I am genuinely curious what you gleamed from your reading that made you atheist. I made the transition from atheist -> Muslim a few years back, though this was not solely from reading the Quran it certainly played a large role in it.
I am bipolar and my sleep is very erratic. I sometimes go 4-5 days without sleep and suffer no loss of productivity. Usually I sleep 3-4 hours a night and feel rested and ready to go. If my sleep goes unchecked, it can throw me into a manic state which is dangerous for my bank account, makes me very aggressive, and leaves me hunting down risky endeavors. I was fine with that on my own, but since getting married I have to work fairly hard to keep more regular hours. My wife wants me to go to sleep when she does and dislikes waking up with me out of bed. Since she can sleep well into the afternoon when her schedule permits it is a challenge for me.
Over the past few years, I have done a ton of research on sleep, tried just about every over the counter and prescription medication, did a few sleep studies, and have tested different tons of sleep hygiene philosophies.
The key to me tuning my sleep has been by recording metrics of how I slept and looking for trends. I record when I sleep and wake, how hard it was to get to sleep and get up, my stress level and mood for the previous day, the medications and sleep-aid methods I am trying, the temperature, darkness, etc. Relying entirely on a subjective rating for sleep didn't work for me, so I use a fitbit to track how much I am moving during sleep, which can be correlated to how effective your sleep is.
In the last few months I have been able to not take any medication and maintain a regular(ish) sleeping schedule for the first time in probably 5 years.
Everyone has different methods that work for them so I will give you a few that work best for most without killing productivity:
-Wake at the same time every morning, sleep when tired(If you don't fall asleep within 15 minutes, you aren't tired).
-When waking, get as much light as you can. Watching the sunrise is both invigorating for your body and mind.
-Exercise daily, even if its just taking a long walk.
-2 hours before sleep avoid anything highly engaging such as media, games, and work(if you can manage). Try writing to empty your mind, or reading something that is not backlit. Dim the lights, stretch or do yoga, etc.
-For those nights you can't stop working for those 2 hours, I use flux(mentioned below) and have found it to work well.
-Don't try the polyphasic sleep except as a last resort.
-Don't nap even for a few minutes.
-Don't drink caffeine.
...the list goes on.
My biggest piece of advice is to systematically try different techniques and to record your results. It will take a while to hone in on what is best since you likely have a schedule that varies daily.
I have encouraged many people to do this, even if they don't have trouble sleeping since you will discover what your body requires and not what your mind wants. Oversleeping can cause almost the same amount of health problems as not sleeping enough.
Fine-tuning your mind(this method is not limited to sleep) and body is one of the most important things you can do to make you healthy and productive. It amazes me that it is not more common...
Paying attention to well designed ad campaigns can let you gleam a lot of information about a company. When picking stocks I put more weight on their ads than I do the stock quote history.
In a sea of shitty advertising where companies recycle bad ideas and rely on special effects or catchy jingles to sell, you end up with an arms race between competitors telling you why to chose them over the alternatives. They completely forget to say why you should want the product at all. It just ends up leaving people suspicious of advertising in general.
This ad was really effective because it didn't hype the technology. They thought about what is important to people and found a way to show their products as enriching that experience.
It is rare to find ads this good, but they are the kind that will stay in their minds for years to come.
I am at the age where I look forward to having children. I want to establish some stability before I do it and so it is still a few years off. Despite this, I find myself thinking on a daily basis what values and skills I want to teach my kids. I am making lists of books, films, projects, etc. that I will introduce to them at the appropriate age. After seeing this ad, I went ahead and registered a few accounts with names that my wife and I talk about every once in a while.
I bet many other people at the same stage of life as me are doing the same.
Not bad, I was working on something similar a while back, but didn't really push through with it since I know pretty much everything that is in my fridge(I am very serious about food and spend a lot of time picking out ingredients).
Few points:
-I dunno who you are marketing to with the red and black color choice. You should pick a layout and color scheme that your intended users are most comfortable with.
-When I add apples, I should be given the option to drill down into the types of apples.
-I haven't poked around enough, but I can't find the button to add more items using the list format.
-Since people generally share a fridge, you should allow multiple logins that can access the same list.
-Maybe an alert when the produce is about to spoil?
-I like the recipe integration. You should add a sort filter to look for recipes that use item(s) X, show the recipes with the least amount of ingredients needed, add recipes of foods about to spoil, add diet restrictions and regional recipe preferences, make sure you have the appropriate quantities of food for the recipe.
-recommend foods and recipes based on what they have liked so far
-for the shop locally, add a feature to order groceries online. It is not very common now (I am in Austin near the WholeFoods flagship store, so its normal for me), but amazon has been testing their own service and are doing well.
-for in store purchases, you should group items by location and should tell what aisle it should be on(easier yet, just add the row description that it would be on).
-advertise certain brands that work best in a recipe, etc.
-advertise kitchen appliances/knives/etc. for sale based on their eating habits. If they go through a loaf of bread in 4 days, recommend a bread machine and bread knife.
-If someone has a food that is always purchased as soon as it runs out, have it auto fed-back to the shopping list when it is deleted from the pantry.
-Have people post their own recipes for sharing, and give them a cut of whatever products sell based on their recommendation.
