Often it pays simply to remember what a rigidly ideological culture we inhabit.
Imagine it's 1986 and this story comes from SoViEt RuSsIa. Derek Lowe (who I hold to be adjacent to a National Treasure) would not be obliged to speculate about motives.
The entire bloviosphere would unanimously collapse into mockery.
tl;dr Big marginal gains for small marginal effort likely make it worthwhile.
The payoff can be enormous. The investment can be illegible on the front end—it depends on the skills and concepts you already have.
Open an Emacs buffer, switch to Org mode, and start typing an outline. The benefit is immediate, provided those paradigms (plain text, outline hierarchy) appeal to you.
There are many features of Org mode that complement each other powerfully but that are district enough that you can climb one learning curve at a time.
I vividly remember the manual, years ago, overwhelming me! But today there are so many good tutorials the barrier to entry is quite low. Best of luck!
Highly recommend: David Wilson's System Crafters channel, Mike Zamansky's channel, Protesilaos Stavrou's channel. There's an amazing community on Mastodon.
If you've lived through even a tiny earthquake it's much like if you've experienced a solar eclipse: even when short and mild, they elicit an otherworldly body-terror.
The people living on that peninsula right now are stressed out in a way most of us have never experienced.
Disagree with this - I was in Iceland this summer when the volcano erupted (ironically at Blue Lagoon just 2 hours before it erupted) and people there just go about their daily business like nothing happened. There was a 5.2 earthquake the day before it erupted and kids kept playing in the street.
I live in downtown Reykjavik and unless you’re paying attention you miss most of them even the strong ones. Definitely more of a thing in Grindavík and I don’t envy the people living there although they’re probably used to it by now. The big earthquake a day or two ago did cause an exodus of tourists from the Blue Lagoon Hotel though.
Disagree: I lived through several short/mild earthquakes in California and Tokyo.
Visitors freaked a little, but locals looked up from their phones, confirmed with each other, then everybody guessed the magnitude and checked USGS to see who came closest.
Also, when you experience an earthquake at the top of a tall building that oscillates and it sounds like it is going to fall apart, this is far more scarier than experiencing a stronger earthquake, but outside, on flat ground.
I have experienced big earthquakes in the former circumstances, and the sensation was confusing, until the earthquakes stopped you were not sure whether your building level is still firmly attached to its base, or it has started to travel independently towards an unavoidable fall.
I suspect it's the justification for many PhDs. If you don't go into academia then chances are the content isn't that relevant, but the experience of having to problem solve in uncharted territory is a great confidence booster and skill to have.
> but the experience of having to problem solve in uncharted territory is a great [...] skill to have.
While I do love to solve such problems, in many business areas there are hardly any hard problems to solve as part of your job: either because they don't exist, or because hardly any boss would be willing to let you work focusedly for years to potentially solve one the hard problems that do exist (which is what a PhD in mathematics or physics is about).
