Share this starter pack

The clocks at Swift & Sons

Swift & Sons is a completely acceptable Chicago steakhouse; its best feature might be that its space is very large and it’s not too hard to get a reservation. S&S does this thing, though, where it has clocks on the wall from exclusively American cities in the Central Time Zone (in this image, Wichita, Chicago, Oklahoma City, and Madison). Incredible bit.

LearnedLeague

If you like Jeopardy! or other trivia offerings, you need to be on LearnedLeague. It's a seasonal head-to-head trivia league, and it's so much more. It's invite-only, but if you've found your way to Rec League, you're savvy enough to find an invite.

The Dispossessed

You've heard of plenty of books that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula (e.g., Dune, Ender's Game, Ringworld, American Gods). Now you've heard of another: My seventh-favorite book, The Dispossessed, Le Guin's exploration of what an anarchist utopia might look like.

Go!

This song's lyrics, comprised of the audio from the Apollo 11 moon landing, contain the line "1202 alarm [...] We're go on that alarm?" The 1202 alarm indicated that the guidance computer was overloaded with tasks. Margaret Hamilton, the software engineer who worked on the guidance computer (and also literally created the term "software engineering"), anticipated this and programmed the computer to deprioritize lower-priority tasks and prioritize high-priority tasks (like landing on the moon). This is a great song, but it's also a great running song because your body is going to send you a lot of 1202 alarms. One of the goals of a good training regimen is to understand which alarms should make you stop, and which alarms are a "Go!"

The clocks at Swift & Sons

Swift & Sons is a completely acceptable Chicago steakhouse; its best feature might be that its space is very large and it’s not too hard to get a reservation. S&S does this thing, though, where it has clocks on the wall from exclusively American cities in the Central Time Zone (in this image, Wichita, Chicago, Oklahoma City, and Madison). Incredible bit.

LearnedLeague

If you like Jeopardy! or other trivia offerings, you need to be on LearnedLeague. It's a seasonal head-to-head trivia league, and it's so much more. It's invite-only, but if you've found your way to Rec League, you're savvy enough to find an invite.

The Dispossessed

You've heard of plenty of books that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula (e.g., Dune, Ender's Game, Ringworld, American Gods). Now you've heard of another: My seventh-favorite book, The Dispossessed, Le Guin's exploration of what an anarchist utopia might look like.

Go!

This song's lyrics, comprised of the audio from the Apollo 11 moon landing, contain the line "1202 alarm [...] We're go on that alarm?" The 1202 alarm indicated that the guidance computer was overloaded with tasks. Margaret Hamilton, the software engineer who worked on the guidance computer (and also literally created the term "software engineering"), anticipated this and programmed the computer to deprioritize lower-priority tasks and prioritize high-priority tasks (like landing on the moon). This is a great song, but it's also a great running song because your body is going to send you a lot of 1202 alarms. One of the goals of a good training regimen is to understand which alarms should make you stop, and which alarms are a "Go!"