Doublespeak by William Lutz

• Doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn't. It is language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable. Doublespeak is language that avoids or shifts responsibility, language that is at variance with its real or purported meaning. It is language that conceals or prevents thought; rather than extending though, doublespeak limits it.
• Doublespeak is not a matter of subjects and verbs agreeing; it is a matter of words and facts agreeing. Basic to doublespeak is incongruity, the incongruity between what is said or left unsaid, and what really is.
• Within a group, jargon functions as a kind of verbal shorthand that allows members of the group to communicate with each other clearly, efficiently, and quickly. Indeed, it is a mark of membership in the group to be able to use and understand the group's jargon.
• Jargon as doublespeak often makes the simple appear complex, the ordinary profound, the obvious insightful. In this sense it is used not to express but impress.
• A third kind of doublespeak is gobbledygook or bureaucratese. Basically, such doublespeak is simply a matter of piling on words, of overwhelming the audience with words, the bigger the words and the longer the sentences the better.
• The fourth kind of doublespeak is inflated language that is designed to make the ordinary seem extraordinary; to make everyday things seem impressive; to give an air of importance to people situations, or things that would not normally be considered important; to make the simple seem complex.
• At its worst, doublespeak, like newspeak, is language designed to limit, if not eliminate, thought. Like doublethink, doublespeak enables speaker and listener, writer and reader, to hold two opposing ideas in their minds at the same time and believe in both of them.
• At its least offensive, doublespeak is inflated language that tries to give importance to the insignificant.
• Business doublespeak often attempts to give substance to pure wind, to make ordinary actions seem complex.
• Indeed, most doublespeak is the product of clear thinking and is carefully designed and constructed to appear to communicate when in fact it doesn't. It is language designed not to lead but mislead. It is language designed to distort reality and corrupt thought.
• Doublespeak is insidious because it can infect and eventually destroy the function of language, which is communication between people and social groups.
• This corruption of the function of language can have serious and far-reaching consequences.
• Remember, doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn't; it is language designed to mislead.
• Statistical doublespeak is a particularly effective form of doublespeak, since statistics are not likely to be closely scrutinized. Moreover, we tend to think that numbers are more concrete, more "real" than mere words.
• Quantify something and you give it a precision, a reality it did not have before.
• Simple, clear language just isn't impressive enough for many people in education. It seems they want to impress others with how hard their jobs are and how smart they have to be in order to do their jobs. After all, if anyone can understand it, then it can't be very special.
• Doublespeak can and is used to avoid those harsh realities the medical profession prefers not to acknowledge.
• It may come as a surprise to you, but advertisements do not have to be literally true. "Puffing" the product is perfectly legal.
• "Puffing" is an exaggeration about the product that is so obvious just about anyone is capable of recognizing the claim as an exaggeration.
• The most common examples of "puffing" involve the use of such words as "exciting", "glamorous", "lavish", and "perfect".
• However, when an advertising claim can be scientifically tested or analyzed, it is no longer "puffing".
• Parity products are simply products in which most if not all the brands in a class or category are pretty much the same.
• Advertisers use weasel words to appear to be making a claim for a product when in fact they are making no claim at all.
• Weasel words appear to say one thing when in fact they say the opposite, or nothing at all.
• The biggest weasel word used in advertising doublespeak is "help". Now "help" only means to aid or assist, nothing more.
• The trick is that the claim that comes after the weasel word is usually so strong and so dramatic that you forget the word "help" and concentrate only on the dramatic claim.
• One of the most powerful weasel words is "virtually", a word so innocent that most people don't pay any attention to it when it is used in an advertising claim.
• "Virtually" means not in fact.
• When used in advertisements, "improved" does not mean "made better". It only means "changed" or "different from before".
• "New" is just too useful and powerful a word in advertising fo advertisers to pass it up easily. So they use weasel words that say "new" without really saying it. One of their favorites is "introducing".
• "Acts" and "works" are two popular weasel words in advertising because they bring action to the product and to the advertising claim.
• Ads that use such phrases as "acts fast", and "acts against", "acts to prevent", and the like are saying essentially nothing, because "act" is a word empty of any specific meaning. The ads are always careful not to specify exactly what "act" the product performs.
• Watch out for ads that say a product "works against", "works like", "works for", or "works longer". As with "acts", "works" is the same meaningless verb used to make you think that this product really does something, and maybe even something special or unique. But "works", like "acts", is basically a word empty of any specific meaning.
• Every word in an ad is there for a reason; no word is wasted. Your job is to figure out exactly what each word is doing in an ad--what each word really means, not what the advertiser wants you to think it means. Remember, the ad is trying to get you to buy a product, so it will put the product in the best possible light, using any device, trick, or means legally allowed.
• Your only defense against advertising is to develop and use a strong critical reading, listening, and looking ability.
• Always ask yourself what the ad is really saying.
• When corporations have a bad year or something goes wrong, the corporate report is filled with doublespeak.
• Often annual reports are simply filled with a lot of seemingly impressive language that says nothing. This is the doublespeak or gobbledygook or bureaucratese.
• See what the doublespeak of accounting can do? It turns profits into losses and losses into profits. The doublespeak of accounting is some of the most powerful and influential (not to mention profitable) doublespeak there is.
• Layoffs are always good for the company and never a sign that the company may be in trouble.
• Using doublespeak, bad news can be magically transformed into good news.
• Dictators are particularly good when using doublespeak to cover up their use of secret police to enforce their rule.
• With doublespeak, a government can kill its citizens while still respecting their rights.
• Often, political leaders are reduced to a kind of doublespeak absurdity when defending their position, or as Orwell put it, "the defense of the indefensible".
• Somehow, dictators never see the killing of thousands of their citizens as anything but necessary for the good of those killed and those still alive. Such instances give rise to doublespeak that is used to make murder respectable.
• With doublespeak, enemies can kill each other while stoutly maintaining their only interest is peace.
• There are three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and the military way, to paraphrase an old G.I. saying. So when it comes to doublespeak, the military has a way with words that is unmatched by other users of doublespeak.
• Military doublespeak starts at the top with the name of the Department of Defense. From the founding of our Republic, there has been a Department of War. Until 1947, that is, when the military pulled off the doublespeak coup of the century.
• One important function of doublespeak is to hide reality, to cover up what's really going on. With doublespeak, weapons never fail, and expensive items are always very complicated and worth their high price.
• Sometime military doublespeak doesn't even give you the faintest idea of what it is the Pentagon is paying all that money for.
• Doublespeak is particularly effective in explaining or at least glossing over accidents.
• The military is acutely aware that the reason for its existence is to wage war, and war means killing people and the deaths of American soldiers as well. Because the reality of war and its consequences are so harsh, the military almost instinctively turns to doublespeak when discussing war.
• Using the language of the business world--jobs, pay, training, benefits, advancement, experience, and career development--the military portrays the unpleasant aspects of military life as not just palatable but desirable. In the world of the military corporation, combat is just one of the functions of the corporation, almost like marketing or sales.
• In the modern military corporation combat does not involve killing and death, but is a "challenge" that will "test your strength, stamina, and spirit" and slake "your thirst for adventure", as the army's "Combat Arms" pamphlet presents it.
• As Orwell pointed out, history can be and often is rewritten to suit the needs of the present.
• Political doublespeak is often language that sounds impressive but really says nothing.
• Gobbledygook, or bureaucratese, is such a common form of political and government doublespeak because it allows the speaker to appear intelligent and able to handle a difficult, complicated subject while suggesting that the audience is too stupid to understand what the speaker is saying.
• In addition to saying nothing, political doublespeak also allows the speaker to sound sincere, concerned, and thoughtful.
• For quite awhile, when politicians had nothing to say because they had no ideas or simply didn't know what was going on, they would fall back on that handy little piece of doublespeak, "process" [...]. But "process" lost its luster, so another meaningless yet impressive word has to be found. Some geniuous at doublespeak came up with "initiative".
• For politicians, "initiative" has become THE word to use when discussing any program that is more gaol than fact, more hope than reality, more hype than substance.
• When politicians run out of ideas or solutions, or when they want to sound like they're doing something when they haven't the faintest idea what to do, they come up with initiatives.
• Initiatives only start, they don't finish, which explains why there have been so many Middle East peace initiatives, but no real peace in the Middle East.
• Initiatives, initiatives everywhere, but not a success in sight.
• While politicians often use doublespeak to avoid taking a position or accepting responsibility, or to lie and mislead, government works often use doublespeak simply because it's the only language they know. They really think they are communicating a message with their doublespeak. There audience, however, is just as bewildered and baffled as any politician's.
• Doublespeak can also mean redefining widely used words, giving them a new meaning that is the opposite of their generally accepted meaning.
• The redefinition of words is a particularly powerful form of government doublespeak.
• Congress is one of the greatest sources of doublespeak, if for no other reason than the tax laws that it produces.

A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes by Peter Bevelin

• But knowledge doesn't automatically make us wise--the most learned are not the most wise.
• Judgement can do without knowledge but not knowledge without judgement.
• Make sure "facts" are facts--Is it really so? Is this really true? Did this really happen?
• Separate the relevant and important facts from the unimportant or accidental.
• It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.
• More information isn't necessarily better information but it may falsely increase our confidence--What is not worth knowing is not worth knowing.
• The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
• The eye sees only what it is trained to see.
• "Checklist" routines for critical factors help--assuming I am competent enough to decide what factors are critical and that I can evaluate them.
• It is just these very simply things which are extremely liable to be overlooked.
• Sometimes we overlook that which is most obvious.
• In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected.
• Use the simplest means first.
• Which is the simplest, most natural explanation--the one requiring the least assumptions needed to explain the facts?
• There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor...before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.
• But remember that we see what we are looking for--if we look for similarities, this  is what we see, if we look for the differences, that is what we find.
• The absence of something we expect to see or happen is information and a clue in itself
• Strip away things the don't count and focus on what matters--the core.
• Test our theory--if it disagrees with the facts it is wrong.
• Distance gives perspective--Sometimes we need to remove ourselves from the problem and get a fresh perspective.
• Learn from your mistakes--and learn the general lessons.
• It is easy to be wise after the event, but very difficult to be wiser.
• Don't think about how to get things done, instead ask whether they're worth doing in the first place.
• A lot of misery comes from what we allow ourselves to get dragged into.

