Pipeline for Saturday, May 23, 2026

When he needed an idea, Thomas Edison liked to sit in a "thinking chair" holding a metal ball bearing in each palm, with his hands closed. On the floor, directly under his hands, were two metal pie pans. Edison would close his eyes and allow his body to relax. Somewhere between consciousness and dreaming his hands would relax and open without effort, letting the ball bearing fall noisily into the pie pans. That's when he would wake up and write down the idea in his head at the moment.

Kaizen: When something goes wrong, ask why five times.

Pow! Two unrelated ideas--adolescent cruelty and telekenesis, come together, and I had an idea. See also intimation KV.

Excellence is a habit - Aristotle

Borrowed Strength

Topic - Storytelling

Best Buy & Remarkability

When they sat down with all the data and compared each child's Simon score, poverty history, and allostatic-load reading, they found that the three measures correlated--more time in poverty meant higher allostatic-load numbers and lower scores in Simon. But then came the surprise--When they used statistical techniques to factor out the allostatic load, the poverty effect disappeared completely. It wasn't poverty that was compromising the executive function abilities of the poor kids, it was the stress that went along with it.