During the 2018 Letters Live show in New York City, the great James Earl Jones used his gorgeous baritone voice to read a humorously inspiring response letter by author Kurt Vonnegut to a group of Xavier High School students who contacted him as part of a 2006 school project.

In 2006, a group of students at Xavier High School in New York City were given an assignment by their English teacher, Ms. Lockwood, that was to test their persuasive writing skills: they were asked to write to their favorite author and ask him or her to visit the school.

Jones captured Vonnegut’s light yet serious advice that he was giving to the boys.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. …Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

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On the plus side if you assume God does NOT understand us you can put an upper bound on His neuron count.

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The marketing consultant told the client that they have to post three times a day on LinkedIn. “It doesn’t matter if it’s good.”

The SEO consultant explained that the website had to be loaded with keywords, and that a big budget needed to be set aside to develop inbound links.

And the job seeker is instructed to make sure that the resume is AI-friendly and checks every possible box.

Feeding the algorithm works when you’re the only one doing it. It works when you seek to fit right into the middle of the lane. And it works if you’re willing to outfeed everyone else–at least until the algorithm changes.

But while someone is going to win that lottery, it’s probably not going to be you.

The alternative is to be uncomfortable. To create remarkable work and leave scale to others. To figure out how to show up in a way that is generous and distinctive, and to refuse the bait that others take when they decide that feeding the algorithm is their best option.

They call it ‘crowd control’ for a reason. If you’re in a crowd, it’s quite likely someone is trying to control you.

If you’re posting on social media or any platform with an algorithm, the real question is: do you work for the algorithm or are you committed to working for the people who want to go where you hope to take them?

APOD: 2024 September 1 – The Moon Dressed Like Saturn Why does Saturn appear so big? It doesn't -- what is pictured are foreground clouds on Earth crossing in front of the Moon. The Moon shows a slight crescent phase with most of its surface visible by reflected Earthlight, known as Da Vinci glow. The Sun directly illuminates the brightly lit lunar crescent from the bottom, which means that the Sun must be below the horizon and so the image was taken before sunrise. This double take-inducing picture was captured on 2019 December 24, two days before the Moon slid in front of the Sun to create a solar eclipse. In the foreground, lights from small Guatemalan towns are visible behind the huge volcano Pacaya.

Linguist Rob Watts of RobWords looked back into the ancient past to trace exactly when punctuation was put into regular use, noting that different grammatical marks came about at different times. The period, colon, and comma, for example, were employed to make sense of the endless run-on sentences of the Greeks.

The story  of our punctuation marks begins with a man called Aristophanes of Byzantium. In around the 2nd century BC,  he proposed a system to solve the problem of the unreadability of Greek writing…Aristophanes put forward a system where dots would be used to mark in sentences  where pauses of different lengths should occur. The middle one marked the  shortest break. The bottom one,  a little longer. And the top one, longer still. These were called comma, colon and periodos (period).

Punctuation was not very popular at that time and it flailed for severals centuries until religion came into play in the 6th Century.

Christian writers began to use punctuation again to help clarify their writings. They were much more keen on spreading their religion on paper than the pagan  polytheists who came before them. You see, they’d written this book called  the Bible, and it was like a bible to them and they wanted to leave minimal space for  ambiguity when spreading the word of God. Punctuation was a great way to do that. So they reverted back to something very similar to Aristophanes’ system.

Watts also explores the origins of the question mark, exclamation point, quotation marks, brackets, dash, hyphen, apostrophe and ellipsis.

Let’s explore this lot: ?!-“.’,(); …I trace the punctuation we use every day as far back as I can.