non-Dhamma, but useful

This is my paraphrase, not his exact wording. He says this around 32min mark. The host asked him, what is the single most important piece of advice he would give someone. Ed responded, "What I learned from giving people important advice,  they don't take it." (after laughter from audience, he explains): People have to test things out, and internalize for themselves before they can absorb important advice and be able to use it.  A quick story about who Edward Thorp is, and why you should pay attention to what he says. One time at a party he asked Richard Feynman (Nobel prize physicist) if it was possible to beat the casino at the roulette wheel. Feyman said it was impossible. Normally, when a genius tells you something is not possible you believe him. Thorpe didn't believe him, and went on to team up with another genius Claude Shannon (father of the Digital communication industry, he invented the theory behind digital computers before there was even computer hardware!...

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/neuroscience-says-doing-this-1-thing-makes-you-just-as-happy-as-eating-2-000-chocolate-bars?utm_source=pocket-newtab Neuroscience Says Doing This 1 Thing Makes You Just as Happy as Eating 2,000 Chocolate Bars It also gives you the same neurological boost as receiving $25,000. Inc.     Melanie Curtin Read when you’ve got time to spare. Getty Images Wanting to be happier is a universal trait. It's rare to find a person whose reply to, "How would you like to feel today?" is, "Morose, please." The scientific study of happiness (aka positive psychology) has mushroomed over the last two decades. Major research institutions have taken on substantial and often thought-provoking forays into the joy of joy, with surprising and often enlightening results. One such study took place in the UK, where researchers used electromagnetic brain scans and heart-rate monitors to generate what they called "mood-boosting values" for differen...

  The way reflowable html tables work, such as the pali and english translation in lucid24.org, is that they try to automatically balance the column widths. But what really screws up the table is if there are invisible non breaking spaces, making words that are super-long that the html reflowable table won't break apart, so that's what causes some sections to have super imbalanced column widths in pali and english. to get rid of non breaking spaces, in text editors with regex such as notepad ++, replace hex character :  \xA0 with: regular space character   

 from forbes.com  | Daily Cover|1,242,126 views|Sep 15, 2020,06:55am EDT Exclusive: The Billionaire Who Wanted To Die Broke . . . Is Now Officially Broke David Cantwell for Forbes Steven Bertoni Steven BertoniForbes Staff Leadership Forbes VP & Senior Editor: Forbes CEO Network, Tech, Investing It took decades, but Chuck Feeney, the former billionaire cofounder of retail giant Duty Free Shoppers has finally given all his money away to charity. He has nothing left now—and he couldn’t be happier. Charles “Chuck” Feeney, 89, who cofounded airport retailer Duty Free Shoppers with Robert Miller in 1960, amassed billions while living a life of monklike frugality. As a philanthropist, he pioneered the idea of Giving While Living—spending most of your fortune on big, hands-on charity bets instead of funding a foundation upon death. Since you can't take it with you—why not give it all away, have control of where it goes and see the results with your own eyes?  “We learned a lo...

  https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-bed-that-saved-me-from-the-taliban?utm_source=pocket-newtab ‘The Bed That Saved Me From the Taliban’ In 2018, Greek pilot Vasileios Vasileiou checked into a luxury hilltop hotel in Kabul that was popular among foreign visitors. Then Taliban gunmen stormed it, killing at least 40 people. Vasileios explains how he survived. BBC News     Vasileios Vasileiou _105194479_img-20181206-wa0000.jpg I had decided to go for dinner early - at six o'clock - with my friend, another pilot called Michael Poulikakos. It was the first time in the three or four months that I had been coming to the Intercontinental that I'd done this - usually I had dinner at around 8.30pm. _105195384_img-20181211-wa0021.jpg Vasileios Vasileiou and Michael Poulikakos worked for Afghan airline Kam Air. We finished dinner about 7.30pm and then I went up to my room - room 522 - on the top floor, to make some calls. At 8.47 p.m. I was on the phone to Athens when I heard a ...

It's Time for an RSS Revival (excerpt from: https://www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader/) BRIAN BARRETT GEAR 03.30.2018 08:00 AM After years of letting algorithms make up our minds for us, the time is right to go back to basics. Image may contain Cone Logo Symbol and Trademark EMILY WAITE THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there's no panacea for what ails this internet we've built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS. For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader, which went the way of the ghost this month. Or maybe you haven't used RSS since five years ago, when Google Reader, the beloved firehose of news headlines got t...

I wish they taught us this as kids in our history books. What was for me one of the the most boring subjects in school, is actually one of the most interesting if history books actually reported what and why things happened in reality. From an opinion piece in washington post: George and Martha Washington enslaved 300 people. Let’s start with their names. from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-and-martha-washington-enslaved-300-people-lets-start-with-their-names/2020/06/26/d3f7c362-b7e7-11ea-a510-55bf26485c93_story.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab In this portrait, George Washington (1732–1799) is shown standing on a bluff above the Hudson River with his enslaved personal servant, William Lee, on horseback behind him. In this portrait, George Washington (1732–1799) is shown standing on a bluff above the Hudson River with his enslaved personal servant, William Lee, on horseback behind him. (John Trumbull/The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection) Image without a caption Opini...