The venn diagrams work better if you read them as "and" rather than "things that are members of both sets". (Apologies for the nitpick.)

Genuine question on this. Why can't you just scale a recipe directly? Are there ingredients that play a binary role (so to speak) so they just need to be present regardless of the quantity? What am I missing here?

I cook a lot and cannot think of any totally non-scaling ingredient, although some things go out of proportion a bit; e.g., the relative volume of water used to cook rice goes down as the recipe grows.

I feel like this is pretty well known; not that recipes can't be scaled, but that you can't reliably do it by multiplying the ingredients.

I just flipped through Ferran Adria's "The Family Meal", which is a record of every house meal served at El Bulli, each of which is scaled to 2, 6, 20, and 40 people. Sure enough, almost none of them scale every ingredient linearly (Caesar salad and hamburgers did, because you just make more dressing or more patties for more people).

In particular: oil, butter, lemon juice, onions, and intensely flavored seasoning ingredients (herbs in particular) often scaled by 2x when the servings scaled by 3x. In some places, an ingredient scaled by more than 3x to make 3x as many servings. Salt went in both directions.

Perhaps they could adopt the model used by some online dating sites. You browse profiles for free but you pay to make contact.

The books are on different topics. You only read the ones you want to.

Why is this the only way to win? Computers don't have unlimited storage.

Also, don't underestimate the "lipstick", in this case the user experience. Dropbox beat jungledisk (another s3 backed cloud storage company) on UX.

I used a dropbox shared folder to transfer a large file just last weekend. The sender (I was the recipient) didn't have a dropbox account. All I did was share the folder with his email address and he worked out the rest.

The difference is that most people don't know how to do that. What they can do however is load a website and follow simple step by step instructions.

the funny thing is, thats its the same on s3. Create bucket, same analogy as a folder, upload and right click create link. Its just as simple, cheaper, and unlimited storage.

When I was a student I found juggling to be a useful distraction when taking a break. It kept the mind engaged but took my focus completely away from my studies. I think this the key to a good break activity. You want to stay sharp but completely distract yourself. There are probably also benefits that come from using your motor skills, different parts of the brains and even shifting your focus to follow moving objects.

It was also quite rewarding to slowly see myself improving.

I think it's because we start to feel more pressure to succeed and to succeed quickly, so we stop playing and tinkering.

I think the key here is the low quality work at the end of the day. I often knock off when I detect that I'm running at a very low productivity rate. Invariably the next day the overwhelming and seemingly massive task from the night before takes just a few minutes for the well rested brain.

There's also something about the "self control as a finite resource" that comes in to play here.