THE ESSENTIALS OF PERSUASIVE PUBLIC SPEAKING by Sims Wyeth

• Public speaking is a centripetal social force: it pulls people into the same place at the same time to think about the same thing. It is an ancient technology designed to help tribes, communities, companies, and nations make wise decisions.
• Good leaders generally speak well, but not all good speakers are good leaders.
• Speech that authentically reveals the personality of the speaker, and is addressed to and about an individual or defined group, is far more memorable than a message from a corporation meant for a demographic.
• Make all your presentations personal.
• Let there be drama in your presentations.
• Spoken language is less ambiguous and more persuasive than written language because it is amplified and clarified by gesture, voice, character, and dialogue.
• Cutting back is easier than taking it up a notch.
• PUBLIC SPEAKING IS the number one tool of leadership because when you get people in a room to hear the same message at the same time you have the greatest chance of moving them to action.
• Most of us in business are better at talking about facts and figures than we are at evoking emotions, values, and beliefs. But the ability to unite both types of speaking—the intellectual and the emotional—is the jewel in the crown of public speech.
• Language lies close to the heart of invention.
• Thou shalt not be Arrogant. Thou shalt not be Boring. Thou shalt not be Confusing.
• Stick to being you. Everyone else is taken.
• On Broadway, you’re a triple threat if you can sing, dance, and act. In business, you’re a triple threat if you look the part, know the part, and see your role in the larger drama.
• Accept every invitation to present. Seek out opportunities to speak. The more you speak to groups, the stronger you become.
• Speak 10,000 times. Quality comes from quantity.
• Most presentations get less effective when loaded with too many fine distinctions. As a speaker, you don’t have to be mathematically exact. You have to deal only in probabilities.
• ADVERTISING ADDS TO the intrinsic value of products by enhancing our perception of them.
• People who look good, sound good, and make compelling sense in high-stakes moments have an unfair advantage over those who don’t.
• Do not dismiss the power of perception. All value is perceived value.
• Good speakers project confidence, a quality attractive in men and women.
• The world we live in is created in our heads. The world our listeners live in is created in their heads, and that’s the world we need to connect with.
• To be your own best speech coach, speak to yourself as you would to a client—be consciously positive. Over time, you’ll become unconsciously positive.
• You’ll improve your speaking by improving how you speak to yourself.
• AS SPEAKERS WE face two big danger zones: 1.We fail to express our intentions, and 2.We express things we don’t intend.
• The power of metaphor. Use it—often!
• WHAT KEEPS PEOPLE up at night? The answer is universal: open questions or unresolved problems.
• A speech or presentation is complete when there is nothing left to take out.
• IF YOU ARE SERIOUS about getting better as a public speaker, cheat and steal whenever possible. Watch others, take what you can, and make it your own.
• Boost the signal by sticking to your point. Kill the noise by making sure that your delivery expresses your intention.
• A good talk is a lively mix of fact and opinion, analysis and story, appeals to reason and emotion.
• Keep the audience’s interest, and end with a bang.
• Problem definition is the key to success.
• Openings and endings are equally important. Pay equal attention to both.
• At the start of your presentation, instead of telling your audience what they need to know, ask them questions that have the potential of revealing that they lack complete knowledge of the subject you’re about to address. You’ll get them thinking and rouse their curiosity.
• Beginners become masters by persisting through failure. Or as the Japanese say, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”
• Your presentation is always more effective when there’s an obstacle to overcome, a problem to fix, a myth to be busted, or a puzzle to solve.
• Memories tend to cluster around emotions, positive and negative. When appropriate, pack your talk with humor. Your message is bound to be remembered.
• Predictability kills interest from the start.
• Good content is often necessary for persuasion, but usually not sufficient. The landscape of history is littered with content-rich arguments that went nowhere.
• Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, spoke about the relationship between information and attention. He said, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
• Listeners appreciate a speaker who can clarify complexity, without oversimplifying it.
• Speak to your audience in the language of your audience, about what is most important to your audience.
• The best strategy for a shy presenter is to be concise, well-rehearsed, clever with words, and humorous now and then. Forget theatrics. That’s a language the shy should not dare to speak.
• Terseness is a kind of hostility. Brevity, on the other hand, implies clarity without elaboration.
• When on stage, it’s a good idea to point with your whole hand rather than use a single finger. It looks better, more assertive.
• Point with your whole hand.
• IF YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE what to work on—your voice or your body language—choose your voice.
• Your voice expresses logic and feeling. Your body language only gets noticed if it’s crummy.
• Fashion is often out of style, but style is never out of fashion.
• LEARN TO STAND STILL as a presenter.
• The juxtaposition of stillness with movement is very near the crux of any performance art.
• THE ABILITY TO PAUSE effectively lends you stature and helps listeners listen.
• Look one person in the eye as you deliver your opening.
• IN WELL-SPOKEN ENGLISH, there is a change of pitch on every stressed syllable.
• Vocal emphasis brings your meaning to life. Not everything is equally important.
• Vary the pitch of your speaking voice.
• The spaces between words are as important to your message as the words themselves.
• Preserve the silences that make speech more effective.
• Rather than correcting your audience for their indifferent response, take responsibility for their experience. It’s not their job to be interested. It’s your job to get them interested.
• LESS IS MORE. People can only retain three to five points. And studies indicate that attention drops off after twenty minutes.
• So, if you have to give a long talk, break it into twenty-minute chunks and give the audience a breather. Or just stop talking for a few seconds as you leave one section and begin the next.
• Don’t be the hunted. Be the hunter. Focus your eyes on your listeners, one at a time.
• Tone of voice counts.
• Great performers narrow their focus. They put aside fear and thoughts of success and bear down to get the job done.
• MEMORIZE YOUR OPENING and deliver it while the title slide is on the screen. The lack of detail on the title slide allows the audience to focus entirely on you.
• Memorize your opening because it’s the part of your talk your audience is most likely to remember.
• Technology is helpful, but there is no substitute for connecting with your listeners, knowing your lines, and speaking with just the right oomph.
• Don’t use slide headlines to introduce a topic. Use them to make a statement.
• Tiny reductions in friction can lead to significant results.
• Don’t let the audience rewrite your talk when it’s time for Q&A. Find a way to bridge back to one of your main points no matter where the audience wants to take you.
• SENIOR DECISION MAKERS are time pressed, content driven, and results oriented.

