September 2019
This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.
You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.
A Case of the Monday’s
Meet the Man Unearthing the Triumphs (and Tragedies) of Monday-Qualifier Life
Every Monday the PGA Tour holds a “small” tournament to get into the week’s “big” tournament. Four spots are up for grabs and there are often over 100 vagabonding golfers trying to play their way in.
“I think golf is thought of as so elitist, epically pro golf — private jets and big money and handing out gloves — so I don’t think people knew this side of it existed,” French says. “They know minor-league baseball because everyone’s been to a minor-league baseball game. It’s organized. Monday qualifying is just so fractured. I don’t think people knew it existed, at least your casual golf fan didn’t. They didn’t realize there were people grinding out there sleeping in cars, and I think that’s the human interest of it.”
My favorites of French’s tweets are the tweets that summarize the level of play so simply.
Brains Are Weird
What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick?
And after a quarter-century of hard work, they have abundant evidence to prove it. Give people a sugar pill, they have shown, and those patients — especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence — will improve. Tell someone a normal milkshake is a diet beverage, and his gut will respond as if the drink were low fat. Take athletes to the top of the Alps, put them on exercise machines and hook them to an oxygen tank, and they will perform better than when they are breathing room air — even if room air is all that’s in the tank. Wake a patient from surgery and tell him you’ve done an arthroscopic repair, and his knee gets better even if all you did was knock him out and put a couple of incisions in his skin. Give a drug a fancy name, and it works better than if you don’t.
You don’t even have to deceive the patients. You can hand a patient with irritable bowel syndrome a sugar pill, identify it as such and tell her that sugar pills are known to be effective when used as placebos, and she will get better, especially if you take the time to deliver that message with warmth and close attention. Depression, back pain, chemotherapy-related malaise, migraine, post-traumatic stress disorder: The list of conditions that respond to placebos — as well as they do to drugs, with some patients — is long and growing.
Screenshot Graveyard
Much like walking through a real-life museum, Version Museum aims to illustrate the visual, tangible elements of various versions of technology, rather than just the written history behind it. Wikipedia and other sites already do a fantastic job of detailing the story behind websites, apps, and everything else. This site focuses on observable changes over time. If you’re a longtime user of a certain product, there’s probably going to be some nostalgia as you look at all the previous iterations of it over the years.
Links
- Hodinkee: Reference Points
- Amazon Review Summarizer
- A Design Guide for the Flags of the United States
- The Orientation of Airport Runways
Sign Off
Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.
Thanks for reading. Have a great month,
Clay
How kind of you to make your way down here.
A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.