The terrible tragedy in Bucks County has taken up most of the front page of the Philly papers for the past couple of weeks.   It’s an awful story.   Four young men are dead and two young men are going away for a long time.

Questions I’d like answered:

How many other murders has the city experienced in 2017 where one person involved with drugs shot another person involved with drugs?  I can see that there are 166 murders as of July 15, 2017.

Have there been other individuals who have acted in concert to rob people attempting to buy drugs who have ended up killing them?

How many murders in Philadelphia have had this kind of extensive (and basically inept) cover-up by the perpetrator?  Is this a common thing or do we just know the details because of the reporting?

How many other murders have been on the front cover of the Philly papers this year?  How many of these murders received coverage over multiple days?  How many of the victims received this kind of coverage, detailing their successes and past lives?  All four of these young men were attempting to buy drugs.   Let’s say they had never dealt drugs before, that they were truly great kids, and made a single, tragic mistake.   How do I teach my own children, my own students, that you only get one chance, that there’s no margin of error for them, that anything that’s too good to be true probably is too good to be true?  How do I teach them to run away from anyone making an offer like this?

This article details a new business that has an elegant solution to a complicated environmental problem: desertification.

Money paragraph:

The cocoon is a bit deceptive in its seeming simplicity: a good deal of high-tech thinking went into it. “Everyone likes biodegradable,” Ruys said, “but it’s actually a tricky concept. You want a thing to work over a period of time, then completely disappear. It’s hard to do, which is why, as consumers, we still buy plastic.” Ruys solved the problem with a particular kind of wax coating that dissolves at the right time. He also spent a lot of time developing a wick that would precisely feed water to the plant.

 

Rue, which I’d not hear of but apparently cats hate.   Wikipedia here. (7-14 days to germinate)

Holy Basil, which I’m growing as an indoor plant.  Wikipedia here.  (5-10 days)

Thinking about habits and motivation.  Reading Charles Duhigg’s follow up book to the Power of Habit this weekend and took these two quotes as a starting point for today’s discussion:

If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier…Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.   

Moreover, to teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but affirmations of our values and goals.   That’s the reason people ask each other “why” — because it shows them how to link small tasks to larger aspirations.  

Good student thoughts later…

Duhigg, Charles. Smarter faster better (New York: Random House Books, 2017), pp.30-31.