The Executive Edition (11/21/2021)

A note from DXB

I’m back in Dubai this week en route to Tbilisi, Georgia on Wednesday. The Emirates flight was packed due to a combination of the holiday week and Expo happening. The onboard bar was jumping and I joked with the flight attendant/bartender that it’s a rookie move to get bombed on martinis on the plane. Sure enough, the merrymakers went from 100 to zero and were soon passed out for the duration of the flight.

It has been interesting to watch Dubai evolve: it stayed open as other places locked down. On my 7+ plus visits in the past few years, it has been easy to get in and out of the airport (most border crossings are a nightmare of paperwork) and everything seems to be working smoothly. Also, it appears a lot of people are moving here, turning it into a Monaco of the Middle East; wealth that was not happy about lockdowns coupled with seasonal work for Expo coupled with the ever-present tax benefits has created a boom of sorts. How long this will last remains to be seen. But it is heartening to see more depth when it comes to food and beverage, the hotel game getting stronger and stronger, and there is less of the Vegas-style spectacle and more of planning for the long-term. It doesn’t help that the destination is served by a consistently fantastic airline.

Their viral marketing game is strong, as well. Pictured below is a stunt of an Emirates flight attendant atop the Burj Khalifa, announcing the return of travel from the UK:

The full video is here. (CJN)

Department of Erosion Control:

Cars used to hold up riverbeds are called Detroit Riprap.

Throughout Montana, the U.S and beyond, there are rusted cars scattered along the banks and bottoms of rivers that are remnants of a time when rivers were less regulated and self-reliant people were trying to figure out how to battle the escalating problem of erosion. These cars abandoned by their owners are relics from a 1950s erosion control experiment, when cars were taken from wrecking yards and dumped into the river, hopefully, to stabilize the eroding bank. The cars would have their engines and other innards removed by cutting torches and hauled down the streets to their destination. Once in the water, if the cars held, they became a sturdy part of the bank, resisting the river’s strength in ways soil couldn’t. Some cars didn’t hold and would drift down the river becoming an odd sight. (NRB)

Some More Explore/Exploit:

There was a bit I couldn’t quite fit into this week’s Explore/Exploit Edition but I think they are related ideas.

First, you’ve got this quote from computer scientist Donald Knuth on email and being paid to stay on top of things versus the ones focused on going deep:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

To this point, I’ve always been a big fan of Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. The basic idea is that one of the cardinal mistakes managers make when working with engineers is thinking that their manager schedule (many meetings interrupting deep work) is, or should be, the schedule of makers.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I might have to turn this into a full-blown WITI, as there’s a whole other angle here around interstitial journaling, which is basically a technique that tries to keep things “in memory” by jotting down a few notes before an interruption. (NRB)

ICYMI

We had a fun week of WITI:

Kavi Moltz of DS&Durga did our MMD.
We had a deep dive on Powerpoint.
I wrote about the spectacle that is Pop Up Magazine.
Noah wrote on Explore/Exploit.

Brady Moore covered one of the most well-known documents in the military: The Five-Paragraph Operations Order.

What Noah watched on Youtube this week:

New random channel I got into this week with my kids: Minibricks. It’s crazy diorama-making. Here’s two: How to make an Ultra-realistic wave out of resin and 🦖 Godzilla vs. 🦍 Kong final battle.

A little more BeamNG: Which wheel goes the furthest?

Desus and Mero try the new Dallas BBQ “Gucci Royale”.

Most Guinness world records are stupid. Lowest limbo roller skating is not.

From SNL this week: Bone Thugs pet store. Three Sad Virgins. Man Park. An old one: Penn & Teller from Season 11.

Obviously, I watched the constitution auction.

Some more skiing, snowboarding, and skateboarding: Snowboarding the Infamous Tunnel Run, THIS KID FROM JAPAN IS TOO GOOD AT SKATING, Rodney Mullen - Playstation Skatepark London 1998, Rodney Mullen - Liminal, Jaws vs the Lyon 25, Markus Eder's The Ultimate Run - The Most Insane Ski Run Ever Imagined.

Not quite skateboarding: Rick McCrank Explores the Fingerboarding Scene.

Impending Black Friday Deal of the Day:

We like Therabody stuff for mobility and flexibility, particularly the smaller Theragun device and the foam roller. It is all on super sale for Thanksgiving. Not a paid plug, but we dig the gear. Go get it here. (CJN)

Remarks complete. Nothing follows.

CJN and NRB