You, my friend, have a hangover. Scientists have a more inscrutable name for it: veisalgia, from the Greek word for “pain,” algia, and kveis, a Norwegian word meaning “uneasiness following debauchery.” That sounds about right.
MARBURY V. MADISON overturned a section of a law passed by Congress. This was no novelty, either in theory or in practice. “Whenever a particular statute contravenes the Constitution,” Alexander Hamilton had written in Federalist 78, “it will be the duty of the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter and disregard the former.” Marshall himself, in his speech on the judiciary at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, had said that if Congress made a law that infringed on the Constitution, judges “would declare it void.”
The anti-inflammatory Clotam, the vitamin B6 analogue pyritinol, Ayurvedic herbal compound Liv.52, and Opuntia ficus indica extract are the only four medicines or supplements that actual clinical trials have shown to be at all effective in treating hangovers. Add dihydromyricetin to the list—the thing Olsen isolated—even though it hasn’t had rigorous human trials. This is a chunk of information so vital that it demands a stunt.
Ethanol is a particularly cool molecule. It’s a solvent, which means lots of different molecules that don’t dissolve in water will dissolve in a solution of ethanol. It’s odorless, colorless, and it burns really well—a sign of a good fuel. It’s also a potent microbicide. When yeasts squirt it into their environment, it kills off local bacterial and fungal competition.
Surprisingly, there is not a single word about an individual right to a gun for self-defense in the notes from the Constitutional Convention. Nor with scattered exceptions in the records of the ratification debates in the states. Nor on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as it marked up the Second Amendment. James Madison’s original proposal, in fact, included a provision for conscientious objectors.
Heat—thermal energy—is actually mechanical movement, and in a solid with springy interatomic attachments like copper, that energy creates tiny whorls called phonons that move through the medium like a wave of sound does through air. When someone says that a metal like gold, silver, or copper is a good conductor of heat, what they’re really saying is that the metal is good at propagating phonons. And copper’s crystal structure, the way its atoms line up in bulk, is really good for working into new shapes—its atomic crystals are smoother on their faces than in other metals, so they slide across each other, metallurgically speaking.
Now entire organizations are attempting to achieve “agility at scale,” believing that it will be a remedy for all their problems. Unfortunately, in their desire to be agile (with a lowercase a), many firms have attempted to do Agile (with an uppercase A). They have traded a goal for an orthodoxy—adopting the methods and certifications but not the theory behind them. And this is fatal. Because an agile workflow is not an operating system. The common practices of Agile development offer little advice to someone wondering about organizational structure, or human development, or compensation, or a thousand other questions that will emerge as you go. And even if it were comprehensive, you cannot cut and paste an OS any more than you can cut and paste a personality. You have to do the work.
to avoid the pitfalls of organizational debt, we need constant and vigilant simplification. We need to create roles, rules, and processes that are inherently agile—built to learn and change. Unfortunately, the very bureaucracy that created our org debt also stands in the way of addressing it. Org debt creates bureaucracy, and bureaucracy protects org debt. It’s a tragic love affair.
