11 gay men and 1 straight man are locked in a house. The object for the gay men is to find out who isn’t gay. Once a week, someone gets voted out, until 2 are left, or the straight man is out. If the gays manage to outvote him, they win 1 million dollars. If the straight man is among the last 2 people in the house in the end, he wins 1 million dollars.
Now here’s the twist: None of the men are actually gay, they just all think they are the one straight man.
A year and a half ago, my uncle Gary bought himself a billy goat and an alpaca. He had been diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer. He took an early retirement and decided to do all the things he’d always wanted to do, but never got around to doing. He reconnected with family and friends. He went to Disneyland. At the end of the year, he hosted a luau at his home, complete with a 300-pound pig over an imu pit.
Uncle Gary lost his battle with cancer last week. He’d had a total of 20 months between diagnosis and endgame.
The countdown timer is ticking for everybody, but no one pays attention to it until the clock gets into the lower digits. We place a lot of emphasis on the crucial final plays, forgetting that a healthy 20-month period starting now is more valuable than the last seconds of the game when we’re worn out and losing our faculties.
From Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford University:
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&w=420&h=315]
Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed.
Be Wrong as Fast as You Can –NY Times
Remember, past performance is not an indication of future returns.
I feel like I’m looking at a roulette table. “Straight up on Industrials, please!”
Following on the results of my last experiment, I plated up a few more samples of D. Muscipula (venus flytrap) seeds in media jars, this time with added nutrients. I wish I had kept better track of what I added to the media, but I got distracted.
I’ll speculate that the above specimen has approximately 1/8 cups sucrose per Liter, a pinch of generic plant fertilizer, and a dash of multivitamin. This was the most dilute sample I made. Plates with higher sucrose concentrations got contaminated and had to be thrown out.
I was too stingy with the agar and the media failed to solidify. I hoped the seeds would float and be happy, but they promptly sank to the bottom. I left the jars on a windowsill, assuming they were a lost cause.
Surprisingly, the seeds germinated while completely submerged. After the leaves grew out, the seedlings floated to the surface. Despite the fact that it is the middle of winter and the plants are receiving no supplemental heat or light, they are still successfully producing chlorophyll by absorbing sugar and trace micronutrients from media.
Growing plants have greater nutrient requirements than seedlings. However, I am loathe to replate these guys for lack of a sterile work environment. I’ll see how long they last in the current media and check back later. I am happy with how things are progressing.
For my next trick, I’ll slice off a piece of my arm to grow in vitro.