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2025 in Books

2025-12-15T07:00:00-08:00

Fiction, Non-fiction, and Business reads this year.

January

Ancillary Sword by Anne Leckie
Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie
Translation State by Anne Leckie

These were all excellent. I really enjoyed the gender ambiguity and continually examined my response to this while reading. Well worth the time. Translation State pushes this in a somewhat different direction and it isn’t as effective.

February

Theft by Finding by David Sederis
It was interesting but grew tiresome after a while.
Circe by Madeline Miller
This was superb. The character growth arc was a joy to follow along.
Inside Moebius (part 1), by Jean Giraud
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Clever and worthwhile, but also the epistolatory nature of the story is obvious.

March

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle
Unexpectedly interesting in the continual mundanity. It is such a close examination of the practical matters that an “average” person would have to deal with in this situation (one suspects).
The Work of Art by Adam Ross
Many interesting interviews, but also sort of feels like it misses an opportunity. It makes the most of what it is, but I would have liked there to be more there. Maybe there just isn’t.
The Notebook by Roland Allen
Easy read that I wish also went a bit deeper.
Tiny Experiments by Anne-Loure Le Cunff
Better in bullets. Didn’t need 200 pages to make the point. I don’t regret reading it.

April

Rules by Lorraine Daston
Quite possibly the best read, and most unexpected, of the year.
Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Knausgaard has become one of my favorite authors, up there with Borges in his observations and insights and connections.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Initially good, but my enjoyment withered. The detachment from the subject felt judgy, like the author found them disturbing, not just disagreeable. It reflected more on the author and their audience than on the subject.

May

Saving Time by Jenny Odell
Glad I read it, and will recommend it to others interested in this author’s topics.
The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber
Loosely related collection of essays. Thought provoking and insightful, as usual for this author.

June

Understanding Comics by Scott McCleod
Helpful and worthwhile read.
The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer
Interesting and exhausting. Abandoned.

July

The Sound Book by Trevor Cox
Interesting material but something didn’t resonate. Abandoned about 20% in.
Calaban’s War¹ by James S. A. Corey
Better than the first book.
The Electric State by Simon Stalenhag
Cool art. Why do they always make the stories such downers?
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds (audio book)
Fascinating, annoying. Very 1970s story for a book published around the turn of the millennium.

August

A Swim In A Pond In The Rain by George Saunders
Another unexpected delight. Both the short stories themselves were excellent, as was the discussion. It is likely that I will revisit this book to extract more.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion It salvaged my relationship with this author. I found Slouching… initially quite engaging, but soon the wry and detached style became off putting. Turning it inward however, treating herself as the subject in the same, that is genius.

September

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
Very good, funny and sad. A truth.

October

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt
Excellent introduction to the principles of strategy.

November

The Crux by Richard P. Rumelt
Dissappointing, to me at least. It was primarily corporate case files, and difficult to find the application to my own Silicon Valley tech situation. I abandoned it about half way through.

December

Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Continues the excellent thing started in Autumn.
On the Calculation of Volume II by Solvej Balle
Reading in progress.

Fun fact: the name Caliban is from Shakespeare and worth looking up. Also appears in Wednesday (Netflix) and other places randomly. ↑

Pushing Ice?

2025-08-01T19:00:00-07:00

So, I have problems with this story. And you will surely have many problems with this blog post too, so we’re even on that score. Yet the core science fiction is compelling enough to investigate more carefully. There are some very interesting concepts and situations, technologies and moral challenges. Particularly the moral challenges are underdeveloped in the text, in my opinion. Unfortunately they are underdeveloped here too. You’ll just have to put up with some annoying parts to get the good bits. Of both of these pieces, mine and Alastair’s.

Warning: here be spoilers. I assume you’ve read the story. I get into details and nuances. But if you haven’t read it, things may not make sense to you because I don’t recap all the events.

What follows is not all of the problems I have with Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds. It’s the ones that I wanted to work out.

Alastair, if you’re reading this (doubtful), I hope you take it as a compliment that I engaged with the text this thoroughly.

Criticisms

Dated vibes. Felt like classic Asimov or Clarke. Reminds me a bit of Rendezvous with Rama, or even Eon by Bear. So, if that’s what you’re into, it’s great. Note that those are all books that I enjoyed. So this might also be a compliment of sorts.
Naive Characters. Overconfident, unsuspecting, incautious. I’m not saying I would do better, but these people often seem quite foolish. Sometimes 2-dimensional. Maybe it was the point.
Fails the Bechdel test, like right out of the gate. Lots of other questionable interaction choices. As a friend said, 2005 was a long time ago.
Audio Book Narrator is fine, I guess.

