The Mix Tape, Vol. 77
Welcome to this week’s Mix:
🏃🏻♂️Sprint Essays
✉️Spinach sending email
🐎A horse is a horse, or not
🏟It’s still Super in Tampa
Sprint Essays
This week, I kicked off a series of 30 Sprint Essays—short essays about my favorite fitness and fitness marketing ideas.
I’m trying to get in “brain shape” to work as a mentor in the upcoming Cohort 6 for Write of Passage, the best writing course ever. Sprints improve stamina, right?
Anyway, here are this week’s sprints:
Spinach sending email
Through nanotechnology, engineers at MIT in the US have transformed spinach into sensors capable of detecting explosive materials. These plants are then able to wirelessly relay this information back to the scientists.
When the spinach roots detect the presence of nitroaromatics in groundwater, a compound often found in explosives like landmines, the carbon nanotubes within the plant leaves emit a signal. This signal is then read by an infrared camera, sending an email alert to the scientists.
Incredible. But please don’t teach broccoli to perform TikTok dances.
A horse is a horse of course, unless it’s something totally different
Ann Handley shared this image in “How to write a first draft of anything”:
Lots of truth in this image.
But, it would be more accurate if the first draft portion of the image was a pine tree. Or a bridge. Something completely unrelated to the idea on the left.
As we draft, we uncover new thoughts. As we write we are like an archeologist with those little dust brushes cleaning off dinosaur bones. Unexpected ideas reveal themselves.
When we’re done drafting, we often create something very different than we first intended.
Use writing to figure out what you think, and let it take you to unexpected places.
It’s still Super
There’s a slight chance you’ve heard this, but Tom Brady has led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to Sunday’s Super Bowl in Tampa.
The Bucs are the first team in NFL history to play in the Super Bowl at home.
Alas, it’s a COVID Super Bowl, so the usual hysteria is a bit muted. But the city is putting on the best show it can.
Last weekend we visited the NFL and Super Bowl Experiences being held downtown.
And it was fun. People wore masks in the exhibits and there was plenty of space to maneuver along the city’s ever-improving Riverwalk.
Should be fun on Sunday. Hopefully the Bucs bring home Lombardi Trophy #2.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
Please hit reply if you have questions, comments, or open rebuttals. (Or just want to say hi.)