Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Back when I lived in Austin, I went to the Toastmasters’ meetings every Monday morning at 6:45am near my apartment. Toastmasters is where you go if you want to get better at talking in front of crowds, which I suck at. It’s also a good place to meet interesting characters, one of whom is Hollis Baker of Liberty Hill. He’s easily one of the best story tellers I’ve ever met and a good friend to boot. Anyway, I stopped by his blog today to catch up and to see what he’s been up to. I was rewarded with several good stories, and I especially liked the following metaphor:

Quiet draped the porch and the yard, the meadow and the world. Finally Child poked a hole in the stillness with the question, “But Old Man what is the most important fact of Life? Old Man replied, “Two things Child, are the only things that really matter in life. The first are Roses, ” the Old Man said. “Roses are like life and love and beauty. Each rose has a thorn to remind us that life must be handled gently, not clutched, or yanked about indiscriminately, ” Old Man stated. “Each rose forms a promising bud, to be nourished and coaxed into full bloom. As the blossom unfolds in all its pristine beauty they make life worthwhile.” Old Man continued, “And even in death the faded petals fall to earth adding nourishment to morrows blossoms.”

See also:

1. Caught flat-footed
2. Lest We Forget
3. Dreams of hand guns

Have you ever really thought about how strange it is to have hair? Or, why we have hair in certain places? It seems strangley odd to have hair springing from our pores. It raises so many questions. Why is it a certain color, thickness, length and oriented in a certain direction? Why do we have it at all? Why is it only present in certain places? We seem fairly naked as far as mammals go, but in fact only the palms of our hands and the bottoms of our feet are completely hairless. Everywhere else our bodies are populated with hair of different lengths and thickness. It’s something I’ve often thought about and been interested in, since on the surface it seems rather arbitrary.

1. The Hair Helmet – Why do we have the most hair on top of our heads? Your scalp is covered with thousands of blood vessels in order to keep your brain’s temperature regulated. Hair does a great job of insulating your head and hair actually protects your head from scratches and injuries. You can scratch hair a lot harder than you can scratch bare skin. When you’re hot, your hair also helps prevent your sweat from evaporating too quickly or running into your eyes.
2. Eyebrows and eyelashes – Eyebrows and eyelashes serve many different purposes. They can help regulate the amount of sunlight that enters your eyes through squinting. Your eyelashes will interlock and still allow you to see out, like natural sunglasses. Eyebrows and eyelashes also help prevent dust and germs from entering your eyes. And, eyebrows catch sweat that runs down from your head. Eyebrows also help communicate body language and expression. If you’ve ever gone to the zoo and seen the monkey exhibits, you will see how eyebrows are used to communicate body language. Some primates have lighter patches under their eyebrows that flash out when they raise their eyebrows in alarm. As social animals, primates make good use of facial expressions to communicate and eyebrows are an important part of this signaling.
3. Sensitive areas – The hair under the arms and in genital areas serves several interesting functions. Much like blossoming flowers, sexually mature human beings release sweat in these areas that is thick with pheromones to entice members of the opposite sex. Under magnification this sweat is even cloudy in appearance. The hair traps this pheromone-rich sweat for use in signaling sexual fertility and health to nearby interested parties. Hair also protects the genitals from chafing and injury, as well as from dust and germs.
4. Beards – Beards are harder to explain. Why do men have beards and women do not? What purpose do they serve? What does it mean that beards are out of fashion and have been for so long? According to one source, beards provide a good way to tell if someone is a mature male at a distance. This came in handy when we were running around sticking spears into each other. It was generally a bad idea to run into rival males from other tribes. That and maybe cave men and women looked pretty similar without beards. Beard hair also protects your face while running through the brush after prey. Although later in history, Alexander the Great made his men cut off their beards before battle since he thought it might be a disadvantage during close combat. This is part of the reason why the modern military style is for close-cropped hair and beard.