HOW "GOD" WORKS by Marshall Brain

• Human beings have to make decisions about the truth of information constantly.
• Statistically speaking, if you live in the United States, there is a 75 percent chance that you are a Christian believer. Seventy-five percent of adults living in the United States today—an overwhelming majority—claim to be Christian and to believe in God and Jesus Christ.
• A 75 percent majority represents an unprecedented level of agreement and approval.
• If something from the world of alternative medicine were to show compelling evidence that it is effective, it stops being categorized as alternative medicine and becomes evidence-based, scientifically proven medicine.
• For reasons that are not completely clear yet, human beings sometimes report feeling better simply through the effects of having someone care for them.
• An anecdotal story about the experiences of one friend is absolutely meaningless.
• Critical thinking is a response to a rather bizarre and unexpected fact about the way human beings naturally think. It turns out that typical human beings, left to their own untrained devices, are not very good thinkers at all. In fact, the average human being who is not provided with any training in critical thinking skills may, potentially, be terrible at logical, precise thinking.
• Critical thinking is logical thinking that is free from biases, fallacies, misinterpretations, fears, and superstitions. As such, critical thinking leads people toward the truth when answering any particular question or when understanding the way the world really works.
• Double-blind testing is one tool in the critical thinking toolbox.
• The average human brain appears to have a natural affinity for superstitions unless it is trained to recognize, understand, and disregard them.
• People tend to put a great deal of faith in stories that are personally told to them by people they trust.
• In reality, the effects of homeopathy are completely, provably imaginary.
• More than half of adults in America believe that the Bible is literally true
• The claims for the effectiveness of prayer in the Bible contradict the reality that we see in the real world here on Earth. Therefore, the claims are false.
• A critical thinker simply looks at the evidence and understands what it indicates.
• Christians and other believers are especially susceptible to something called the post hoc fallacy.
• When the post hoc fallacy combines with confirmation bias, where only positive correlation is noted, a person who suffers from the post hoc fallacy acquires a completely erroneous view of what is happening in the real world.
• Just because you do X and then Y happens (correlation), that does not mean that X causes Y to happen (causation). Causation must be proven scientifically.
• Just because something happened following a prayer, it does not mean that the prayer caused it to happen.
• The problem with groups of human beings is that, if they are not critical thinkers, they tend to create echo chambers amongst their members.
• Given that prayer is such an important part of the definition of God, the fact that prayer is not working tells us something essential about God.
• If prayer actually works, there are a number of things we would expect to see happening, on a statistical basis, in the real world.
• The facts are simple and straightforward. When critical thinkers apply modern statistical methods and use them to understand if prayer works, there is no valid evidence that it does.
• Amputated limbs are never restored through prayer.
• Every answered prayer of intercession is nothing more than a coincidence.
• every prayer fails when the possibility of coincidence has been eliminated
• This is a simple fact about human beings: Our expectations tend to influence our behavior.
• The ability to recognize scams is an important skill for any critical thinker, and it’s also important for consumers in the marketplace.
• The thing to understand is that Yes/No/Wait is always true.
• no matter what you do or who you pray to. No matter what a person prays to, “Yes,” “No,” and “Wait” are the only three possibilities. Therefore, like the sunrise, it’s guaranteed to happen.
• If you insist that prayer works, then simply pray for something impossible and watch it not happen. You have proven conclusively that prayer does not work.
• God is declared to be omniscient. But if God is omniscient, then there clearly is no reason to pray, because God already knows what you want and need.
• a God who is hidden cannot answer prayers without exposing Himself.
• When Jesus talks about the power of prayer in the Bible, none of what he says is true.
• Prayer’s effects have never been demonstrated in any valid statistical sense.
• Belief in prayer is a superstition.
• Lacking any evidence, the default position of any critical thinker is to assume that God is in fact imaginary.
• The God defined by the Bible answers prayers. A person who wants to claim that God exists but does not answer prayers is inventing an entirely new god-concept that stands completely separate from the God of the Bible.
• A person who goes around redefining God on a whim is a person who is inventing imaginary beings.
• IF POSITIVE CLAIMS ARE MADE, IT’S POSSIBLE TO PROVE WHETHER THOSE CLAIMS ARE REAL OR IMAGINARY.
• To create certainty, we perform many different kinds of experiments, gather lots of data, and create an interlocking web of evidence that all points to the same conclusion.
• Why is the Bible so divergent from reality? The myths in the Bible have no basis in reality because the people writing the myths had no scientific knowledge, nor any access to omniscience.
• There is the huge ego boost and reassurance that comes from the belief that the all-powerful creator of the universe is on your side.
• In logic there is a principle called the Law of Noncontradiction that is one of the three Classic Laws of Thought. The Law of Noncontradiction, according to Aristotle, says that “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time.”
• A being who set out to murder nearly every living thing on an entire planet is evil, plain and simple.
• A critical thinker looks at evidence, then evaluates it.
• How do we know that something is real in our universe? It is very simple: There must be evidence demonstrating it to be real.
• One of the hallmarks of religious delusion is a refusal by believers to process straightforward evidence and reach logical conclusions from that evidence.
• If God were imaginary, we would expect to see events happen at exactly the same statistical rates to believers and nonbelievers after controlling for confounding factors.
• Any animal is an intricate multicellular chemical machine, nothing more.
• One reason that Christians buy into the idea of souls and heaven is because most started hearing about the soul as toddlers and they never think about the concept rationally after that.
• Things like anecdotal evidence, confirmation bias, cherry-picking, the post hoc fallacy, doublethink, groupthink, the regression fallacy, and the placebo effect combine together to create a powerful and convincing illusion for people who don’t think critically.
• The God of the Bible is unethical, immoral, evil, and often nonsensical.
• The chosen beliefs of a religious believer are extremely persistent and usually immune to evidence, discussion, common sense, questioning, rational thinking, etc., despite the fact that the believer can so easily see the irrationality in other religions.
• As a general rule, human beings are not very good at thinking unless they’re trained to be critical thinkers.
• As human beings, we have to come to grips with the fact that evolution has imprinted our brains with a strong tendency toward super-irrationality in certain areas.
• Decisions should be based on empirical evidence, experimental results, and critical thinking that indicates the best course of action rather than anecdotes, emotional whim, dogma, or political party lines.
• It’s telling that Christians in developed nations of the world reject misogyny and slavery even though the Bible fully supports both.
• The fact is, human thinking is the source of all ethical behavior, for everyone.

A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO 3D MODELING by Cameron Coward

• 3D printing technologies have revolutionized the engineering world.
• We can categorize today’s 3D modeling software into two broad types: parametric modeling and mesh modeling.
• In mesh modeling software, you push and pull a virtual mesh to create a 3D model like a sculptor.
• In contrast, parametric modeling software like SolidWorks, Creo, Inventor, and Fusion 360 (which we’ll use in this book) rely on parameters,
• Virtually all modern CAD software is parameter based (though many include some mesh modeling capabilities), and in most cases it’s the best option for designing real physical parts.
• The single most important part of the drafting profession is the ability to create drawings that can be interpreted in only one way.
• Fusion 360 is a fully featured parametric CAD program that has nearly all of the features one would find in costly professional CAD software.
• The key to understanding how parametric modeling software works is in its name: with parametric modeling, you define every single feature by a collection of characteristics called parameters.
• The building blocks of parametric modeling are called features.
• Individual features are often just primitive polygons—basic shapes that you put together with other features to end up with a complex part.
• One of the fundamental skills you’ll learn as a designer is how to break the complex part you envision into a series of basic features.
• One of the major factors that holds hobbyists back from jumping into computer-aided design (CAD) is the complexity of the software.
• A 2D plane can only exist as either a surface or as reference geometry, which means it isn’t part of the solid model.
• This is because a 2D model has no thickness, so it isn’t physically possible to create in the real world.
• A fillet (pronounced “fill-it”) is a frequently-used tool for rounding a sketch’s corner.
• Creating a cube is like the “Hello, World!” of 3D modeling.
• The most direct way to produce parametric 3D objects is through manipulating 2D sketches.
• You should leave a 0.5 mm gap between the edge of the lip and the box, because when you’re designing parts that mate together, it’s important to think about how they’ll actually fit in the real world.
• In engineering terms, the room you allow for some error is called tolerance.
• Formal drafting has hundreds of rules about everything from the thickness of different lines to the typefaces used for text. Luckily, in the real world, few people care about the vast majority of those rules.
• Scale, or the relationship between the size of your drawing and the size of the object, is one of the most crucial details of a technical drawing—and one that many novices overlook.
• A tolerance tells the manufacturer how precisely it needs to adhere to the dimensions shown on your drawing (called nominal dimensions).
• There are two kinds of technical drawings: part drawings, which show the specific dimensions of an individual part, and assembly drawings, which show how multiple parts fit together.
• Rendering is the process by which your computer converts a 3D model into a 2D image that displays on a screen.

