Face it: you're a crazy person:

I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

If that’s a stumper, here are some followups: Which kind of coffee mug is best? How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost? Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?

The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.

50 things I know. And wish I'd known sooner:

41. It’s almost impossible to have an easy life and be interesting. Suffering is what gives people texture.

and

47. Heaven is a set of gradually increasing but attainable challenges.

Listicle has become a bad word but there is a reason they are popular. A well done one is *chef's kiss *.

27 Notes on Growing Old(er):

6. The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

and

17. ... The human condition is that we want it all, and we’re not willing to make trades… ‘deathbed regrets’ typically have the bias of wanting the other path—the path they could have taken—without considering the cost of that path. So they say, “Hey I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.” It’s like, well yeah, but you didn’t, because you actually chose the path that you’re on, and you weren’t willing to do that. What you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.

Mad respect for whoever decided that there was a business opportunity here and then made it happen.

Space Rock That Punched Through Roof Almost Struck Resident (NYT):

“I suspect that he heard three simultaneous things,” Mr. Harris said of the person whose home was hit. “One was the collision with his roof, one was a tiny cone of a sonic boom, and a third was it impacting the floor all in the same moment.”

Looking at the photos, I think he would have died if it had struck him. Here's another amazing ancient rock story from the NYT.

Performance Art?

The ratio of members!

The Infinite Well: How Innovation Keeps Water Flowing:

Solutions from experts follow a familiar pattern, claiming that the only way to avert a crisis is to adopt radical social and behavioral changes, driven by moral proselytizing, government intervention, or both, to save the water supply. Environmentalists urge people to replace old toilets with low-flow models, avoid running faucets while brushing their teeth or washing dishes, and switch to eating less water-intensive foods. Meanwhile, activists pressure elected officials to impose usage restrictions, ban certain crops in arid regions, and regulate everything from swimming pools to car washes.

Fortunately the economics of water innovation reveals why the apparent scarcity tends to be self-correcting, without requiring us to adopt ascetic lifestyles or perform symbolic actions like picking up dropped ice cubes to water house plants or writing letters to elected officials. Rising prices, not moralizing pleas, lead people to conserve, look for substitutes, recycle resources, and innovate helping to meet demand through alternative means or improved efficiency.

The same principles apply to many other things too.