September 14 2023

If you are an average adult American male who weighs 180 pounds (82 kilograms), your rate of energy expenditure while resting quietly in a chair is approximately seventy calories per hour.

-- Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding (affiliate link)

The Dutch invented capitalism as we know it. This was great for the Dutch and great for the world, but like most great inventions, it brought with it some potentially deadly consequences. While production, trade, and private ownership had existed before, the ability of large numbers of people to collectively buy ownership in money-making endeavors through public equity markets did not exist. The Dutch created that when they invented the world’s first publicly listed company (the Dutch East India Company) and the first stock exchange in 1602. Like most inventions, these capital market developments arose out of necessity and self-interest. The voyages across the world in search of new trade routes were risky ventures, so it made sense for merchants to sell some of the risk associated with the voyage to others in exchange for a share of the future profits.

-- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail (affiliate link)

Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history.

-- Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (affiliate link)

Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

-- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (affiliate link)

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don’t necessarily write down what I’m thinking; it’s just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths. No matter how much I write, though, I never reach a conclusion. And no matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination. Even after decades of writing, the same still holds true. All I do is present a few hypotheses or paraphrase the issue. Or find an analogy between the structure of the problem and something else.

-- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage International) (affiliate link)

Playing with the soldiers’ band sounded better than dressing like a toy soldier every day to operate the elevator at a high-rise office building in Midtown Manhattan. It had been the best job he could find after leaving school. But there are only so many times you can smile and wish “Good morning” to white men in suits who don’t answer, nor even look at you, before you start to question your own existence.

-- Lovely War (affiliate link)

It's more than fine to voice any opinion. It's not fine to scream foul before you see where the batter hit the ball.

Those who come after are cursed by those who came before. Keep you feet planted, my vision of the future, the floor is yours.