of interest this week: 14 February 2016

Here’s some of what I was reading this past week. In truth, I read a large amount about gravitational waves and I can recommend quite a few other articles and resources on the subject if anyone’s curious. Or just do a Google search. Or go to Reddit. It’s been huge news this week, and rightly so.

• To Overcome the Fear of Failure, Fear This Instead
  By Adam Grant

  So take it from this group of elite failures. If at first you don’t succeed, you’ll know you’re aiming high enough.

  This article doesn’t necessarily impart any new wisdom; chances are you’ve come across similar exhortations to action, even at the risk of failure, versus inaction and later regret. But sometimes one more repetition becomes the right message at the right time.

  This author’s book is now on my to-read list.

• I’m Charles Duhigg, and This Is How I Work

  Productivity is, ultimately, about thinking more deeply. And the best productivity aids, in my experience, are things that push me to critique ideas until they become more true and real.

  This is one of the better “How I Work” installments on Lifehacker that I’ve seen in a while.

• You Can Train Your Body Into Thinking It’s Had Medicine
  By Jo Marchant

  Besides helping with organ transplants, there’s a plethora of uses that conditioning might have, by reducing harmful side-effects or simply making treatment more cost-effective for patients and governments that can’t afford constant full doses of the most expensive drugs. Other possibilities include allergies and autoimmune conditions.

  Just like dogs can be clicker-trained, our bodies might be trained to suppress pain, increase immune response, and more through conditioning. The process doesn’t appear to be as simple as it sounds, and there’s plenty more research to do yet, but I definitely like the idea of boosting a body’s defenses and healing abilities without the side effects and other negative consequences of modern medicines.

• Gravitational waves have been found, scientists say
  By Todd Leopold

  “What’s really exciting is what comes next,” said (David) Reitze (executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). “I think we’re opening a window on the universe — a window of gravitational wave astronomy.”

  I kind of want to rename this piece, “Gravitational Waves Are Real, Bitches!” Because I’m so dope.

  Actually, this is quite big news. Gravitational waves are produced when two black holes collide. And black holes, if you didn’t know, have long been objects of conjecture and speculation, not of certainty or fact. Finding evidence of gravitational waves means that we can observe the universe in a new way and “see” much more of what’s happening out there, but it also would give us evidence of the existence of black holes.

• What’s Wrong with Me?
  BY Meghan O’Rourke

  To be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living. Healthy people, as you’re painfully aware, have the luxury of forgetting that our existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you.

  This is an older piece but one I came across only this week. There is quite a lot about this essay—detailing the author’s experience learning to live with autoimmune disease—that resonated with me that I easily could have included above approximately every other paragraph to emphasize what spoke to me the most.

  I don’t want to be a broken record about the challenges of living with chronic illness. Like the author of this essay, I just want to get better. I’m tired of having to be hyper-conscious of every little detail of life from food ingredients and tracking migraine pain from one hour to the next and what’s triggering the unpleasant GERD symptoms, to how much sleep I did or didn’t get and the outside temperature and my current level of hydration and how many daily spoons I might have left based on all of the above and considerably more. If I could take a vacation from being sick, I would have run away from home a long, long time ago.

  This essay speaks to the despair we can fall into when chronic illness overwhelms us and also to the lifelines of hope and support that can be found in blogs, Facebook groups, and online bulletin boards devoted to individual maladies and to chronic illness in general. And about the dangers of becoming trapped in one’s identity as a sick person.

Creative Commons photo: NSF’s LIGO Has Detected Gravitational Waves by Charly W. Karl.