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Happy Sunday morning and welcome back to our 114th edition of The Sunday Morning Newsletter!
Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights
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Let’s dive in.
Every hobby has its own set of tools, guides, products, and other resources that help people produce the highest-quality output possible. As the Company writes:
Every trade has a small number of items so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool that nearly everyone in that trade uses.
This website aggregates each industry and hobby, then lets qualified users vote to determine what is truly an essential item for that industry.
Ask the internet what to buy and the answers are incredibly varied. Many articles and blogs with affiliate links and more. This knowledge is real, but its value lies with people and is lost every time it isn’t aggregated or written down.
This register gives everyone a place to write these things down. It is not a buying guide and does not rank which tool is best. It records which tools the trades actually reach for and actually use, which is arguably the more important fact.
This website is independent, with no manufacturer paying to appear, rank, or otherwise. Everything is independent, verified, voted on by real people, and valuable.
Like some of the smartest of us have said, if I’m going to be misled, I’d much rather be misled by the people than by anyone else.
#2: What If America Went Completely Dark?
Christopher Cox - The New York Times
America’s electrical grid is much more fragile than we would imagine. And mainstream media isn’t talking about it!
FERC, the governing body for electrical utilities in the United States, conducted an analysis to identify weak points in the nation’s electrical system. The electrical grid is an incredibly complex machine. It was created without a master plan and is subject to state, local, and federal laws.
Three major grids exist: the Western, Eastern, and Texas Interconnections. Within each region, thousands of utilities generate and distribute power.
In the recent FERC analysis, they modeled the cascading effects of knocking out the most critical substations in each interconnection. These are where multiple high-voltage lines come together. They found a crazy stat: if you knock out just nine total substations, you can black out the entire United States.
How do we solve this?
Decentralized energy access, generally provided by renewable energy, gives businesses and consumers flexible access and, when combined with batteries, can buffer these risks.
#3: When Giving Up Teaches You More Than Persevering Ever Could
Mario I Juarez-Garcia - Psyche
Mario starts with a powerful quote I want to highlight:
Grit is all well and good, but sometimes abandoning your goals can be crucial to discovering who you are.
For some, it’s easy to give up on your goals—in those cases, were they ever really real?
For others, abandoning goals can be especially difficult. We’re surrounded by stories of grit, determination, and success. No one ever wants to be labeled as a “loser” or a “quitter.”
Honoring our past efforts to build commitment helps us resist the temptation to quit and can push us toward long-term goals. We should always start long-term projects with the strong belief that they will succeed, despite our doubts or history of failures. Favorable circumstances can overcome these factors.
In real life, abandoning goals can be crucial to discovering who we are. The author describes this as the exploratory value of giving up. In these cases, quitting can reveal skills, limitations, and passions we could not have known before failure.
In other cases, we can learn about our lives generally from failure. Failure can help us acknowledge that the conditions we are in are not ideal for pursuing these goals. In these cases, the solution may be to change ourselves. Alternatively, it may mean changing the environment around us.
Long story short, don’t be afraid of failure or giving up. Be purposeful in these times, and learn and grow into the next experience.
#4: New Simulations of the Universe
Katrina Miller - The New York Times
Recently, researchers released a large set of visualizations detailing one of the most in-depth simulations of what happened at the dawn of our universe.
This imagery tracks the period between 50M and 2B years after the Big Bang and how it progressed over time.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to peer further into cosmic time than ever before. This takes us back to when the first stars and galaxies were born.
A written description would showcase how the universe was a mix of electrons and nuclei following the Big Bang. As it expanded throughout what’s now the known universe, it cooled and formed hydrogen and helium gas. The first stars appeared around 100M years after the Big Bang.
This simulation program took around a year to run on a supercomputer located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It helped deliver a suite of information about the conditions of the early universe, including the distribution of dark matter and gas over time.
So what? First, if you’re like me, you’re interested in these simulations of the universe and want to understand more about the broader world we live in. Secondly, it’s interesting to see how our scientific knowledge continues to expand and progress over time. Where will we be in 5 years? 10? 50? 1000?
#5: Everything to Know About El Niño
Judson Jones, Chico Harlan and Raymond Zhong - The New York Times
If you don’t know it or are only familiar with the name, El Niño is a natural climate pattern driven by unusual warming of the Pacific Ocean. These effects can shift the weather systems worldwide for months or even years at a time.
Usually, these effects reach full strength by December each year, appearing at irregular intervals with unique dynamics each time. Unfortunately, you don’t just have to live by the Pacific Ocean to be affected; scientists predict this year will show effects globally.
These researchers and writers put together an FAQ guide to help folks understand what they need to know heading into the winter months (here in the Northern Hemisphere). They can help you understand how strong it will be in your area and how you can prepare.
It’s definitely worth reviewing to understand what you may or may not be getting yourself into in the coming months.
That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.
Drew Jackson
Founder & Writer
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