Questions

The following is a deeper inquiry into some questions raised by the story. I tend to treat the text like eyewitness testimony: it’s one interpretation of events, possibly unreliable, and it’s worthwhile to try and reconcile it with other things we can understand about the universe and sequence of events. It tends to be a scientists interpretation, but I am also interested in the story-logic of it. I am still up-skilling on literary interpretation, that is interesting too.

How did the Memorial Cube arrive at Janus?

The sequence of events to this point is:

The Rockhopper departed the solar system with Janus, headed for a structure at Spica.
Janus enclosed itself, and the human colony, just before arrival at Spica.
A year later, a hole appears in the enclosure. When the humans venture out, they find the cube, and then the Fountainheads (who made the hole). The cube is marked with an obviously human sigil.¹ It is noted (perhaps internal dialogue?) by the Bella era humans that the Cube feels very incredibly old.²

We (A and I) suspected immediately that this cube was the helpful gift that Chromis had sent (technically was planning to send). At this point, my assumption had been that Janus was traveling very fast, and continued to do so, but limited by relativity. And that the cube’s speed was also limited by relativity. I don’t see how the cube could catch up to Janus without the later humans being even more powerful than the Spicans (or whoever), which seems unlikely or at least a rather improbable turn of events in story physics.³

This is a valid time to state the constraints in this universe:

The speed of light remains the ultimate speed limit.
Fusion (mass/energy conversion) remains a very potent weapon.

With the rather annoying and misleading help⁴ from one or two variants of the leading chatbots, I found where Reynolds himself confirms that Rockhopper/Janus does not enter The Structure immediately, but instead have a holding pattern to await the arising of other star-faring species.

So the problem of the Cube’s arrival time is solved. It’s reasonable and a clever enough alternative hypothesis that answers how Janus and the Cube arrive at the same time.

But how did they come to be located together? Perhaps the Spican machine sorted the cultural artifacts together.

Spican Scale

Were the Spicans a galactic scale empire, or larger? The Chromis era humans launched the Memorial Cubes throughout the galaxy and even beyond to nearby galaxies and ambitiously beyond the local group. The Chromis era humans were small potatoes compared to the Spicans, those same Spicans that outclass all other species trapped in The Structure, even ones beyond the matter gap. Based on the common knowledge of the species collected in The Structure, and the experience of the Janus explosion, only Spican technology has sufficient energy to damage Spican technology.

But Zvetlana’s last picture shows something missing or damaged at the central location of The Structure’s torus shaped arrangement of many thousands of tubes.

So that central damage was either done by some other species that is at the same level as the Spicans, or it was a faction of the Spicans themselves.

Why is Janus the only source of energy? The tube walls can repair themselves, they have energy from somewhere. It’s untappable?

How much energy is needed to accelerate Janus to $0.999\;c$ ($\gamma \approx 22$), and how does that compare to the energy output of the sun? Rough back-of-the-envelope calculations (with ChatGPT helping) suggest that Janus required the energy equivalent of 300 years of the Sun’s total energy output to achieve that speed. It’s worth also mentioning that the amount of energy ($E=mc^2$ energy) to accelerate Janus to this speed is 21x the mass of Janus itself, so there is something fishy there.

And the Spica relay acceleration (assuming only a $\gamma = 10^6$) would require 14 MY of the sun’s total energy output. That is about 32% of the Earth’s mass converted to energy.

This seems to contradict the Fountainhead McKinley’s statement that atomics are a sufficient deterrent for a superior species trying to simply take by force from less developed ones.

Whatever the source, this is a lot of energy to be manipulating. Perhaps The Structure is some strange variation of a Dyson Sphere. I think the Kardashev Scale could have been more clearly delineated. None of these civilizations appear to be approaching Class III. The Spica relay sounds like something perhaps beyond merely Class II. And The Structure’s behaviors a speculatively more than that even.

The energy problem remains unsolved to my satisfaction. It is science fiction at this point.

It’s a Zoo?

How does the time dilation zoo collecting work? What is its purpose? Some provisional hypotheses.

The “Spicans” made it to meet others by preserving themselves (by time dilation) and others (by the same) to meet at the same much later time. It’s a conference center. A giant monument to the possibility that other civilizations will exist later.

Based on the Zvetlana’s final image, the structure is immensely large- the size of a solar system with many thousands of tubes. Some central component is damaged or missing, yet the Stucture still functions. At least its outlying instruments still do, the Janus conveyence and the acceleration relay at Spica. But these are long in the past. (Also the tube chambers in the Structure itself.) How were those devices, the Janus’s and Spica type accelerators, placed throughout the Galaxy? Presumably the “Spicans” were very old and galactic scale.

