I had the great fun the other week of hanging with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, an episode he titled Matt Mullenweg on Polyphasic Sleep, Tequila, and Building Billion-Dollar Companies. His previous guest was Arnold Schwarzenegger (!) and if you dig into the podcast archives there are some really amazing episodes, I’m working my way through them now.

The Pun-Off, held annually since 1978, matches the peculiar energy of a place where the unofficial slogan is “Keep Austin Weird.” This is the city, after all, that organizes Eeyore’s Birthday Party, an outdoor costume party honoring the depressed donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh. […]

It’s a reunion of legends past. Steve Brooks, a country singer with a mop of gray hair, is the only other person besides Ziek to have won both Punslingers and Punniest of Show in the same year. Retired from competition, he now serves as a judge and emcee.

Everything about this article about the World Pun Championships in Austin is amazing, I want to quote the entire thing.

A federated Wikipedia by Jon Udell talks about the ossification happening in the Wikipedia community, caused in part by its attachment to rules that were created with the best of intentions. All open source communities, including WordPress, have to be vigilant against this. Sometimes we have to throw out what worked before to create what will work tomorrow.

I write novels. And with just about every novel I write, I try to do something new or different that I haven’t done before, in order to challenge myself as a writer, and to keep developing my skills. In The Android’s Dream, of example, I wrote in the third person for the first time; in Zoe’s Tale, I had a main character—a sixteen year old girl—whose life experience was substantially different from my own; with The Human Division, I wrote a novel comprised of thirteen stand-alone “episodes.”

And now? With Lock In? What new thing have I done to stretch myself as a writer and teller of tales? Well, I’ll tell you; it’s something I’m really proud of, actually:

I’ve written a novel entirely free of semicolons.

John Scalzi in Pacing Doesn’t Just Mean Wearing a Groove in the Floor.

Slack Buys Screenhero To Add Screen Sharing And Voice Chat To Its Work Messaging Platform, which I’m very excited about as a daily user of Slack (on 5 teams now) and through Audrey an investor in Screenhero and a big fan of their vision. As the article mentions, Automattic has been a Screenhero customer as well.

I always like reading Paul Ford’s writing, and this one about How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled Kim Kardashian’s back-end (SFW) is funny and accessible. I learned that people still use Movable Type. Also if PAPER used VIP, the story would be short and boring:

1. Wake up, press the publish button.
2. Watch the stats go crazy. Sip some bourbon.
3. Go to sleep.

He has been called the “superman pope”, and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?

The Guardian on Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches. Definitely the coolest pope in my lifetime.

“Fasting for as little as three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as ‘remarkable’.” — Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds.

Harper’s had a great article on fasting a few years ago it’s not online at the moment but here’s a PDF of it. It’s also common in yoga and folks trying to live longer. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but perhaps will at some point this year — I like the idea of doing something by doing nothing.

“They modelled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. […] The book’s central point, much criticised since, is that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead to a crash. So were they right?” The answer lies in Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse.

I think it’s good to show both sides of what a distributed organization is like, here are two essays by different Automatticians. Steph Yiu writes Still figuring it out: communicating remotely with lots of people and Chris Hardie writes on Distributed vs. In-person Teams.

Did you know the NFL is a non-profit? Slate says the NFL should lose its tax-exempt status: The league is not a “nonprofit.”.

There’s a simple, unattributed site called Decent Security which has very nice common-sense but effective advice on security. I believe it’s from the same person as behind the Infosec Taylor Swift account. It’s refreshing like reading Bruce Schnier’s blog.

Over on the BruteProtect blog they have a look at the Jetpack Bloat Myth, and find that counter-intuitively even though Jetpack has more comprehensive functionality it’s faster than using individual plugins to do the same things. There are economies of scale to Jetpack’s approach, and it doesn’t even include the impact of doing things more advanced and complex like Related Posts. There’s a reason why some web hosts like WP Engine ban most related post plugins but encourage the use of Jetpack.

The performance of the plugin code, though still faster, is still a small difference when compared to the benefit of offloading certain tasks like image resizing, related posts, stats, video transcoding, and more in the future to the WordPress.com cloud (which is now across 11 datacenters worldwide).

Of course if you don’t need the functionality at all it’s always faster to have nothing, but that’s a shrinking minority. There are still more optimizations to be had, and in line with a performance focus in 2015 look for more improvements to come in the future. In the meantime, check out the Jetpack benchmarks.

With the news that PGP is one of the things that is still tough for the NSA, now is a great time to donate to GnuPG, which I just did.

I kind of want spell check for emails I receive, not just ones I send. Also someone needs to make a Ubiquiti server hosting service.

Life Hack: Put leftovers on top of your Mac Pro to keep them warm.

I’m as likely to give Twitter a hard time as anyone, but today I want to tell you about something great they did: Twitter open sourced their emoji set for anyone to use. We’ve been working with them behind the scenes on this and launched the emoji for WP.com as well. Support will be coming to Jetpack soon.

OnBeep, an Audrey company, has introduced their first product, the Onyx. It’s a lot like the communicator from Star Trek. (Don’t wear it with a red shirt.) Business Insider covers the news pretty well.

I spoke with Tony Conrad and Laurie Segall at Web Summit in Dublin today and was able to announce that Automattic has acquired Code For The People to join our VIP team. Techcrunch also covered the news.