Bookmarked. Called me to get back to reading and writing again.

A joy to read and loved the artwork on mobile.

Henry is one of the most cutting edge designers out there today in my opinion. Check out his other sites.

I've always liked this song from the Cure, we're hedonists on a treadmill:

I'm always wanting more, anything I haven't got Everything I want it all, and I just can't stop Planning all my days away but never finding ways to stay Or ever feel enough today, tomorrow must be more Drink, more dreams, more bed, more drugs More lust, more lies, more head, more love Fear more fun, more pain, more flesh More stars, more smiles, more colors, more sex

But however hard I want I know deep down inside I'll never really get more hope Or any more time Any more time Any more time

I want the sun to fall in, I want lightning and thunder Blood instead of rain, I want the world to make me wonder I want to walk on water, take a trip to the moon Give me all this, give me it soon More drink, more dreams, more drugs More lust, more lies, more love

But however hard I want I know deep down inside I'll never really get more hope Or any more time Any more time Any more time Any more time

I'm reminded of the song Small Bill$ by Regina Spektor:

His destiny was just too big to spend / So he broke it into smaller bills and change

By the time he'd try to buy the things he needed / He had spent it all on loosies and weed and

He had spent it all on chips and Coca-Cola / He had spent it all on chocolate and vanilla

He had spent it all and didn't even feel it / He had spent it all and didn't even feel it

Selective plant breeding and robotics pickers are the way forward here. University of Arkansas is the holder of multiple plant patents for better blackberries. New varieties are bred for many, many traits (sweetness, transport, shelf quality, ripening window, etc.)

Prof John Clark likely has invented the berries you've ate: https://news.uark.edu/articles/63163/arkansas-fruit-breeder-...

Harvest costs for fruit are an incredibly important consideration for farms and out of the thousands of potential fruits you could eat, the commercial winners have to be profitable.

There are some awesome opportunities for robotics, computer vision, and ML in agriculture. And if you can reduce harvest costs by 75% like this approach for blueberries, farmers have more market options to select better flavor qualities because the harvest quality goes up: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/impact/innovative-harvest-...

On the contrary (though it may not be everyone's case), my reading is better off with the presence of these shortform formats. By just going through these "trailers" I can now easily filter out the books that I should actually be reading, while still retaining the core ideas of those that I'd rather not read fully. It is doing wonders for discoverability in the right hands.

My favorite books transported you to a new world and showed you how characters adapted and learned to navigate.

Here's a few I don't see on lists frequently:

Here’s an updated list with your addition:

1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster- adventure that encourages curiosity while navigating a magical world.

2. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg- Mystery about independence where two kids hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain- A time-travel pioneer + clash between modern thinking and medieval traditions.

4. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George- survival story of a boy living in the wilderness, promoting self-reliance + love for nature

Love the Oregon Trail and Powell's--it's a magical book place.

I had a chance to work with one of the original Oregon Trail creators on a board game concept these past three years. Don is a true pleasure to work with and has a sharp mind plus great stories. Highly recommend HN folks look up his GDC talk or send him some work (he's open to select projects) https://www.linkedin.com/in/donrawitsch/

Powell's is great. On the top floor is a rare book room with tons of old books, including a copy of the Journals of Lewis & Clark in its original binding with all the maps in tact. They were the first to map the eastern and western river valleys that the Oregon trail crossed.

They used to have an incredible technical bookstore a few blocks away. Sadly, it closed over 10 years ago.

It moved to i think the forth floor and is as big as ever, just way more dense. But yes, in my younger years the technical bookstore over looking the park was a monument not to be missed.

Yes, I recently rediscovered it.

Man, in the 90's when I was learning about a lot of manufacturing processes, that tech book store was a gold mine!

I would get the pre-computer era books and those contained all the manual, analytical geometry means and methods. Awesome skill builders for the time.

I still use that stuff when making things sans a nice shop environment today.

My first internet account was at techbooks.com

ISP run on a Sun Sparc 10 and a few Linux boxes. I could dial in at 9600 baud, just smoking fast! Ahem.

It became teleport.com later.

Fun times.

In any case, Powells books is very highly recommended.

I miss the old computers on display, though.

Ha, I had a chance to work in the "blueberry world" over a decade ago. Ridley's blueberries are bred for flavor first and truly are exceptional. Most of the comments are correct, generally fruit is grown for looks first, yield second, and spoilage third. Flavor doesn't even factor in.

If you're in N America, here's the farmer that grows his cultivars: https://familytreefarms.com/fruit/blueberries/ Best chance of finding them in stories is during the March-April window in the US.

The reason you're seeing blueberries year-round in stores is due to a huge improvement in naturally hybridizing commercial blueberries to remove this requirement for frost and chill hours. The industry owes a big debt mainly to U of Florida's Dr. Lyrene for discovering blueberries that could fruit without the need for a winter. https://floridaaghalloffame.org/2011/11/dr-paul-lyrene/ You'll have good luck with any of his varieties in California.

Flipping this the other direction, I'm intrigued by the idea of a perpetual purpose company, even a charity, that could be set up and endowed to keep to it goal even after the founders have departed (maintaining open source libraries, providing grants, etc.)

There have been attempts at solar sintering, which may be viable in arrays or a central paver base: https://www.dezeen.com/2011/06/28/the-solar-sinter-by-markus...

That would not work like that on Moon, because the technique described works for sand, which is highly enriched in silicon dioxide.

Such deposits of rocks with very high content of silicon dioxide, like sands, are formed on Earth by the action of water, which dissolves the more alkaline oxides from the rocks, leaving sand made mostly of quartz. There are no such sands on the Moon.

However, I have not mentioned above that besides sintering, there is an alternative way of making solids from lunar dust and rocks, which is to melt them completely and cast them into solid blocks.

However, this would be more difficult than sintering, because it must be done inside a sealed space, filled with some gas (materials do not melt in vacuum, they sublimate), and it would require a greater energy.

When introducing in the sealed space and extracting from it the raw materials and the end products, there would be some losses of the pressuring gas. Nevertheless, when melting rocks made of oxides, unlike when melting metals, the gas could be oxygen extracted from the lunar rocks, so its losses would not be important.

However, the use of oxygen as the working gas would make difficult to find a material from which to make the walls and the casting die, because such a material would have to resist both oxygen and melted oxides at high temperatures, which few materials are able to do, except some platinum-group metals, but even those do not last forever and need periodic replacements.