Well, I didn't mean to make this many feature requests, but I did stop myself from continuing to append. If you want to spitball more stuff, just lemme know and I would be happy to help. At this point I don't have the bandwidth to pick up my project again and the next best thing is helping someone else build it and have them scratch my itch for me. ;)
For little known authors the pay out is well bellow 50k going through traditional publication methods. This is why so many maintain jobs while writing. It is much akin to creating a startup where you do not expect an instant pay out, but our driven by a much higher return in the long run.
Furthermore, most beginning authors have careers that pay considerably less than 50k a year.
I am facing the same challenge. I grew up in art museums and libraries, but fell in love with computer science in college. I took literature and art classes when possible, but due to my demanding CS program I did not get to explore nearly what I wanted to.
Furthermore, I found myself surrounded by engineers who rarely shared my interest. In spite of this I continued moonlighting my obsessions and have grown a library of 7 full shelfs (excluding school books, library checkouts, and kindle downloads) and cases of art supplies.
It's common with programmers to look down on wannabe artists that do not adhere to strict logic in creation or conversations. (Just try asking an artist what they were trying to achieve with their piece. Your answer will be a glare of pity mixed with disgust. I often find, thought not always, this is a diversion tactic because the concept is to "fuzzy" to convince anyone of it).
But when you strip Great Art to its pure essence you will discover a philosophical theory that adheres to a form of logic. We are not completely in the wrong to view this with skepticism since many pseudo-artists can not see this, let alone create it themselves; their only option is to fake it and hope their bravado convinces other. With programming we have no such luxury, if you are incompetent no level of bullshit will make your design work.
This leads me to my current situation where I am trying to find a way to integrate my love of programming with my innate drive to explore beyond the limitations imposed by my code. For now this means waking at 5am, writing for 3-4 hours, going to work until 7, writing a few more hours, then sleep.
Believe it or not, this regiment actually makes me a better programmer. I find myself not only more relaxed during the day, but often am able to rethink my solution and identify flaws instead of powering into the code as I once did.
I am not sure this helped, but my main message was that learning to think about things in a different way gives you a versatility that manifests in ways you may not anticipate. In my case, I feel it helped me be a better coder. (Think of it as studying lisp even though you primarily code in C. Its an exercise that gives your brain flexibility)
Honestly, that is not a ridiculous idea. If we remove the standardized testing, the community developed textbook would explode.
In many of my college classes I spend more time using wikipedia than my textbook.
Furthermore, I know many teachers who have written widely used (assigned reading in over 1k classes) who want their books to be available for a greatly reduced price if not all together for free. Unfortunately the publishers ban this and the writers must relent since the only way to get their book known is if it comes from a major publisher. They justify this mostly based on promotion costs, but this is not even close to their profit margins.
Books are expensive because there is little competition, particularly with k-12 schools, largely based on political lobbying.
Of course, we aren't likely to dissolve lobbyists anytime soon; but the idea of socially conscious startups is to dream big.
Bill Gates did make quite a bit in the education market. Find one school that does not use MS Office.
Also, Apple was, and still is, notorious for donating or offering heavily discounted products to teachers and schools. Why? They would get familiar with and used to using their products and purchase them in the future. It also gives them great publicity.
Many other companies do this as well. My campus computer store sells software at 90% discounts for the same reason. Sometimes giving things away is where the smart money is at.
A huge problem that the Khan Academy fails to address is the digital divide. Often the children who attend schools who are the most at risk do not have access to computers/internet at home and community centers are often hard to reach both due to their distance and the danger in their traveling there.
I, a CS masters student, and my wife, a PhD EE, who attend University of Texas at Austin run an after school program for middle school kids to teach robotics and programming using lego mindstorms.
The school is one of the poorest in the city, but also has an integrated math/science magnet program within it. Our students are a mix of both the local children and the magnet kids who are bussed in.
At the beginning of class we place logic problems on the board and we were surprised to find that often the kids not in the magnet program solved them correctly often on par with those who were supposed to be the best and brightest in the city.
However when it came to programming and using the computers, the non-magnet students lagged behind the others at a pace of almost half the speed. Though they both were able to mechanically develop and debug their robot equally well.
I meet with the parents throughout the program and the correlation I noticed most prominently with those that suffered with programming was if the kid had easy access to a computer outside of school.
I suggest you watch "Waiting for Superman" where they address the problems teachers face with being given merit based pay, which they could reinvest in product purchase.
A quick solution for this is to create a localized version of craigslist specific to teachers where they can request donations of items/funds for specific projects.
I tried to implement this many years back with a focus on computer donations, but the school administration shot it down because they feared the increase cost of their incompetent IT staff supporting multiple hardware formats, despite them often being nearly new technology.
I did have teachers in Highschool who were able to build amazing labs based on applying for grants. Unfortunately these grants were not widely known about among teachers and they had no knowledge on how to write a good grant request. My HS physics lab actually exceeded the quality of the lab I used at university (UT at Austin). I was able to skip every literally single class, with exceptions of tests, and ended with a final score in the top 5% of the class.
Another quick comment to solving the "selling to public schools" is community involvement. PTA groups often can play a powerful role in determining the agenda of the schools. Too often they stop at bake sales for carnivals, but in some cases they can be very effective in lobbying for change.
This incubator states that they are going to target charter schools as test beds. I assume that means they are already creating contacts for interested schools.
One of my fears is that since some charter schools have agendas that vary greatly from publicly funded schools, E.G. religious charter schools