THE LITTLE BOOK OF TALENT by Daniel Coyle

• Talent begins with brief, powerful encounters that spark motivation by linking your identity to a high-performing person or group. This is called ignition, and it consists of a tiny, world-shifting thought lighting up your unconscious mind: I could be them.
• STARE AT WHO YOU WANT TO BECOME
• Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation.
• SPEND FIFTEEN MINUTES A DAY ENGRAVING THE SKILL ON YOUR BRAIN
• What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?
• Many hotbeds use an approach I call the engraving method. Basically, they watch the skill being performed, closely and with great intensity, over and over, until they build a high-definition mental blueprint.
• The key to effective engraving is to create an intense connection: to watch and listen so closely that you can imagine the feeling of performing the skill.
• STEAL WITHOUT APOLOGY
• All improvement is about absorbing and applying new information, and the best source of information is top performers. So steal it.
• When you steal, focus on specifics, not general impressions.
• BUY A NOTEBOOK
• A high percentage of top performers keeps some form of daily performance journal.
• What matters is not the precise form. What matters is that you write stuff down and reflect on it.
• Results from today. Ideas for tomorrow. Goals for next week.
• BE WILLING TO BE STUPID
• Feeling stupid is no fun. But being willing to be stupid—in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes—is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections.
• CHOOSE SPARTAN OVER LUXURIOUS
• luxury is a motivational narcotic: It signals our unconscious minds to give less effort.
• Simple, humble spaces help focus attention on the deep-practice task at hand: reaching and repeating and struggling.
• When given the choice between luxurious and spartan, choose spartan.
• BEFORE YOU START, FIGURE OUT IF IT’S A HARD SKILL OR A SOFT SKILL
• The first step toward building a skill is to figure out exactly what type of skill you’re building.
• Every skill falls into one of two categories: hard skills and soft skills.
• HARD, HIGH-PRECISION SKILLS are actions that are performed as correctly and consistently as possible, every time. They are skills that have one path to an ideal result; skills that you could imagine being performed by a reliable robot.
• Hard skills are about repeatable precision, and tend to be found in specialized pursuits, particularly physical ones.
• Hard skills are about ABC: Always Being Consistent.
• SOFT, HIGH-FLEXIBILITY SKILLS, on the other hand, are those that have many paths to a good result, not just one.
• These skills aren’t about doing the same thing perfectly every time, but rather about being agile and interactive; about instantly recognizing patterns as they unfold and making smart, timely choices.
• Soft skills tend to be found in broader, less-specialized pursuits, especially those that involve communication,
• Soft skills are about the three Rs: Reading, Recognizing, and Reacting.
• TO BUILD HARD SKILLS, WORK LIKE A CAREFUL CARPENTER
• To develop reliable hard skills, you need to connect the right wires in your brain. In this, it helps to be careful, slow, and keenly attuned to errors. To work like a careful carpenter.
• When you learn hard skills, be precise and measured. Go slowly. Make one simple move at a time, repeating and perfecting it before you move on.
• Pay attention to errors, and fix them, particularly at the start.
• Learning fundamentals only seems boring—in fact, it’s the key moment of investment.
• TO BUILD SOFT SKILLS, PLAY LIKE A SKATEBOARDER
• While hard skills are best put together with measured precision (see Tip #8), soft skills are built by playing and exploring inside challenging, ever-changing environments.
• In other words, to build soft skills you should behave less like a careful carpenter and more like a skateboarder in a skateboard park: aggressive, curious, and experimental, always seeking new ways to challenge yourself.
• When you practice a soft skill, focus on making a high number of varied reps, and on getting clear feedback. Don’t worry too much about making errors—the important thing is to explore.
• HONOR THE HARD SKILLS
• Prioritize the hard skills because in the long run they’re more important to your talent.
• DON’T FALL FOR THE PRODIGY MYTH
• Early success turns out to be a weak predictor of long-term success.
• If you have early success, do your best to ignore the praise and keep pushing yourself to the edges of your ability, where improvement happens.
• Great teachers, coaches, and mentors, like any rare species, can be identified by a few characteristic traits.
• Avoid Someone Who Reminds You of a Courteous Waiter
• Seek Someone Who Scares You a Little
• Seek Someone Who Gives Short, Clear Directions
• Most great teachers/​coaches/​mentors do not give long-winded speeches.
• Instead, they give short, unmistakably clear directions; they guide you to a target.
• Teaching is not an eloquence contest; it is about creating a connection and delivering useful information.
• Seek Someone Who Loves Teaching Fundamentals
• Great teachers will often spend entire practice sessions on one seemingly small fundamental—for
• Other Things Being Equal, Pick the Older Person
• Great teachers are first and foremost learners, who improve their skills with each passing year.
• The key to deep practice is to reach. This means to stretch yourself slightly beyond your current ability, spending time in the zone of difficulty called the sweet spot. It means embracing the power of repetition, so the action becomes fast and automatic. It means creating a practice space that enables you to reach and repeat, stay engaged, and improve your skills over time.
• FIND THE SWEET SPOT
• Deep practice is not measured in minutes or hours, but in the number of high-quality reaches and repetitions you make—basically, how many new connections you form in your brain.
• Instead of counting minutes or hours, count reaches and reps.
• BREAK EVERY MOVE DOWN INTO CHUNKS
• No matter what skill you set out to learn, the pattern is always the same: See the whole thing. Break it down to its simplest elements. Put it back together. Repeat.
• EACH DAY, TRY TO BUILD ONE PERFECT CHUNK
• Deep practice has a telltale emotional flavor, a feeling that can be summed up in one word: “struggle.”
• CHOOSE FIVE MINUTES A DAY OVER AN HOUR A WEEK
• DON’T DO “DRILLS.” INSTEAD, PLAY SMALL, ADDICTIVE GAMES
• The governing principle is this: If it can be counted, it can be turned into a game.
• Whenever possible, create a vivid image for each chunk you want to learn. The images don’t have to be elaborate, just easy to see and feel.
• PAY ATTENTION IMMEDIATELY AFTER YOU MAKE A MISTAKE
• People who pay deeper attention to an error learn significantly more than those who ignore it.
• Develop the habit of attending to your errors right away.
• Take mistakes seriously, but never personally.
• Smaller practice spaces can deepen practice when they are used to increase the number and intensity of the reps and clarify the goal.
• SLOW IT DOWN (EVEN SLOWER THAN YOU THINK)
• Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.
• One of the quickest ways to deepen practice is also one of the simplest: Close your eyes.
• Removing everything except the essential action lets you focus on what matters most: making the right reach.
• WHEN YOU GET IT RIGHT, MARK THE SPOT
• TAKE A NAP
• The science: Napping is good for the learning brain, because it helps strengthen the connections formed during practice
• TO LEARN A NEW MOVE, EXAGGERATE IT
• Always focus on the positive move, not the negative one.
• TO LEARN FROM A BOOK, CLOSE THE BOOK
• The biggest problem in choosing a practice strategy is not that there are too few options, but that there are too many.
• Small changes in method can create large increases in learning velocity.
• STOP BEFORE YOU’RE EXHAUSTED
• PRACTICE IMMEDIATELY AFTER PERFORMANCE
• JUST BEFORE SLEEP, WATCH A MENTAL MOVIE
• END ON A POSITIVE NOTE
• Use the First Few Seconds to Connect on an Emotional Level
• Effective teaching is built on trust, and when it comes to trust, we humans are consistent: We decide if we’re going to trust someone in the first few seconds of the interaction. This is why good teachers use the first few seconds to connect on an emotional level, especially on the first encounter.
• Avoid Giving Long Speeches—Instead, Deliver Vivid Chunks of Information
• Be Allergic to Mushy Language
• One of the most common mistakes teachers and coaches make is using mushy, imprecise language.
• All good teaching follows the same blueprint: Try this concrete thing. Now try this concrete thing. Now try combining them into this concrete thing. Communicate with precise nouns and numbers—things you can see and touch and measure—and avoid adjectives and adverbs, which don’t tell you precisely what to do.
• Make a Scorecard for Learning
• Maximize “Reachfulness”
• Reachfulness is the essence of learning. It happens when the learner is leaning forward, stretching, struggling, and improving.
• Aim to Create Independent Learners
• Your long-term goal as a teacher, coach, or mentor is to help your learners improve so much that they no longer need you.
• EMBRACE REPETITION
• Repetition is the single most powerful lever we have to improve our skills, because it uses the built-in mechanism for making the wires of our brains faster and more accurate (see the Appendix, this page).
• Embracing repetition means changing your mindset; instead of viewing it as a chore, view it as your most powerful tool.
• FOR EVERY HOUR OF COMPETITION, SPEND FIVE HOURS PRACTICING
• A five-to-one ratio of practice time to performance time is a good starting point; ten to one is even better.
• DON’T WASTE TIME TRYING TO BREAK BAD HABITS—INSTEAD, BUILD NEW ONES
• TO LEARN IT MORE DEEPLY, TEACH IT
• GIVE A NEW SKILL A MINIMUM OF EIGHT WEEKS
• WHEN YOU GET STUCK, MAKE A SHIFT
• Grit is that mix of passion, perseverance, and self-discipline that keeps us moving forward in spite of obstacles.
• Grit isn’t inborn. It’s developed, like a muscle, and that development starts with awareness.
• KEEP YOUR BIG GOALS SECRET
• Telling others about your big goals makes them less likely to happen, because it creates an unconscious payoff—tricking our brains into thinking we’ve already accomplished the goal.

