As part of the marketing for the The Carbon Almanac, which will be released next month, the volunteer team launched an email series called The Daily Difference on May 1.

I participated in writing and editing the Almanac, but I’ve been a bit too busy winding down The Little Middle School to work on the marketing phase of the project. However, I’ve kept an eye on what the team is doing, and one message that Seth Godin sent to the team prior to the launch of the Daily Difference series caught my eye.

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As a child, I would read anything I could get my hands on.

At least, I would try. I had a small collection of classics that had been gifted to me, novels from Wuthering Heights to Dune, but I didn't get past the first page of a number of them.

My sole consideration in deciding whether to continue reading was, "Does this grab me right away?" If it didn't, I didn't.

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The other day, a student, April, came to me in tears.

She had had an unpleasant interaction with another student during Discretionary Time, which is the period in which students can work on the assignments and projects of their choice.

The other student told April to do her work, and April did not like that.

"I just feel so mad!" she said. "I want to go home."

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Human potential is effectively infinite.

Yeah, there are certain areas in which we are approaching the limits of what individuals can do. There's only so fast that a man can run a mile, right? But we thought that nobody could run the mile in under four minutes until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. So what do we know.

Areas other than physical performance might be harder to measure. How do we know what we're capable of?

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The old-school arcade games were light on plot compared to the home console games of today.

Mostly, as you progressed in a game, the bad guys did the same basic thing, but faster or more. There were more bullets, more aliens, or the ghosts were more bloodthirsty. The blocks fell at an unmanageable pace.

This is a convenient way to make the most of the available RAM. It's also not so different from real life. We do tend to confront the same problems and challenges over and over, but at a higher difficulty setting each time.

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