Stock and flow. I heard Max talking about this on the Do By Friday after show, where he quoted Robin Sloan:

I was an economics major in college, and I’ve been grateful ever since for a few key concepts those courses drilled into me: things like opportunity cost, sunk cost, and marginal cost. I think about this stuff all the time in my everyday life. I think about the sunk cost of waiting for a slow elevator; I think about the marginal cost of making myself another sandwich.

I think most of all about the concept of stock and flow.

Do you know about this? It couldn’t be simpler. There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy. Too easy.

But I actually think stock and flow is a useful metaphor for media in the 21st century. Here’s what I mean:

  • Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.

  • Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

This is how I’m approaching note taking now. Write down everything. Filter it later.

Looking forwards and backwards. The regular expression (?<!foo)bar will match iff bar is not preceded by foo. Decomposing this a bit, the expression outside of the parenthesis, bar, is the sequence of characters to look ahead / behind of. The expression within the parenthesis, ?<!foo, is the sequence of characters to look ahead / behind for.

>>> re.search('(?<!foo)bar', ' foobar') is not None
False
>>> re.search('(?<!foo)bar', ' bazbar') is not None
True

Clapton played a wild guitar part on ‘What is life’ that was never used.