Fungible goods as mutually interchangeable in that, in principle, you could swap in any unit for any other unit of the same type or kind and it would be equivalent. Money is a classic fungible good. A $10 bill is equivalent to any other $10 bill, so if you were to borrow $10 from someone they wouldn't care or expect to get the same $10 bill back.

Non-fungible goods are unique and not mutually interchangeable. Each house, even cookie-cutter houses, is in a unique location, with different neighbours, quirks, and history. Having a print of the Mona Lisa on your wall is not the same as having the original from the Louvre. And swapping people between teams at work, even people with similar experience, will still result in different outcomes.

A nice thought experiment to distinguish fungible and non-fungible goods is to ask if you were to borrow one, would it make a difference if you returned a different one? So if you were to borrow my car, you could return it to me with a different tank of fuel (a fungible good) and it wouldn't make any difference to me. But if you were to return a different used car (a non-fungible good) that would be rather odd.

In case you've heard of NFTs — Non-fungible tokens — and would like to understand their flaws and promise better I recommend the NFT Freakonomics episode of the 3-part series What can Blockchain do for you?

Fungible - non-fungible

Many trees and forests were built to live with fire and in many cases, fire is essential for a healthy ecosystem. Giant sequoias, for example, have cones that dry out during surface fires releasing their seeds so they can germinate at the ideal time to grow with less competition.

Ponderosa pines have a number of ways they have evolved to live with fire.

They have bark that when heated can split off from the tree protecting the trunk and reducing the spread of fire. 

They often lose lower branches, sometimes from smaller fires, reducing the likelihood of ladder fires that climb towards the crown.

The shade they cast and the acidic soil they favour helps reduce understory plants that could catch fire beneath the tree and help a fire to latch onto the main trunk.

They have deep roots that can remain intact after a fire allowing the tree to still gather water and nutrients even when surface roots are damaged.

Some policies of suppressing natural fires have changed the balance of many forest systems and helped promote some of the recent mega-fires.

More about the Fire ecology of ponderosa pines (pdf).

Also see: identify a douglas fir, time hierarchy

Ponderosa pine fire protections

The magic of a first draft is that the first draft is always perfect. It doesn't matter if it's rubbish, if it's messy, if it doesn't flow, if it lacks personality or it won't work. The job of a first draft is to be a draft and get the process started. So however it turns out the first draft has done its job perfectly.

In the illustrated art collection by Dr Seuss you can see some of the first drafts and iteration of text and images that go to refine the seemingly effortless rhythm, rhyme and combination of text and images from his wacky illustrations.

Donald Schon in his classic The Reflective Practitioner goes further by sharing his analysis of design as a reflective conversation – observing each mark sketched on paper informs the next you make. You don't know how it will turn out until you put pen to paper. Seeing what comes out allows you to adapt and modify as you go in a back and forth of discovery and evaluation.

Don't worry about your first draft — it'll be perfect.

I read this for the first time in an article that's no longer live and I couldn't now find. Respect to the author.

The first draft is always perfect