Paul Ford: A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite. What’s Left? A decade ago I lost 100 pounds. I did it in my web-nerd way—by building a custom content management system using the Django framework in the Python programming language. Every day I would enter calories ingested (more)

Those Weight Loss Drugs May Do a Number on Your Face. People using drugs like Ozempic are discovering an unwanted side effect: facial aging. (more)

It’s the Age of Ozempic. Do We Need Weight Watchers Anymore? ...the night I first met Sima Sistani. This was a decade ago, before she became the chief executive of Weight Watchers. Sistani was working at Yahoo. Sistani’s career has been a winding one. After jobs at Goldman Sachs, Creative Artists Agency, and a short-lived tech startup, she became the head of media for Yahoo-owned Tumblr. Then the VP of media for Meerkat, a buzzy livestreaming video startup. Sistani and a Meerkat founder decided to stealthily launch a second live-video app, called Houseparty. In 2019, Epic Games acquired that venture for a reported $35 million. Sistani didn’t need to work again, but in 2020 she contacted Weight Watchers and expressed interest in advising the company on its digital strategy—planting a seed that would eventually result in the chief executive role. (more)

GLP-1 and Obesity. Let’s have a look at a paper that came out recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. It shows strong results in a therapeutic area that a lot of people have spent a lot of effort on: obesity (more)

Why the Rolling Stones Wanted to Silence Robert Frank (Hint: Group Sex). Frank, who died on Monday Sept. 9 at the age of 94... he was a photographer who, in mid-career, having cemented a reputation as one of the premier street photographers of the 20th century, turned his back on that and took up filmmaking and then in late life a sort of photo collage wherein handwritten text was scrawled across the images. (more)

Edward Glaeser focuses on the connection Joel Mokyr sees in his book The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 ISBN:9780300124552 between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age. “What is new here,” he writes, “is not an argument that the Enlightenment changed history, for better and/or worse, but that its economic effects on the wealth-creating capabilities of the affected societies have been overlooked.” Mokyr has long emphasized the economic value of new ideas and he thus emphasizes that “Britain’s intellectual sphere had turned into a competitive market for ideas, in which logic and evidence were becoming more important and ‘authority’ as such was on the defensive.” (more)

The transcendentals (Latin: transcendentalia) are the properties of being that correspond to three aspects of the human field of interest and are their ideals; science (truth), the arts (beauty) and religion (goodness). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals cf Plato, Transcendentalist (more)

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States.[1][2][3] A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature,[1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism

US equivalent (but predecessor) of the UK Bloomsbury Group, at least as framed by Susan Cheever in her book American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work ISBN:0743264622. The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Transcendentalists...

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA),[2][4] commonly known as the Royal Society of Arts, is a London-based organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges.[5][6][1] The RSA's mission expressed in the founding charter was to "embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufacturers and extend our commerce", but also of the need to alleviate poverty and secure full employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Arts (more)

Steven Johnson's 2012 book Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age ISBN:1594488207 (more)

stock in a company held by employees (founds and others) (more)

Amazon rule to keep teams as Small Teams. (more)

Donald Trump phrase/supporter

Brink Lindsey sees Libertarian folks moving from Republican to Democratic parties. Libertarian-leaning voters started drifting away from the GOP even before Katrina, civil war in Iraq, and Mark Foley launched the general stampede. (more)

Behind the walls of Andy Warhol’s secretive Factory. Stephen Shore, who quietly documented the glittering figures of Andy Warhol’s Factory between 1965 and 1967, has to go down in history as the least fazed 17-year-old boy to have ever come into contact with extremely cool people. As the influential photographer recalls in Factory: Andy Warhol, the just-published treatise by Phaidon, he was granted permission to take photographs of Warhol and his inner circle by simply walking up to the artist and asking if he could.

Tales From the Andy Warhol Factory. He went into Pop Art because he saw that Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein started to get all that attention. (more)

Tom Gilb (full name "Thomas Steven Gilb", born 1940) is an American systems engineer, consultant, and author, known for the development of software metrics, software inspection, and evolutionary processes... He is known for his early work on evolutionary software development processes[1] from 1968 to 1981, which was a forerunner of agile software development methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Gilb

original Extreme Programming project - aka C3

The term is also used in software engineering, where a retrospective is a meeting held by a project team at the end of a project or process (often after an iteration) to discuss what was successful about the project or time period covered by that retrospective, what could be improved, and how to incorporate the successes and improvements in future iterations or projects. Retrospective can be done in many different ways. The Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki is a resource for sharing retrospective plans, tips & tricks, tools and ideas to help us get the most out of our retrospectives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospective#Software_development (cf Incident Analysis, Learning Organization, post-mortem) (more)