THE OBESITY CODE by Dr. Jason Fung

• THE ART OF medicine is quite peculiar. Once in a while, medical treatments become established that don’t really work. Through sheer inertia, these treatments get handed down from one generation of doctors to the next and survive for a surprisingly long time, despite their lack of effectiveness.
• Obesity is defined in terms of a person’s body mass index, calculated as a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in meters. A body mass index greater than 30 is defined as obese.
• In the science of nutrition, there is rarely any consensus about anything:
• A calorie is a unit of food energy used by the body for various functions such as breathing, building new muscle and bone, pumping blood and other metabolic tasks.
• Calories In is the food energy that we eat. Calories Out is the energy expended for all of these various metabolic functions.
• Throughout most of human history, obesity has been rare.
• All foods can be divided into three different macronutrient groups: fat, protein and carbohydrates.
• IT IS FAIRLY obvious that obesity runs in families.
• Seventy percent of your tendency to gain weight is determined by your parentage. Obesity is overwhelmingly inherited.
• Hunger is one of the most powerful and basic of human instincts.
• There is no survival advantage to carrying a very high body-fat percentage.
• There is an important difference between being fat and being obese. Obesity is the state of being fat to the point of having detrimental health consequences.
• In humans, evolution did not favor obesity, but rather, leanness.
• TRADITIONALLY, OBESITY HAS been seen as a result of how people process calories, that is, that a person’s weight could be predicted by a simple equation: Calories In – Calories Out = Body Fat This key equation perpetrates what I call the calorie deception.
• Caloric intake and expenditure are intimately dependent variables. Decreasing Calories In triggers a decrease in Calories Out.
• “A calorie is a calorie” implies that the only important variable in weight gain is the total caloric intake, and thus, all foods can be reduced to their caloric energy.
• All calories are not equally likely to cause weight gain.
• A calorie is simply a unit of energy.
• Hormones tightly regulate every single system in the body.
• The problem of fat accumulation is really a problem of distribution of energy. Too much energy is diverted to fat production as opposed to, say, increasing, body-heat production.
• Calories In and Calories Out are highly dependent variables.
• Losing weight triggers two important responses. First, total energy expenditure is immediately and indefinitely reduced in order to conserve the available energy. Second, hormonal hunger signaling is immediately and indefinitely amplified in an effort to acquire more food.
• Weight loss results in increased hunger and decreased metabolism. This evolutionary survival strategy has a single purpose: to make us regain the lost weight.
• Let me state it as plainly as I can: “Eat Less” does not work. That’s a fact. Accept it.
• When it comes to weight loss, exercise is just not that effective.
• You can’t outrun a poor diet.
• Exercise represents a stress on the body. Small amounts are beneficial, but excessive amounts are detrimental.17
• The overfeeding paradox is that excess calories alone are not sufficient for weight gain—in contradiction to the caloric-reduction theory.
• Increased caloric intake is met with increased caloric expenditure. With the increase in total energy expenditure, we have more energy, more body heat and we feel great.
• Eating more does not make us fat. Getting fat makes us eat more.
• Our body is not a simple scale balancing Calories In and Calories Out. Rather, our body is a thermostat. The set point for weight—the body set weight—is vigorously defended against both increase and decrease.
• The vast majority of obese people are not deficient in leptin. Their leptin levels are high, not low. But these high levels did not produce the desired effect of lowering body fatness. Obesity is a state of leptin resistance.
• Obesity develops over decades.
• Obesity is a hormonal dysregulation of fat mass. The body maintains a body set weight, much like a thermostat in a house.
• OBESITY IS NOT caused by an excess of calories, but instead by a body set weight that is too high because of a hormonal imbalance in the body.
• Hormones are molecules that deliver messages to a target cell.
• Insulin is a key regulator of energy metabolism, and it is one of the fundamental hormones that promote fat accumulation and storage.
• Insulin is a storage hormone. Ample intake of food leads to insulin release. Insulin then turns on storage of sugar and fat. When there is no intake of food, insulin levels fall, and burning of sugar and fat is turned on.
• Under normal conditions, high insulin levels encourage sugar and fat storage. Low insulin levels encourage glycogen and fat burning. Sustained levels of excessive insulin will tend to increase fat storage. An imbalance between the feeding and fasting will lead to increased insulin, which causes increased fat, and voilà—obesity.
• OBESITY DEVELOPS WHEN the hypothalamus orders the body to increase fat mass to reach the desired body set weight.
• The key to understanding obesity is to understand what regulates body set weight, why body set weight is set so high, and how to reset it lower.
• Insulin causes obesity.
• In type 1 diabetes, there is destruction of the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas, resulting in very low levels of insulin. Patients require insulin injections to survive.
• In type 2 diabetes, cells are resistant to insulin and insulin levels are high.
• Insulin causes weight gain.
• Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Insulin falls to extremely low levels. Blood sugar increases, but the hallmark of this condition is severe weight loss.
• THE RESULTS ARE very consistent. Drugs that raise insulin levels cause weight gain. Drugs that have no effect on insulin levels are weight neutral. Drugs that lower insulin levels cause weight loss.
• Hormones are central to understanding obesity.
• Obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric imbalance.
• The crucial point to understand, however, is not how insulin causes obesity, but that insulin does, in fact, cause obesity.
• Long-term use of prednisone leads to an insulin-resistant state in a patient or even to full-blown diabetes.
• abdominal fat deposits are more dangerous to health than all-over weight gain.)
• Stress contains neither calories nor carbohydrates, but can still lead to obesity. Long-term stress leads to long-term elevated cortisol levels, which leads to extra pounds.
• SLEEP DEPRIVATION IS a major cause of chronic stress today.
• Getting enough good sleep is essential to any weight loss plan.
• Highly refined carbohydrates are the most notorious foods for raising blood sugars. High blood sugars lead to high insulin levels. High insulin levels lead to weight gain and obesity. This chain of causes and effects has become known as the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis.
• Refined carbohydrates are easy to become addicted to and overeat precisely because there are no natural satiety hormones for refined carbs. The reason, of course, is that refined carbohydrates are not natural foods but are instead highly processed. Their toxicity lies in that processing.
• Insulin and obesity are still causally linked. However, it is not at all clear that high carbohydrate intake is always the primary cause of high insulin levels.
• The notion that carbohydrates are the only driver of insulin is incorrect. A critical piece of the puzzle had been neglected.
• Usually, obesity is a gradual process of gaining 1 to 2 pounds (0.5 to 1 kilogram) per year.
• THE HUMAN BODY is characterized by the fundamental biological principle of homeostasis. If things change in one direction, the body reacts by changing in the opposite direction to return closer to its original state.
• Insulin causes insulin resistance.
• The longer you are obese, the harder it is to eradicate.
• The longer you are obese, the more insulin resistance you have. Gradually, that insulin resistance will cause even your fasting insulin levels to rise.
• Persistent high insulin levels lead gradually and eventually to insulin resistance.
• The brain is not resistant to insulin. When high insulin levels reach the brain, the insulin retains its full effect to raise body set weight.
• Normally, insulin is released in bursts, which prevents the development of insulin resistance.
• Over time, insulin resistance induces the body to produce even more insulin to “overcome” the resistance.
• Insulin resistance requires persistently high levels.
• Eating more frequent meals does not aid in weight loss.
• The human body has evolved mechanisms to deal with prolonged periods without food. The body instead burns fat for energy, and blood sugar levels remain in the normal range, even during prolonged fasting, due to gluconeogenesis.
• The increase in eating opportunities has led to persistence of high levels of insulin.
• Increasing meal frequency does not result in weight loss.
• It is simply not necessary to eat the minute we wake up.
• There is simply no need to refuel with sugary cereals and bagels. Morning hunger is often a behavior learned over decades, starting in childhood.