Life requires a lot of work, and it’s a lot easier if you waste less energy. Like many of you, I am always on the look out for good ways to make things work better, so I can spend more time doing things I enjoy. Here are a few concepts that have helped me improve the way I do things:

1. Get up early: It’s hard to get out of bed early, but it’s easier if you go to sleep early. This is probably the hardest part, especially if you’re naturally a night owl or living with a night owl. Even though it feels a little strange to be up before other people, I have found that it adds a lot of benefit. For your entire day you are ahead of the pack. You get the best parking spots, the line at the coffee shop is shorter, traffic is lighter, you’re replying to email before everyone else, you go to lunch earlier and miss the rush, and you can go home earlier without feeling like a slacker. Not only does this help you stay on top of things but everyone else who comes in later starts to look a little more like a slacker. Early morning is also a good time to plan your day and make lists of all the things you need to take care of. If you work in an office, it’s also easier to get things done before everyone else comes in and starts chatting it up. Now, some people like to come in extra late to avoid the herd and this works pretty well, but I find that in the early morning you often have more time to react to situations, like the server going down overnight, for example. This is harder if you roll in at 10-10:30am with your voicemail and email inbox full of messages.
2. Funnel everything into one email box: I used to spend several minutes a day logging into various email accounts, dialing into my voicemail to stop the light from flashing, etc. Now I forward all 5-6 of my email accounts (with the exception of my work email address) to my gmail account or I check my email and download into Gmail (Gmail lets you check up to 5 POP email accounts). For faxes I have an Efax account. For voicemail my messages are forwarded as .wav files and are not stored in the voicemail system. For any account statements these are also forwarded to email, so I receive less actual mail.

Stamp hike in the mail:

“The panel also backed the USPS’ proposal to offer a “Forever Stamp”, a stamp that would continue to cover the cost to mail a first-class, one-ounce letter even if the Postal Service instituted another rate hike.

Besides allowing consumers to hedge against future rate increases, the “Forever Stamp” would help eliminate the need to purchase 2-cent stamps and also help shrink lines at the post office, the Postal Regulatory Commission said.”

The bottled water business is amazing. Much of the bottled water consumed in the US is actually filtered municipal water. The same type of stuff we’ve bathed in and swallowed for years. When reduced to its elementary components one water should be little different than another. As with many things, you’re mostly buying an idea, the concept of health, taste, and purity. But, as a business, bottled water seems simple and the barriers for entry seem low, especially if you’re bottling purified municipal supplies. Some of the pieces:

1. Operations: where to put the processing plants to achieve the most strategic benefit? Best location for distribution networks? Best quality and cheapest source waters? Best regulatory and tax environments?
2. Supplies: Commitments and contracts with suppliers for equipment, bottles, labeling, trucks, etc.
3. Sales: Establishing the distribution network and filling the pipeline with orders from retailers.
4. Marketing: Developing the company identity and brand. Developing the actual idea, which is the product.
5. Distribution: Getting the end product to retailers.

Bottled water is good, but the best way to go if you drink lots of it is to invest in a good filtration system and filter your tap water. In fact, it would be a good experiment to take several identical plastic bottles and fill them up thusly: one bottle tap water, one bottle filtered water, one bottle distilled water, one bottle spring water, and one bottle of purified pre-bottled water. Refrigerate the group and then set up a taste test. I’d be curious as to the results in ranking.

Related:

• MSN: Is your bottled water coming from a faucet?
• Organic Consumers Association: Is America’s $8 Billion Bottled Water Industry a Fraud? (It’s now a $9 billion industry)
• How water bottlers tap into all sorts of sources “That same year, the commission held a blind taste test near the Ferry Building. The 300 participants were offered samples of two popular bottled-water brands (Crystal Geyser and Aquafina) and local tap water. Half said they preferred the tap water. Twenty-five percent picked bottled water. And 25 percent said they couldn’t tell the difference.”
• Nestle Waters: Regional brands: I was interested to see that Nestle owns both Ozarka and Poland Springs.

I’ve just started reading the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son over at Project Gutenberg. I have not dug far into it, but the book is very interesting in several respects. One, as these are private letters to his son, the subject matter is candid and honest. Two, as Lord Chesterfield intends to educate his son on the finer points of manhood and engagement in society (ie. the role of the gentleman) he makes many noteworthy observations and presents essentially a work of practical social philosophy. From the very beginning, it is insightful and thought-provoking:

If care and application are necessary to the acquiring of those
qualifications, without which you can never be considerable, nor make a
figure in the world, they are not less necessary with regard to the
lesser accomplishments, which are requisite to make you agreeable and
pleasing in society. In truth, whatever is worth doing at all, is worth
doing well; and nothing can be done well without attention: I therefore
carry the necessity of attention down to the lowest things, even to
dancing and dress. Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a
young man; therefore mind it while you learn it that you may learn to do
it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act. Dress is of
the same nature; you must dress; therefore attend to it; not in order to
rival or to excel a fop in it, but in order to avoid singularity, and
consequently ridicule. Take great care always to be dressed like the
reasonable people of your own age, in the place where you are; whose
dress is never spoken of one way or another, as either too negligent or
too much studied.