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You are not lazy, and still you are an idler

You are not lazy, and still you are an idler

Late-1850, Abraham Lincoln’s step-brother, John D. Johnston, wrote to him and asked, yet again, for a loan with which to settle some debts. Said Johnston:
I am dund & doged to Death so I am all most tired of Living, & I would all most swop my place in Heaven for that much money […] I would rother live on bread and wotter than to have men allways duning me […] If you can send me 80 Dollars I am willing to pay you any Intrust you will ask.
On previous occasions Lincoln simply would have agreed to such a request. This time, however, sensing an opportunity to impart some wisdom, he responded with the following letter of advice and a proposal. (Source: Lincoln and His World: Volume 3; Image: Abraham Lincoln, via.)

January 2, 1851 Dear Johnston:

Your request for eighty dollars I do not think it best to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a little you have said to me, “We can get along very well now”; but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now, this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is, I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time is the whole difficulty; it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should break the habit. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it, easier than they can get out after they are in. You are now in need of some money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, “tooth and nail,” for somebody who will give you money for it. Let father and your boys take charge of your things at home, prepare for a crop, and make the crop, and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get; and, to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you, that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of May, get for your own labor, either in money or as your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this I do not mean you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines in California, but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can get close to home in Coles County. Now, if you will do this, you will be soon out of debt, and, what is be tter, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. But, if I should now clear you out of debt, next year you would be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place in heaven for seventy or eighty dollars. Then you value your place in heaven very cheap, for I am sure you can, with the offer I make, get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months’ work. You say if I will furnish you the money you will deed me the land, and, if you don’t pay the money back, you will deliver possession. Nonsense! If you can’t now live with the land, how will you then live without it? You have always been kind to me, and I do not mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eighty times eighty dollars to you.

Affectionately your brother, A. Lincoln

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from Letters of Note http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/you-are-not-lazy-and-still-you-are.html

Jordan cave on CouchSurfing.com

Jordan cave on CouchSurfing.com

Cnn Dam Assets 120509044610-Cave-Door-Horizontal-Gallery Ghassab Al-Bedoul, 42, offers up his cave in Petra, Jordan, for visitors on CouchSurfing.com. It looks like a fantastic experience. In the four years he’s been registered on the site, Al-Bedoul says he’s hosted more than 1,000 people. From CNN:

The cave, which is no larger than 150 square feet, is uniquely modern. A row of solar-powered lights, a gift from a couch surfer, encircles the front of the cave entrance. When the sun sets past the Petra mountains, they are the only visible lights.

The outside of the cave is hard stone, but Al-Bedoul has done some decorating on the inside. The roof is painted black with stars circling the room. Candlelight glows just bright enough to see some of the traditional Jordanian paintings he’s placed inside; not included in that collection is the large Bob Marley poster near the cave’s entrance…

When asking Al-Bedoul for the washrooms, he points to the mountains, and says, “far away please.”

“Couch surfing a cave in southern Jordan”

from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/jordan-cave-on-couchsurfing-co.html?utm_sour…

Straight White Male, the game of life’s lowest difficulty setting

Straight White Male, the game of life’s lowest difficulty setting

Using a video game metaphor, John Scalzi explains straight white male privilege for those straight white males who get hung up on the word “privilege”.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.

Tags: John Scalzi from kottke.org http://kottke.org/12/05/straight-white-male-the-game-of-lifes-lowest-difficul…

If you put all the water on Earth in one place

If you put all the water on Earth in one place

Put all the water on this planet into a single sphere and it would have a diameter of about 860 miles, says the United States Geological Survey. For reference, that’s roughly the distance between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Topeka, Kansas.

About 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth’s water. But water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and earthgwaquifer.html, and even in you and your dog. Still, all that water would fit into that “tiny” ball. The ball is actually much larger than it looks like on your computer monitor or printed page because we’re talking about volume, a 3-dimensional shape, but trying to show it on a flat, 2-dimensional screen or piece of paper. That tiny water bubble has a diameter of about 860 miles, meaning the height (towards your vision) would be 860 miles high, too! That is a lot of water.

I really like this illustration because it shows off an important concept: Whether a number represents “a lot” of something or “a little” is pretty damn relative. As the USGS says, that is, in fact, a lot of water. But it also makes for a surprisingly little ball.

Read more about this graphic and the water cycle on the USGS website.

from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/05/10/if-you-put-all-the-water-on-ea.html?utm_sour…