• The word breakfast literally means the meal that breaks our fast, which is the period when we are sleeping and therefore not eating.
• The main problem in the morning is that we are always in a rush. Therefore, we want the convenience, affordability and shelf life of processed foods.
• The vast majority (73 percent) of children regularly eat sugary cereals. By contrast, only 12 percent regularly eat eggs at breakfast.
• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day—for Big Food.
• Are you hungry at breakfast? If not, listen to your body and don’t eat.
• To put it simply, you cannot eat more to weigh less, even if the food you’re eating more of is as healthy as vegetables.
• EXCESSIVELY HIGH INSULIN resistance is the disease known as type 2 diabetes. High insulin resistance leads to elevated blood sugars, which are a symptom of this disease. In practical terms, this means that not only does insulin causes obesity, but also that insulin causes type 2 diabetes. The common root cause of both diseases is high, persistent insulin levels.
• Despite the similarity in culture and genetics between populations in Canada and the United States, U.S rates of obesity are much higher.
• States with the most poverty tend to also have the most obesity.
• The increased palatability of food is not accidental.
• The majority of exercise is free, often requiring no more than a basic shoe.
• The government is subsidizing, with our own tax dollars, the very foods that are making us obese. Obesity is effectively the result of government policy. Federal subsidies encourage the cultivation of large amounts of corn and wheat, which are processed into many foods.
• The driving factor in obesity is insulin, and in many cases, the wide availability of refined carbohydrates.
• Childhood obesity also leads to adult obesity and future health problems, particularly cardiovascular issues.
• miserably as a remedy for adult obesity. Did the children learn how to eat a low-fat diet? Sure did. Dietary fat started at 34 percent of calories and over the course of the study, fell to 27 percent. Did they eat fewer calories? Sure did. The intervention group averaged 1892 calories per day compared to 2157 calories per day in the control group. Fantastic! The children were eating 265 fewer calories per day. They learned their lessons extremely well, eating fewer calories and less fat overall. Over the course of three years, calorie counters expected a loss of approximately 83 pounds! But did the children’s weight actually change? Not even by a little bit. Physical activity was no different between the two groups. Despite the increased physical education done in the schools, the total physical activity measured by accelerometer was not different—which should have been expected, given the known effect of compensation. Those children who were very active in school reduced their activity at home. Children relatively sedentary at school increased their activity once out of school. This study was vitally important. The failure of the low-fat, low-calorie strategy should have prompted a search for more effective methods of controlling the scourge of childhood obesity. It should have prompted soul searching for the underlying cause of obesity and how to rationally treat it.
• Thereafter, sugar-sweetened drink relentlessly declined in popularity. From 2003 to 2013, soft-drink consumption
• Sugar, more than any other refined carbohydrate, seems to be particularly fattening and leads to type 2 diabetes.
• Glucose is the main sugar found in the blood and circulates throughout the body.
• Whereas almost every cell in the body can use glucose for energy, no cell has the ability to use fructose.
• The bottom line is that excess fructose is changed into fat in the liver. High levels of fructose will cause fatty liver. Fatty liver is absolutely crucial to the development of insulin resistance in the liver.
• Fructose overconsumption leads directly to insulin resistance.
• INSULIN IS NORMALLY released when we eat.
• Balancing feeding and fasting periods over a day ensures that no net fat is gained or lost.
• Fructose overconsumption causes fatty liver, which directly produces insulin resistance.
• Sugar’s effects, as well as obesity, develop over decades, not days.
• IF YOU WANT to avoid weight gain, remove all added sugars from your diet.
• Despite reducing sugar, diet sodas do not reduce the risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome, strokes or heart attacks. But why? Because it is insulin, not calories, that ultimately drives obesity and metabolic syndrome.
• Despite having a minimal effect on blood sugars, both aspartame and stevia raised insulin levels higher even than table sugar.
• Caloric reduction is the main advantage of artificial sweeteners. But it is not calories that drives obesity; it’s insulin. Since artificial sweeteners also raise insulin levels, there is no benefit to using them.
• Insulin and insulin resistance drive obesity. Refined carbohydrates, such as white sugar and white flour, cause the greatest increase in insulin levels.
• Refining significantly increases the glycemic index by purifying and concentrating the carbohydrate. Removal of fat, fiber and protein means that the carbohydrate can be digested and absorbed very quickly.
• Today’s wheat is simply not as nutritious as in previous generations.
• FIBER IS THE non-digestible part of food, usually of a carbohydrate.
• Fiber has the ability to reduce absorption and digestion. Fiber subtracts rather than adds.
• Soluble fiber reduces carbohydrate absorption, which in turn reduces blood glucose and insulin levels.
• Western diets are characterized by one defining feature—and it’s not the amount of fat, salt, carbohydrate or protein. It’s the high amount of processing of foods.
• BOTH OBESITY AND type 2 diabetes are diseases caused by excessive insulin. Insulin resistance develops over time as a result of persistently high insulin levels.
• Blood glucose does not drive weight gain. But hormones—particularly insulin and cortisol—do.
• Carbohydrates are just long chains of sugars. There is nothing intrinsically nutritious about them.
• All foods, not just carbohydrates, stimulate insulin. Thus, all foods can cause weight gain.
• PROTEINS DIFFER GREATLY in their capacity to stimulate insulin,8 with dairy products in particular being potent stimuli.
• Animal proteins tend to cause you to feel fuller for longer, with whey having the greatest effect.
• Eating three extra servings of meat per day is associated with an extra pound in weight gain over one year, even after controlling for calories.
• It is difficult to significantly increase dairy proteins without resorting to whey protein shakes and other such artificial foods.
• Here’s a small tip for weight loss, one that should be obvious, but is not. If you are not hungry, don’t eat. Your body is telling you that you should not be eating.
• Heart attacks and strokes are predominantly inflammatory diseases, rather than simply diseases of high cholesterol levels.
• THE EVIDENCE ON a link between dietary fat and obesity is consistent: there is no association whatsoever. The main concern about dietary fats had always been heart disease. Obesity concerns were just “thrown in” as well.
• THERE ARE TWO prominent findings from all the dietary studies done over the years. First: all diets work. Second: all diets fail.
• There is no one single cause of obesity.
• Virtually all diseases of the human body are multifactorial.
• All diets work because they all address a different aspect of the disease. But none of them work for very long, because none of them address the totality of the disease.
• The long-recognized truth is that certain foods must be severely restricted, including sugar-sweetened beverages and candy. Other foods do not need to be restricted: kale or broccoli, for instance.
• Calories are only a single factor in the multifactorial disease that is obesity.
• SUGAR STIMULATES INSULIN secretion, but it is far more sinister than that. Sugar is particularly fattening because it increases insulin both immediately and over the long term.
• Candy is often little more than flavored sugar.
• Be aware, though, that if your goal is weight loss, your first major step must be to severely restrict sugar. Don’t replace sugar with artificial sweeteners, as they also raise insulin as much as sugar and are equally prone to causing obesity.
• Grazing is the direct opposite of virtually all food traditions.
• Simply ask yourself this question. Are you really hungry or just bored?
• There’s a simple answer to the question of what to eat at snack time. Nothing. Don’t eat snacks. Period. Simplify your life.
• In the diets of children under age eight, breakfast cereals rank behind only candy, cookies, ice cream and sugared drinks as a source of dietary sugar.
• A simple rule to follow is this: Don’t eat sugared breakfast cereal.
• Remember: the toxicity in much Western food lies in the processing, rather than in the food itself.
• GLUCOSE AND FAT are the body’s main sources of energy. When glucose is not available, then the body adjusts by using fat, without any health detriment.
• Fat is simply the body’s stored food energy.
• Regular fasting, by routinely lowering insulin levels, has been shown to significantly improve insulin sensitivity.
• FASTING IS DEFINED as the voluntary act of withholding food for a specific period of time.

Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky

• Ideas don’t happen because they are great--or by accident.
• Creative people are known for winking it: improvisation and acting on intuition is, in some way, the haloed essence of what we do and who we are.
• Making ideas happen = Idea + Organization + Communal forces + Leadership capability
• In the modern world of information overload and constant connectivity, you must manage your energy wisely. Otherwise you will fall into a state of “reactionary workflow,” where you act impulsively (rather than proactively) and simply try to stay afloat.
• Every project can be broken down into just three things: action steps, backburner items, and references.
• We discovered that the most productive creative individuals and teams have a lot in common when it comes to (1) organization and relentless execution, (2) engaging peers and leveraging communal forces, and (3) strategies for leading creative pursuits.
• The ideas that move industries forward are not the result of tremendous creative insight but rather of masterful stewardship.
• New ideas face an uphill battle from the moment they are conceived.
• The most potent forces that kill new ideas are our own limitations.
• Most ideas are born and lost in isolation.
• It is a tragic truth that most new ideas, despite their quality and importance, will ever see the light of day.
• The quality of ideas themselves is less important the the platform upon which they materialize. Realize that you control the platform for your ideas.
• It is undeniable that your approach to productivity largely determines your creative output.
• The way you organize projects, prioritize, and manage your energy is arguable more important than the quality of the ideas you wish to pursue.
• Productivity is not about how efficient you are at work. Instead, productivity is really about how well you are able to make an impact in what matters most to you.
• Extremely productive and accomplished people and teams capitalize on the power of community to push their ideas forward.
• As you become accountable to others, your creative impulses become tangible projects. Your ideas grow roots. Community strengths both your creative energy and your commitment to channel it.
• Leadership capability is what makes the pursuit of an idea sustainable, scaleable, and ultimately successful.
• Unfortunately, there is a huge void of leadership capability in the creative world, as evidenced by the high attrition and frequent management debacles across the creative industries.
• Leadership capability relates both to your leadership of others as well as to your ability to lead yourself.
• Perhaps some of the greatest hurdles in implementing ideas are personal deficiencies--a common psychological barriers that creative minds often face when executing ideas.
• The reality is that creative environments--and the creative psycho itself--are not conducive to organization. We become intolerant of procedures, restrictions, and processes. Nevertheless, organization is the guiding force of productivity: if you want to make an idea happen, you need to have a process for doing so.
• Only through organization can we seize the benefits from bursts of creativity. If you develop the capacity to organize yourself and those around you, you can beat the odds.
• Organization is just as important as ideas when it comes to making an impact.
• The harsh reality is that brainstorming sessions often yield disappointing results. Ideas with great potential fade from the participant’s minds which each additional idea is thrown into the mix.
• The tendency to jump from idea to idea to idea spread your energy horizontally rather than vertically. As a result, you’ll struggle to make progress.
• Brainstorming should start with a question and the goal of capturing something specific, relevant, and actionable. You should depart such sessions with more conviction than when you started.
• Each person needs to “own” their action steps. When tasks are written in your own handwriting, in your own idiom, they remain familiar and are more likely to be executed.
• The best methods for managing projects are simple and intuitive. They help you capture ideas and do something with them--no more, no less. This simple efficiency keeps you engaged and on task with as little effort as possible.
• Every project in life can be reduced into these three primary components. Action Steps are the specific, concrete tasks that itch you forward. References are any project-related handouts, sketches, notes, meeting minutes, manuals, web sites, or ongoing discussions that you may want to refer back to.
• Finally, there are backburner items--things that are not actionable now but maybe someday.
• Every project must be broken down into Action Steps, References, and Backburner Items.
• Action Steps are the most important components of projects--the oxygen for keeping projects alive. No action steps, no action, no results.
• Action Steps are specific things you must do to move an idea forward. The more clear and concrete an Action Step is, the less friction you will encounter trying to do it.
• To avoid this, start each Action Step with a verb.
• Action Steps should be kept short.
• An unowned Action Step will never be taken. Every action step must be owned by a single person.
• In other words, the aesthetics of the tools you use to make ideas happen matter.
• It turns out that most of us seldom refer back to all of this static documentation that clutters our lives.
• It is common that action steps get lost in the shuffle of non actionable stuff. The more energy you spend scribbling down notes, the more liable you are to miss the opportunity to capture valuable action steps.
• The action method reduces project management to its most basic elements so that you can focus your energy on the important stuff, like actually completing tasks and making progress.
• Actions are truly “delegated” only when they are accepted.
• Sequential tasking is better than multitasking. It is impossible to complete two action steps at once, which would suggest that “multitasking” is a myth.
• The action method suggests that action steps should be managed separately from communications.
• Capture action steps relentlessly.
• Collect them using whatever notebook or technology option you desire--but try to keep action steps separate so they stand out amidst your references and backburner items.
• Try to discard as many references as you can, because most handouts and notes will ultimately never be used.
• We must prioritize because we can only focus on one action step at a time.
• Prioritization should help us maintain both incremental progress as well as momentum for our long-term objectives.
• Prioritization is a force that relies on sound judgement, self-discipline, and some helpful pressure from others.
• If you have lots of ideas, you probably have the tendency to get involved with or start lots of projects.
• Energy is your most precious commodity. Regardless of who you are, you have only a finite amount of it.
• The concept of the Energy Line is meant to address our tendency to spend a lot of time on projects that are interesting but perhaps not important enough to warrant such an investment of energy.
• Hoarding urgent items is one of the most damaging tendencies I’ve noticed in creative professionals who have encountered early success. When you are in the position to do so, challenge yourself to delegate urgent items.
• To achieve long-term goals in the age of always-on technology and free flowing communication, create windows of time dedicated to uninterrupted project focus.
• The more we hear about things, the more likely we are to focus on them.
• When someone is constantly bothering you about something, chances are you have become a bottleneck in the team’s productivity.
• Organizing each project's elements, scheduling time, allocating energy, and then relentlessly completing action steps comprises the lion’s share of pushing ideas to fruition.
• Our ideas become less interesting as we realize the implied responsibilities and sheer amount of work required to execute them.
• The easiest and most seductive escape from the project plateau is the most dangerous one: a new idea.
• New ideas offer a quick return to the high energy and commitment zone, but they also cause us to lose focus.
• Making ideas actually happen boils down to self-discipline and the ways in which you take action.
• Bureaucracy was born out of the human desire for complete assurance before taking action. When we don’t want to take action, we find reasons to wait.
• Even when the next step is unclear, the best way to figure it out is to take some incremental action. Constant motion is the key to execution.
• Taking actions helps expose whether we are on the right or wrong path more quickly and more definitively than purse contemplation ever could.
• Most meetings are fruitless.
• At the end of a meeting, take a few moments to go around and review the action steps each person has captured.
• Abolish automatic meetings without an actionable agenda.
• “Shipping” is when you release something--when you put a new product on sale, when you debit your latest piece of artwork in a gallery, or when you send your manuscript to the publisher. Shipping is the final act of execution that so rarely happens.
• A big part of execution is persistence. When we rely on others to drive momentum, our projects are at their mercy. Sometimes, to keep moving our ideas forward, we need to relentlessly follow up with others.
• “I’m starting to believe that life is just about following up”.
• It turns out that constraints--whether they are deadlines, budgets, or highly specific creative beliefs--help us manage our energy and execute ideas. While our creative side intuitively seeks freedom and openness--blue-sky projects--our productivity desperately requires restrictions.
• Well-articulated problems can also serve as helpful restrictions for the creative process.
• Constraints serve as kindling for execution. When you’re not given constraints, you must seek them.
• Brilliant creative minds become more focused and actionable when the real of possibilities is defined and, to some extent, restricted.
• As you successfully reach milestones in your projects, you should celebrate and surround yourself with these achievements. As a human being, you are motivated by progress. When you see concrete evidence of progress, you are more inclined to take further action.
• The inspiration to generate ideas comes easy, but the inspiration to take action is more rare.
• Feeling progress is an important part of execution. If your natural tendency is to generate ideas rather than take action on existing ideas, then surrounding yourself with progress can help you focus.
• When you make incremental progress, celebrate it and feature it. Surround yourself with it.
• It is no secret that design is a critical element of productivity. Design helps maintain a sense of order amidst creative chaos.
• You can only organize something if you understand how it works.
• Use your work space to induce attention where you need it most. You ultimately want to make yourself feel compelled to take action on the tasks pending, just as a marketer makes you feel compelled to buy something.
• Execution is rarely comfortable or convenient. You must accept the hardships ahead and anticipate the spotlights of seduction that are liable to stifle your progress.
• Perspiration is the best form of differentiation, especially in the creative world.
• Work ethic alone can single-handedly give your ideas the boost that makes all the difference.
• Ultimately, most ideas die in isolation because they are not shared and, as a consequence, are ultimately forgotten.
• The value of feedback is inarguable. It is a powerful, sobering force that can help refine good ideas, kill bad ones, and postpone premature ideas that are not yet ripe.
• Nothing boosts feedback exchange more than transparency.
• If you don’t normally work within a group, you may want to create your own.
• When groups get much bigger than that [15 people], people feel less accountable to a collective rather than to each other as individuals, which is less effective.
• Ideas often have the tendency to lie stagnant until we are jolted into action by either excitement or fear.
• The prospect of someone else completing and receiving fanfare for an idea that you had first is outright painful.
• Perhaps the most critical of all communal forces is accountability.
• Given all of the tendencies of the creative mind that we have discussed, it is no surprise that we need help staying focused and committed to our goals.
• Creatives are often guilty of leaping into new projects with a “build it and they will come” attitude that privileges notions of undeniable genius over the effectiveness of smart marketing.
• Your career is 100 percent your responsibility.
• Self-marketing should start with identifying the strengths that different you from others.
• Self-starters are often successful doing everything themselves. However, when forced to grow beyond the one-person show, may creative people struggle to make the leap from a solo success to a successful collaboration.
• Your ideas will thrive only if you manage them as a leader rather than as an independent creative visionary.
• There is a great void of leadership in the creative world.
• For most of us, the ideas we capture, the knowledge we choose to master, and the tasks we complete are heavily influenced by the demands of those around us--as well as our own thirst for swift gratification.
• As humans, we are motivated by novelty. This is what makes the honeymoon stage of any new idea the easy part.
• You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ingrained short-term reward system within you. But you can become aware of what really motivates you and then tweak your incentives to sustain your long-term pursuits.
• Recognition is a powerful reward that, whether or not money is tight, can help further engage those who play a role in making your ideas happen.
• In a ROWE [Results Only Work Environment], employees are compensated based on their achievement of specified goals rather than on the number of hours worked.
• To truly distinguish yourself as a creative leader, you must be able to gracefully incorporate a broad spectrum of ideas from the team and constituents of a project while still preserving the core mission.
• Team should not strive for complete consensus at the outset of a project. After all, consensus-driven teams run the risk of settling on what offense no one and satisfies no one.
• Early and complete consensus is comfortable but almost always unremarkable.
• Leaders of reactive teas should identify and highlight the noteworthy, memorable solutions at both ends of the spectrum that, in all likelihood, are not agreeable to all.
• Sound leadership in the creative world is all too rare. Creative minds flee their teams at an alarming rate and attrition is a common challenge. And when creative people do leave, it is seldom for a higher salary.
• The creative process is also a process of engagement.
• The ability to recognize and share appreciation may, in fact, be more difficult than offering constructive criticism. Human kind is critical by nature.
• The most successful leaders of change in organizations focus less on hierarchy and more on who has the best information.
• Ultimately, quality information leads to quality decisions.
• If you are able to identify the nodes of information in your organization, you will be able to lead with great understanding.
• We should all stop looking up and start looking around us for the people who seem to always know the answers.
• The most challenging one to manage is you.
• Some of the greatest barriers we face along the path to pushing our ideas to fruition lie within us.
• Self-leadership is about awareness, tolerance, and not letting your own natural tendencies limit your potential.
• Our best hope for staying on track is to notice when we stray and to figure out why--to be self-aware. Self-awareness is a critical skill in leadership, but it is deeply personal. It is not about our actions but about the emotions that trigger our actions.
• With increased self-awareness, we become better students of ourselves. When we make mistakes, we are able to identify what we could have done better more readily.
• The path to self-awareness never ends, but we must traverse it nonetheless.
• With greater self-awareness comes a greater tolerance for uncertainty.
• The best leaders have a high tolerance for ambiguity. They don’t go nuts over the unknown, and they don’t lose patience when dealing with disappointments. They are able to work with what they know, identify what they don't know, and make decisions accordingly. They also act with a faith in the law of averages. Over time, truth has a way of revealing itself.
• When a project goes awry, we must remain open to the lessons that can be learned.
• When a project falls short of expectations, there is almost always something that you could have done differently along the way. Previous knowledge is yours for the taking, often risk-free and time-tested. Today never feels like it will be history, but it will.
• For the small portion of society that is tasked with innovation and pushing the envelope, a reliance on conventional wisdom is damming. We have to temper advice with a dose of skepticism, and we must always consider the merits of developing new platforms rather than more and more derivatives.
• Contrarians are willing to manage (if not embrace) the uncertainties and risks inherent in thinking differently. And by questioning the norms, they are bound to either find better approaches or to feel more confidence in the old ways of doing things.
• The brilliant export from yesterday may have little insight that is relevant today. In fact, such experts may be too biased by their own past experiences and success to see how the times have changed. As such, you should question the correlation between one's past accomplishments and present knowledge.
• Most entrepreneurs will admit that the value of having a masterful business plan is overrated. What matters most is your ability to keep moving and pushing your ideas forward, yard by yard.
• The vision of extraordinary achievements is, by definition, a few steps beyond consensus and conventional logic. As such, we should become emboldened by society’s doubts rather than deterred.
• Ideas are not made to happen by accident or out of luck. Creative achievement implies the logical outcomes of doing something different and seeing it through to completion.
• What society views as a tremendous risk may appear to some of us as an obvious and compelling opportunity.
• Whether or not the project becomes something meaningful depends on our capacity to organize and lead.
• You must learn to gain confidence when doubted by others. The uncharted path is the only road to something new.
• You cannot rely on conventional knowledge, rewards, and procedures as you lead creative pursuits.
• Nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means. With a deviant mind-set, the pressures from others become a source of confidence.
• By shedding the obligations and expectations bestowed upon you by the status quo, you can organize and lead extraordinary ideas to fruition.
• Optimization isn’t about making drastic changes. The key to optimization is making incremental tweaks in a controlled and measurable way.
• Don’t neglect your strengths and focus only on your weaknesses. On the contrary, efforts to optimize should be spent on your strengths. Small tweaks are the difference between 95 percent and 100 percent. If you can find your 95 percent and really bring it home, that’s where you are most likely to change the world.
• Despite the quality of your ideas and output, the impact you will make largely depends on your ability to constantly optimize--to build on your successes and grow them into something greater.

