P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #378
Chicago summer!
my story 🚀
⛺️ I’m pleased to report that our annual dads + kids Father’s day weekend camping trip was a huge success. Sunday morning I woke up a bit of commotion as a thunderstorm was approaching. We packed up camp in a hurry, almost in time to avoid getting soaked. We were able to redirect the group to a wonderful breakfast spot that did an admirable job accommodating our group of 8 dads and 16 unwashed kids.
fun facts 🙌
Dead reckoning. “In navigation, dead reckoning is the process of calculating the current position of a moving object by using a previously determined position, or fix, and incorporating estimates of speed, heading (or direction or course), and elapsed time.” ~ learn more
Purple gorilla story. My kids asked me for a scary but not too scary story. The internet delivered this. ~ learn more
Successful finance guy buys his way into a pro soccer club in Portugal. The subhead of this WSJ article can’t resist disclosing that he (Courtney Reum) is Paris Hilton’s brother-in-law, overshadowing his professional accomplishments. ~ learn more
ProPublica exposes nonprofit group for fundraising right into their own pockets. You might think this is insane and illegal, yet they do it with visible disclosures like: “When you make a contribution, we want you to know that a minimum of 90 cents of every dollar will be dedicated to covering our fundraising costs and outreach efforts.” ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
The story behind Chicago’s first murder. “The perpetrator of Chicago’s first (documented) homicide was not punished, though; in fact, he has a street named after him.” ~ learn more
What Colombia can teach Chicago about managing a migrant wave. This isn’t really about Chicago at all, it’s about Colombia. “The small, relatively poor South American country has received four times more Venezuelans than the United States but offers a path to integration. We went to see it.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
GitHub’s CPO on the future of AI in software development. “Inbal Shani is the chief product officer at GitHub, where she leads core product management, along with product strategy, marketing, open source, and communities, including the development of GitHub Copilot.” Notably Copilot was one of the first big LLM use cases that took off, even before ChatGPT. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
The Wright brothers missed a lot of school. “So the boys missed some school but they read a lot of books. They missed some classes but they made the world their classroom. They were learning to trust their instincts, to follow projects through to conclusion and to lead their own education.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
The great American poisoning. “The health of an animal reflects the health of its environment. One glance at a starving boar, ribs pressing through the skin, and you understand the boar’s environment lacks the food it needs to be healthy. … Humans are animals too. We’ve evolved to exist in an ancestral environment where health was the default.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
From seashells to cement, nature inspires tougher building material. “The most significant results were observed in the beams with completely separated hexagonal tablets, which are similar to nacre. These beams exhibited 19 times the ductility and 17 times the fracture toughness while retaining nearly the same strength as the solid cement paste beam.” ~ learn more
staying thirsty 🚰
Chicago downplays the threat of losing its biggest water customer. This is a long and well-researched story about water deals between cities. I had never considered these dynamics in the past and find them very interesting. I have always considered Chicago to be water-rich, and this really helps that point hit home. ~ learn more