Relax with intent. Relax with the sole purpose of relaxing. Meditation would be the extreme case, I think.
No scrolling, no consuming media. Do something that involves little mental or physical capacity, but provides some holisitic benefit. Things that make you feel good on the whole.
In summary, do something where the point is to do it in order to relax, and not for any other point at all. Remove all mental load of stress about outcomes and instead immerse yourself in the present moment of relaxation.
Some methods that seem to work for myself and others are a good walk or a journaling session. A physical notebook to write in can be a bit more holistic than typing an entry into a keyboard. It can be hard to start, I just start with "captains log", then a date, and then my stream of thoughts.
Playing with small manipulatives can be good fun as well. Lego, K'nex, etc. I hear some people like painting models. Playing an instrument is also fantastic. Guitar is absurdly simple to learn the basics of (a servicable one can be had at a pawn shop or amazon for reasonably cheap), and then it's just a matter of grabbing some sheet music and practicing. If you let go of how good you actually sound, and instead assign value to the act of practicing, it is a great way to refresh.
Another great way is to read. A good book and a cup of tea is a very relaxing experience. I'll note that this should be pleasure reading, and not technical reading.
Most productions works like that. You create a single thing, when that thing is done, the work is done. TV shows and movies doesn't need updates or maintenance (well except Cats ;) ).
When you hire a plumber do go in your house, do you keep finding him stuff to do to keep him on the payroll?
At least in North America, people will just toss their trash on the ground if there isn't a garbage can available, but if there is a bin around they will make use of it. Might be able to chalk that up to cultural differences when discussing Japan, however.
The city of Portland did a study once where they removed trash cans in some parking garages and the amount of litter went down. The theory was that if there's trash on the ground (as there often is around trash cans, especially when they are full) people will throw more trash onto the pile. Get rid of the trash can and people will carry their trash out.
"in North America, people will just toss their trash on the ground if there isn't a garbage can available, but if there is a bin around they will make use of it."
Better than in the UK, where many people toss their rubbish on the ground if there isn't a bin available. If there is a bin available, they still toss it on the ground.
At the risk of being put on even more watchlists than the average person-
I wonder if it would be quite as easy to wreck similar havoc on a commuter rail as on an airplane. It seems that it is easier to induce catastrophic failure to a plane than it is to a train.
Interestingly, there have been attempts[1], specifically in North America, with no major addition of security checks to train boarding. I suppose it would take a full scale, 9/11 style event to induce the same sort of worry about travel. I'd say that trains have a pretty good safeguard built in: they're stuck on tracks. That makes them significantly harder to ram into buildings, by my reckoning.
It would be harder to ram a train into a building, of course, but a derailment of a high speed train full of passengers would be a plenty bad enough incident to create a perceived need for TSA-style person and baggage screening.
What happens when a fast train hits a moose or other large animal? Is the mass difference so huge that it's effectively like a car running over a squirrel?
Most countries solve that issue by separating the high speed rail lines from the land much better than you would bother with low speed rail. A mind boggling amount of infrastructure goes into separating the Shinkansen from the rest of the world. Hundreds of kilometers of it is raised up on bridges, the rest is inside tunnels or strongly fenced off by wire fences or concrete walls. No level crossings either.
I imagine part of the design of the front of the trains is also to minimize damage by deflecting impacts. Although I think the major design drive for their long noses is entering and exiting tunnels without creating sonic booms and air pressure issues for passengers.
Adding security checks to train boarding is very costly because most trains stop at a dozen or more stations, oftentimes open air platforms without any real infrastructure or place to do security.
I think that’s the main thing that has protected them from TSA nonsense so far. The TSA does occasionally do baggage screening on train passengers at large stations but it’s rare and mainly to flex their power I think.
Personally, I would respect high school students enough to have them write actual lines of code and not drag and drop blocks. The Arduino language and libraries are abstracted enough as to not provide major difficulty.
Those who really have an aptitude for it will be able to implement datastructures and algorithms in it, and those that don't will be able to muddle through copying and pasting enough code to get it running.
If you go directly to code, you'll hook the people who would end up being hooked anyway. You will lose all the other too embarrassed to ask what is a file and how you edit it, what is this folder thing, etc... Those are the one you want to teach.
I tried teaching by giving the classes I wish I had. Turns out 95% of the kids are not like me and needed some crash classes in computer usage before even managing to save a file saying `print("Hello")`
What I like with Ardublocks is that it shows the lines of code next to it. If you prefer writing code directly, you can as well!
In the author's opinion, what men are looking for in online dating apps is to dispense with the app:
> For a little contrast, I went on a few dates with men as a woman during the course of my time as Ned. The men I met on the internet, and then subsequently in person, didn't require this epistolary preamble, nor did they offer it. They were eager to meet as soon as possible, usually, I found, because they wanted to see what I looked like. Their feelings or fantasies would be based on that far more than, or perhaps to the exclusion of, anything I might write to them.
Say what you will about this attitude, I wouldn't say that the men are looking for something different online than they are in person. Rather, they think online interaction is getting in the way of what they want, and they do their best to avoid it.
I don't think that applies here, although maybe I'm only right about users who understand what they are doing/have the right mindset.
I've lost the attribution, but someone said that "dating is a numbers game. The goal is to go on as many first dates as possible, to get in front of as many people as possible. At this, tinder (and associates) absolutely excel. There is no other way to reliably find a lot of single people to go on dates with."
Agreed, the general goal of dating apps is to generate pairs. But in order to generate the desired pair, as many pairs must be "brute forced" as possible, as efficiently as possible, is my point.
I think it might apply in one sense. If you're in a room and the most attractive people is a 6 or a 7 and maybe a 9 or a 10. You're more likely to have a conversation with the 6-7 range given you can tell if the other person is even interested and you have a limitation of choice, there might even be other things about the 9-10's that put you off. They seem more appealing, etc.
Go online, suddenly the pool is so large that you see dozens of 9-10's and swipe right on them, suddenly the 6-7s seem less attractive so you start swiping left when in a social setting you'd probably at least talk to them, you become more picky, and you end up getting fewer matches because the wealth of choice leads to you being pickier about physical attractiveness than you'd otherwise be IRL.
The critical assumption here is that the first date is a useful metric for a long term relationship. And I don't think that holds, using hiring as an analog
No scrolling, no consuming media. Do something that involves little mental or physical capacity, but provides some holisitic benefit. Things that make you feel good on the whole.
In summary, do something where the point is to do it in order to relax, and not for any other point at all. Remove all mental load of stress about outcomes and instead immerse yourself in the present moment of relaxation.
Some methods that seem to work for myself and others are a good walk or a journaling session. A physical notebook to write in can be a bit more holistic than typing an entry into a keyboard. It can be hard to start, I just start with "captains log", then a date, and then my stream of thoughts.
Playing with small manipulatives can be good fun as well. Lego, K'nex, etc. I hear some people like painting models. Playing an instrument is also fantastic. Guitar is absurdly simple to learn the basics of (a servicable one can be had at a pawn shop or amazon for reasonably cheap), and then it's just a matter of grabbing some sheet music and practicing. If you let go of how good you actually sound, and instead assign value to the act of practicing, it is a great way to refresh.
Another great way is to read. A good book and a cup of tea is a very relaxing experience. I'll note that this should be pleasure reading, and not technical reading.