Weekly Finds #40 - February, 9th, 2024
Sharing some of the interesting things I've gathered over the course of the week.
📖 Read
What Good Friends Look Like
The article delves into evaluating friendships using Tim Urban's "Does This Friendship Make Sense" Matrix, which assesses friendship health and enjoyability. Highly enjoyable and healthy friendships, labeled as Q1, are characterized by positivity, shared interests, and mutual support. Q2 friendships are healthy but less enjoyable, while Q3 friendships are fun but unhealthy due to power dynamics or resentment. Q4 friendships, neither healthy nor enjoyable, are considered toxic and best avoided.
The article encourages readers to assess their friendships, journaling about examples in each quadrant to determine which relationships are worth maintaining. It emphasizes the importance of understanding others' roles in one's life and using the tool to evaluate friendships effectively.
🙉 Overheard
You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.
– Louise Bourgeois
👯♂️ Friends of Culture Curated
This week, we have a bonus post from Food Jungle, where our friend Gregory Zenin writes about what’s happening in the food industry. Be sure to subscribe and stay up-to-date on this storied industry's good, bad, and ugly news.
Food Waste to Energy
Small and medium-sized farms account for around 95% of Benin’s agricultural production. However, these farms produce enormous amounts of food waste.
Enoch Gnaga and his company - Benin Biogas - have devised a solution. They’ve created a system that turns food waste into biofuel that can be used for cooking and heating homes.
By building a network of concrete food waste tanks beneath various neighborhoods and industrial zones that burn excess food, they’ve revolutionized the way in which dozens of farms and hundreds of homes manage their waste.
And, so far, Benin Biogas has provided fuel for over 560 households and 24-hour off-grid electricity in some areas.
Better still, the leftover compost gets transformed into fertilizer, reducing the reliance on imported - and potentially damaging - foreign alternatives! Food Jungle approved ✅
🎧 Listen
A couple of items from this week’s Music Curated issue.
I mix it up here and share various music with my readers, so you’ll see something different each week. You may be into some of what I share, and you may not be into other things, and that’s okay. My goal is to share the things I enjoy and I hope to introduce my audience to something they might not have otherwise heard, and I hope some of it also resonates with you.
Song: The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist
The Avalanches are an Australian electronic music powerhouse started in 1997 and celebrated for their unparalleled use of eclectic sampling. The dynamic duo, consisting of Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi, has consistently pushed boundaries with three albums in their repertoire, featuring the groundbreaking "Since I Left You" (2000), the vibrant "Wildflower" (2016), and the ethereal "We Will Always Love You" (2020).
Renowned for their debut masterpiece crafted from over 3,500 samples, “Since I Left You” is a brilliant album layered with a deep roster of samples—this track, “Frontier Psychiatrist”, samples from 28 songs and numerous samples from each.
Playlist: Sampled by The Avalanches
The Avalanches are known for their liberal use of samples to create rich sounds layered throughout their music. Here’s a great playlist of a few songs of theirs and the samples within.
Take a journey through some of the sounds that helped shape the intricate tapestries on select tracks from Since I Left You, Wildflower, and We Will Always Love You.
🔗 Random Finds
10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing
As a visual learner, charts are my go-to for understanding global shifts. These 10 charts are an interesting look into some aspects of our world today.
Cry Once a Week
Click to feel something
🍲 🍹 Eat & Drink
Creamy Tuscan Chicken
Elevate your dinner game with this tasty Tuscan chicken recipe. Succulent chicken breasts seasoned to perfection and seared until golden then bathed in a luscious cream sauce infused with parmesan cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, and heaps of spinach.
Dauphine’s Roffignac
Step into the vibrant atmosphere of Dauphine’s, a New Orleans-inspired gem nestled in Washington, D.C. Here, the classic Roffignac cocktail gets a bold makeover courtesy of mixologists Neal Bodenheimer and Donato Alvarez.
Bidding adieu to the traditional Cognac base, they opt for tequila, infusing the drink with a zesty twist. Enhanced with the tangy kick of cranberry shrub and a refreshing splash of soda, the house Roffignac dazzles with every sip. Indulge in this spirited concoction and let the lively flavors transport you to the heart of the Big Easy!
🧒 Kiddos
My kids thought this was fascinating and wanted to share it with you all.
Why do people and animals need to breathe?
Breathing is like eating for your body, helping it make energy from food. When you eat, food gets broken down and goes to your cells, where tiny engines called mitochondria turn it into energy. But to do that, they need oxygen.
Humans and animals breathe to get oxygen into their bodies. When you breathe in, your lungs take in oxygen, which goes into your bloodstream and travels to your cells. Other creatures like fish use gills, insects have air tubes, and plants have little holes in their leaves called stomata to get oxygen. Even though they do it differently, they all need oxygen to survive and make energy, just like we do when we breathe.