I attended a lecture on fatherhood with other fathers at my son’s school. The lecturer has been an educator for decades and run school systems and Greenwich Country Day School. He was quite interested in and well read on issues of genetics, nurture (family & parenting), and culture (social influences) as they relate to child development. But he opened the Father’s Workshop by saying males are not biologically inclined to raise children, except perhaps in the earliest months. (In his view, only culture motivates fathers to act as fathers, which is what he urged us to do.) While I admired his motivation, I disagreed with his premise, saying that what I have read on this subject suggests his claim is correct for many species but that humans, though not monogamous, are far closer to monogamy than most animals, including our nearest primate relatives, and that this is likely true because human parents must care for and teach their children for so many years and have evolved pair-bonding precisely to help our children (and grandchildren) thrive and pass their genes into the future. Human fathers are instinctively, I believe, more bonded to their children than gorilla, chimp and bonobo fathers. My reading of the primatology literature confirms what my heart (and the logic of evolutionary biology applied to the human condition) tells me about the fatherhood impulse in humans being partly biological. Coincidentally, just a few days later, New York Times writer Nicholas Wade wrote “New View of How Humans Moved Away From Apes”, based on fresh research on this exact question. ...

In an article full of shocking examples, [Matt Taibbi writes](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall- street-in-jail-20110216?print=true), “Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.” He explains that no one on Wall Street (aside from Madoff) has gone to jail because Wall Street owns our government and the agencies that exist to regulate Wall Street and punish financial crimes: A former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there.” ...