So basically, we have low level neutron radiation coming at us at all times from space. Mostly from our own sun, some other external sources too. It takes a whole lot of concrete or lead or water to stop that completely, so anything that makes it through our atmosphere is harmlessly passing through all of us.

But since things like computer RAM and other electronic storage have gotten so much smaller, this radiation is now capable of energizing or discharging individual bits — 1s or 0s — in that storage. Imagine you’re in the hospital for a back operation and the robot arm is approaching a 1 bit that tells it to stop… but that 1 flips to a 0 because the sun sneezed and now your spine is in two fun-sized pieces.

This is all mostly moot today, though. ECC-enabled RAM (memory with protections against bit flips) is the norm and this is a pretty well-understood problem.

About a decade ago at a job in Philly, we’d hunt down the spOt Burger cart (that’s how they capitalized it). Tiny little trailer/cart only big enough for one person to stand in, and this guy would park it somewhere new around center city/university city area every day. My memory is a little hazy so I might have some details wrong, but every day he’d grind a blend of ribeye and filet fresh to make the burgers in his cart, cooked around a medium, and served them on a brioche bun with pickled red cabbage and some other fixings. He got the fat content just perfect with the steak blend, and the toppings were unexpected but incredible together.

I haven’t been back in awhile but I heard he was opening a brick and mortar restaurant because his cart was so successful. Hope it’s true!

A handful of years back, JC Penney made a huge deal about stopping this practice in their stores, where everything is on “sale” all the time. Sales plummeted even though the actual product prices stayed the same. They immediately reversed course.

Hard to blame them. Human brains are weird.

How to manage your mail comes down to what type of person you are. There’s a lot of great advice here for “Type A” people who don’t find it burdensome to follow a regimen, however simple, and keep things tagged/foldered/scheduled appropriately.

Type Bs might try that, have it work for a week, fall behind, and naturally let the process die. I’m that person.

What works for me is only caring about two kinds of messages: unread ones and starred ones. If I read a message and there’s something I need to do because of it, I click star. Instead of using my Inbox as-is, I make my main view a filter that only shows unreads at the top, and starred messages (newest to oldest) below. Messages I read but don’t star immediately disappear. Messages I unstar immediately disappear. Nothing is deleted because I rely heavily on search to give me a refresher about certain topics that came up anywhere from the day before to three years ago.

I’ve never been an Apple Mail user— my personal and work email accounts are both Gmail, and Mimestream on Mac supports the above workflow really nicely. It’s a native gmail client that uses the gmail API directly, so things like tagging and snoozing work when you need them, and the search isn’t trying to search gigs of messages on your local hard disk.