I'm bought into the whole standing and working thing. I don't do it enough, but sitting hurts my back and I feel better when I stand. While this is starting to be a fixable problem in the work environment, one place where there is no alternative is the car (or any kind of transport). Why can't we stand and drive? Or how about seats like this where you are sit-standing? Even this, would be a huge improvement over the one option we have today. Cars would get taller, yes. That's bad for aerodynamics, so the designs would have to change around them. The only other alternative is where you are almost reclining, like a race car driver - but I'm not sure people want to crawl into their cars. I hope someone in the car industry is thinking about this as they rework most of the other things about how cars and transportation work. _{*Image of standing driver made in Paper by FiftyThree *Sit-stand seat is the Focal Seat}

Yes, Silicon Valley does amazing things - creates and changes industries, impacts people, imagines the future. Given that, one can either look at the rest of the country as a burden or an opportunity. One can either say "screw them, let's move forward alone" or say "let's help everyone move forward". The latter path is, obviously, much more painful. What I love about the tech folks working in Obama's "Stealth Startup" is that they are choosing that path.

Oh, and the stories about Weaver. "First name is Matthew," Weaver says, sitting on a cheap couch in a makeshift office near the White House. But no one calls him Matthew, he explains, since there are too many Matthews in any given room at any given moment. Even among D.C.’s new technorati, people view Weaver as someone separate from the fray. Maybe it’s because he once lived in a camper in the Google parking lot without going home for an entire year. Maybe it’s because he was the one guy who, if he didn’t answer an emergency call, the whole search engine might go down. Or maybe it’s because in a group of brilliant engineers, Weaver, as one of his new colleagues puts it, stands out as "someone who is, like, superhero-fucking-brilliant." Recruited from California last year by these guys Mikey and Todd to work on the broken Healthcare.gov website, Weaver decided this year to stay in D.C. and leave behind the comfort of Google and a big pile of stock options. He recalls it in terms that suggest the transfixing power of a holy pilgrimage. "That"—he says, meaning the Healthcare.gov fix-it work—"changed my life in a profound way. It made it feel like all my accomplishments in my professional life meant very little compared to getting millions of people through the hospital doors for the first time. And that made me see that I could never do any other work without a public impact." Weaver now spends his days in the guts of the Veterans Administration, helping the agency’s digital team upgrade their systems and website—and trying to reboot the way government works. As an early test to see if he could challenge the VA’s protocol, he insisted, successfully, that his official government title be Rogue Leader. And so he is: Rogue Leader Weaver.

The popular history of science is full of such falsehoods. In the case of evolution, Darwin was a much better geologist than ornithologist, at least in his early years. And while he did notice differences among the birds (and tortoises) on the different islands, he didn’t think them important enough to make a careful analysis. His ideas on evolution did not come from the mythical Galápagos epiphany, but evolved through many years of hard work, long after he had returned from the voyage. (To get an idea of the effort involved in developing his theory, consider this: One byproduct of his research was a 684-page monograph on barnacles.) The myth of the finches obscures the qualities that were really responsible for Darwin’s success: the grit to formulate his theory and gather evidence for it; the creativity to seek signs of evolution in existing animals, rather than, as others did, in the fossil record; and the open-mindedness to drop his belief in creationism when the evidence against it piled up. The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth. But in science, at least, they are destructive, in that they promote false conceptions of the evolution of scientific thought.

The mythification of very hard work makes for a good story, but it minimizes the effort that went into it.

The oversimplification of discovery makes science appear far less rich and complex than it really is.

This very good op-ed in the NYTimes is focused on science, but this is true not just for science - it's true for almost anything. In tech, it's the pithy "and now it's a unicorn". In film, it's "and it premiered at (insert name of festival)". The punchline ignores all the decisions and work that went before it. While you are in the middle of the struggle, it's easy to be seduced by the thought that others had it easy, that somehow it all came together instantly. But it's the grind, the perseverance and the hard work that matters, even though it is unglamorous and hard and unreported. It's the only thing you control.

The myths can seduce one into believing there is an easier path, one that doesn’t require such hard work. : : The Darwin, Newton and Hawking of the myths received that instant gratification. The real scientists did not, and real people seldom do.