Jujitsu: Basic Techniques of the Gentle Art by George Kirby

• Remember, practice, practice, practice, or good old kime-no-kata (practice the form without executing the technique).
• Pain is relative; injury is absolute!
• The white belt eventually becomes black only because of the time, effort, and experience the wearer puts into practicing the art.
• When you have become a black belt or sensei in the martial arts or at any other skill, do not keep your knowledge to yourself. If you do not help others, you have not truly learned the art.
• You don’t truly learn how to do something until you teach someone else to practice that skill or art at least as well as you do.
• Stated simply, jujitsu is the “gentle art” of self-defense. This is a very simple definition for a very complicated art.
• There are perhaps 30 to 50 basic moves that make the art so complex and almost infinite in its variety.
• By dividing the art into three general areas (jud for throws and leverage, karate for strikes and hits, and aikido for nerves and the use of attacker momentum), portions of the art became easier to teach.
• A physical confrontation should be avoided whenever possible.
• If you practice techniques and moves regularly, your proficiency will be developed and improved.
• It is essential that you take your time while learning. Rushing will get you nowhere fast. Patience and persistent practice, directed toward perfecting techniques, will bring you the confidence that accompanies success.
• Jujitsu techniques will only work if you are calm and in control of your body.
• Calmness is reflected in your ability to keep presence of mind in an otherwise tense situation--even though you are aware of what is happening or has happened and feel scared. If you remain calm, keep your presence of mind, speak in a low voice and refrain from indications of fright, you have a better chance of getting out of the situation successfully.
• Speed cannot compensate for a lack of development in the aforementioned factors. Speed is a consequence that will come naturally as proficiency in techniques increases.
• Proficiency and speed are required for effective self-defense techniques. However, speed cannot compensate for a lack of proficiency.
• Jujitsu techniques are relatively easy to learn if you approach them with an open and positive mind. If you also understand the mechanics behind the techniques, they are easier to understand and learn.
• Once you’ve learned everything right-handed, you should then learn the techniques left-handed by simply doing everything the opposite way.
• A technique used for a lapel grab also can be used for a hit, club attack, choke, etc., with only slight modifications in the initial reaction to the attack.
• The use of strikes and nerves form an integral part of jujitsu techniques, either to loosen up an opponent as part of an actual technique or as a finish to a technique once the opponent is on the ground.
• Nerves and pressure points are those points in the human body, usually at a body joint, where nerve centers can be attacked.
• Jujitsu techniques are only useful if they are automatic reactions.
• It is impossible to effectively learn jujitsu without a partner. You must work with another human body to get the feel of the techniques.
• All jujitsu techniques are taught as reactions to street attacks.
• Gravity controls which direction you will fall--usually down.
• It is important to know hot to land--how to hit the ground with proper breakfalls, spreading the shock out over your torso and extremities--to reduce your chances of injury.
• The importance of learning how to land properly cannot be overemphasized.
• JUjitsu, unlike arts that solely emphasize kata, is an art that must be learned through contact. You need to train with another person so that you can develop the feel for what is required to execute a technique correctly and for how a correctly executed technique feels. You need to know how another human body reacts to what you are doing. For this, constant training with others is the only way to understand jujitsu and its usefulness.
• Keep in mind that some techniques will be more difficult to learn than others and that none can be mastered overnight.
• Integrity can be defined as your reputation, how you see yourself and, more importantly, how other people see you. This is usually a long-term view of you based on your history.
• Humility is your ability to be humble while maintaining your integrity. You do not need to be boastful or tell people how wonderful you are or how much you know or what you can do. Although you may be quite knowledgeable or competent, it is for others to discover through your behavior; your actions and their experiences with you.
• Humility is based on your sense of integrity and respect for yourself and others.
• Respect influences your perception of yourself and how others perceive you. It is how you treat others and how they treat you. It is about how you would like to be treated by other people. If others see that you respect yourself, then they will respect you.
• Respect is never something you can innately expect or demand from others. Nor should respect be confused with obedience.
• Respect is something that must be earned and maintained by maintaining your sense of integrity and humility.
• A street-effective martial art cannot be practiced solo.

HACKING ELECTRONICS by Simon Monk

• When it comes to areas of electronics where a microcontroller would be useful, an Arduino Uno board is best.
• You don’t need a degree in electronic engineering to create or modify something electronic.
• The best way to learn is by having a go at it.
• Soldering is the main skill necessary for hacking electronics.
• The main thing to remember is that you heat up the item you want to solder and only apply the solder when that thing is hot enough for the solder to melt onto it.
• As the word suggests, resistance is actually resistance to the flow of current. So a high-resistance resistor will not allow much current to flow, while a low-value resistor will allow lots of current to flow.
• Resistors are the most commonly used component you can find.
• For the curious, capacitors store charge, a bit like a battery, but not much charge, and they can store the charge and release it very quickly.
• You will occasionally need to use diodes. They are kind of a one-way valve, only allowing current to flow in one direction. They are therefore often used to protect sensitive components from accidental reverse voltage that could damage them.
• While transistors can be used in audio amplifiers and in many circumstances, for the casual electronics hacker, the transistor can be thought of as a switch. But rather than a switch controlled by a lever, it is a switch that switches a big current, yet is controlled by a small current.
• Generally speaking, the physical size of the transistor (Figure 2-8) determines how big the current that it switches can be before it starts producing smoke.
• Generally, the rule for a component is that if it’s ugly and has three legs, it’s probably some kind of transistor.
• Voltage, current, and resistance are three properties that are fundamental to almost everything you will do in electronics.
• Current, rather like the current in a river, is measured by counting how much charge passes you per second
• A resistor’s job is to provide resistance to the flow of current.
• Power is all about energy and time.
• Power is the best measure of how much electricity is being used.
• The First Rule of Schematics: Positive Voltages Are Uppermost
• A convention that most people follow when drawing a schematic is to put the higher voltages near the top,
• Second Rule of Schematics: Things Happen Left to Right
• it is common to start with the source of the electricity—the battery or power supply on the left—and then work our way from left to right across the diagram.
• It is normal to give every component in a schematic a name.
• It is also normal to specify the value of each of the components where appropriate.
• There are two main styles of circuit symbol: American and European.
• Resistors are designed to cope with a bit of heat.
• A very common technique in electronics is to use a pair of resistors (or a single variable resistor) as a “voltage divider.”
• This transistor has three leads: the emitter, the collector, and the base. The basic principal is that a small current flowing through the base will allow a much bigger current to flow between the collector and the emitter.
• MOSFETs do not have emitters, bases, and collectors, they have “sources,” “gates,” and “drains.”
• LEDs (light-emitting diodes) are diodes that emit light when a current passes through them.
• A diode is a component that only lets current flow in one direction.
• The 555 timer IC is a useful little IC that can be used for many different purposes, but is particularly convenient for making LEDs flash or generating higher frequency oscillations suitable for making audible tones
• Breadboard is very useful for trying things out, but not so useful as a permanent home for your electronics.
• A good way of checking that you have made all the connections you need is to print off the schematic and then go through each connection on the stripboard and check off its counterpart on the schematic.
• Lasers are best bought as laser modules. The difference between a laser module and a laser diode is that the module includes a laser diode as well as a lens to focus the beam of laser light and a drive circuit to control the current to the laser diode. If you buy a laser diode, you will have to do all this yourself.
• Capacitors only store a tiny fraction of the charge that a battery of the same size can store.
• Batteries use a chemical reaction to store electrical energy. This means their voltage remains relatively constant until they are spent, at which time it falls off rapidly.
• Capacitors, however, drop evenly in voltage as they discharge, just like the level of water decreasing in a tank.
• Everything that you make or adapt is going to need to get its power from somewhere.
• all batteries actually have an internal resistance. So, it is as if there is a resistor connected to one of the terminals.
• when a battery is discharged too quickly, by too high a current, it gets hot—sometimes very hot, sometimes “on fire” hot. This will damage the battery.
• A variable power supply lets you set both an output voltage and a maximum current.
• The thing with batteries is that even though they may say 1.5V, 3.7V, or 9V on the package, their voltage will drop as they discharge—often by quite a high percentage.
• Replacing batteries is a nuisance, and expensive, so it is often cheaper and more convenient to power things from a wall-wart power supply.
• Recall that diodes act rather like one-way valves. They only allow current to flow in the direction of the arrow.
• Solar cells, unless they are very large, produce fairly small amounts of electricity and so are most suited to low-power devices and projects that are outdoors away from household electricity.
• Projects that use a solar panel to provide power nearly always also use a rechargeable battery. So the panel charges the battery and the project draws its power from the battery.
• It will probably be easier and cheaper to put your efforts into minimizing the current consumed by the system rather than increasing the size of the solar panel and battery.
• Microcontrollers are essentially low-powered computers on a chip. They have input/ output pins to which you can attach electronics so the microcontroller can, well, control things.
• A relay is basically an electromagnet that closes switch contacts. The fact that the coil and the contacts are electrically isolated from one another makes relays great for things like switching home-powered devices on and off from something like an Arduino.
• The great thing about a relay is that it behaves just like a switch.
• The success of Arduino had been in no small part due to the wide range of plug-in shields that add useful features to a basic Arduino board. A shield is designed to fit into the header sockets of the main Arduino board.
• PIR motion sensors are used in intruder alarms and for automatic security alarms. They detect movement using infrared light. They are also cheap and easy to use.
• Ultrasonic rangefinders use ultrasound (higher frequency than the human ear can hear) to measure the distance to a sound-reflective object. They measure the time it takes for a pulse of sound to travel to the object and back.
• Ultrasonic range finding works the same as sonar used by ships and submarines. A sound wave is sent out from a sender, hits an object, and bounces back. Since we know the speed of sound, the distance to the sound-reflecting object can be calculated from the time it takes for the sound to come back to the receiver
• To change the direction in which a motor turns, you have to reverse the direction in which the current flows.
• Comparators, as the name suggests, compare voltages.
• Sensing a magnetic field is made easy using a three-pin sensor IC like the A1302 linear hall effect sensor.
• Microphones (mics) respond to sound waves, but sound waves are just small changes in air pressure, so it is not surprising that the signal you get from a mic is usually very faint. It requires amplification to bring it up to a useable level.
• Whereas a comparator turns its output on when the “+” input is higher than the “–” input, an op amp amplifies the difference between the “+” and “–” inputs.
• The human ear can pick out the direction of a high-frequency sound very easily.
• When working on something that is powered by household electricity, NEVER work on it when it is plugged into the outlet.
• Unless it is a very small capacitor, it should not be discharged by shorting the leads with a screwdriver.
• Fuses are basically just wires designed to burn out when the current flowing through them gets too high.
• Calculating what you expect before you measure it is always a good idea, because if you measure it first, it is all too easy to convince yourself that it was what you were expecting.
• When something stops working on a PCB, it is often the result of something burning out. This sometimes leads to charring around the component. Resistors and transistors are common culprits.
• Dead consumer electronics are a good source of components. But be selective, because some components are really not worth saving.
• When measuring high-value resistors of 100kΩ and up, remember that you yourself are also a big resistor, so if you hold the test lead to the resistor at both ends (see Figure 11-2), you are measuring both the resistor in question and your own resistance.
• Fritzing (www.fritzing.org) is a really interesting open-source software project that lets you design projects. It is intended primarily for breadboard design and includes libraries of components and modules, such as an Arduino, that can all be wired up
• To get yourselves a basic stock of components, you are strongly recommended to buy a starter kit of components.