Maybe the Structure is not at rest. This is a curious possibility but seems wrong. I will pick it up later and run with it. This is sparked from the comment that the only other species to escape the Structure was never heard from again. My idea is that they left the time dilation field and slipped away in time from the Structure. But, it seems there are just unrecognizable fixed stars, partly occluded by the Structure itself, in the images that Svetlana sends back. Likely it’s just millions (or billions) of years in the future and everything is moved. Later arrivals should have less movement and be more likely model the motions and therefore locate the Structure. Maybe they’re just not sharing. So idk, there are a lot of unknowns here.

Is there more than one Structure? Each successive Galactic empire would possibly create one. Where there is one, there should be many. It is curious that Chromis does not allude to her own people pursuing such a goal. How is it that no later species makes more Janus energy devices and Structures? Where the Spicans far more advanced than anything captured in the zoo? And none of the captive civilizations continued advancing to develop capabilities even greater than the originators of The Structure? It seems unlikely.

Every advanced empire would create one or many such zoos. The Spicans aren’t the only culture to want to meet others.

Some empire reasoned it out and sent maximally advanced envoys to meet this ancient Spican culture, but they couldn’t get along and that let to the missing central part of the Structure. Or the failure was some catastrophic accident, where is the debris?

Why the problem with repeated motions on Janus, by living beings? Is it also a problem on the surfaces of Structure? I think it likely is just a poetic mystery of the author’s making. I can’t figure any logic of it. Maybe it’s filter for less intelligent species, no infestations of lemmings⁵ allowed at The Structure.

More questions than answers in this section. Sorry.

Questions about the later civilizations

How did the Fountainheads find the Thai expansion era suit and also end up on the Structure? The simplest explanation is that their historical archive of human culture happened to contain the vat manufacturing plans and they made one. It was the nearest in time object to Bella’s departure they could make.

The Fountainheads seemed to have access to the rest of human history, or they are able to identify Chromis from some records in the far distant past. Apparently they either traded for this archive or had it when they arrived at the structures, catching their own Janus much much later than the humans did.

There is a flaw in the timing of the Musk Dogs’ departure from Janus and the door closing. They were never going to make it. The humans closed the door on their clock but didn’t know when Janus would blow up. Presumably the Musk Dogs did know when (or they were tricked by The Whisperers). They should have been able to make it out without damaging their ship but could not, even without human and Fountainhead interference.

Conclusion

So that’s all my random thoughts and questions. Surely some of these are intended by Reynolds, but others feel like either logical flaws or misunderstandings on my part. Reading audiobooks while driving is hard sometimes because of distractions.

I will leave aside the possibility that this may be subterfuge. It seems to not be that sort of book so far. Although deceptions do begin to feature more critically into the story after this point. Later facts support this conclusion, and align with the Chromis frame story. ↑
Perhaps the Cube took the non-relativistic path to the Structure, spending the millions or more years simply waiting to arrive, or for Bella to arrive. ↑
Perhaps I should explore a tale featuring this turn of events. Or maybe someone already has and I just need to find it. ↑
It was a bit like I imagined the interrogation of Golum to be: confidently confused, seemingly sure that it knows what it is talking about. Links: bad o3 help, bad 4o help. If you’ve read the book, you can spot the completely incorrect description of the story immediately. Note that Gemini also fails badly here. ↑
Yes, I know that the lemmings cliff thing is wrong. ↑

Daston's Rules

2025-05-04T16:36:00-07:00

I just finished reading Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, by Lorraine Daston, published in 2022. If you want to know what you’re in for with this book, check this (brief) review in Foreign Affairs.

Reaction

Five stars! This was an excellent book; S-tier oddball history. Erudite, funny, challenging, wide-ranging, deep, and well structured. I have gained a new lens for looking at the world, a toolkit for excavating situations with peculiar properties, and a better grasp on the range of possible ways and places that rules press upon us. I’ve even gotten a better appreciation for the firmness, or lack, that rules have or that we should think they have. The book and some of its lessons have already made a difference in my professional life, something I was not expecting to happen at all. So, the book is surprising too. If you are at all interested, this is a text worth seeking out.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, if you are reading this, I suggest you take a look at Rules for your next musical. Really.

Partial Reading Summary

I have only read the book once, yet. There is much more to plumb out of this rich text. I have captured a few anchors, re-entry points, for future visits. To be honest, it’s only a sampling. I’m sure I will gain more such footholds in future readings too.

Origins

Rule, as in straight edge. A cane plant used in ancient masonry. Rule, as in tape measure, or as in the rules of multiplication. Basically geometry and by extension all math and other algorithms.

Rule, as in WWJD. Models, paradigms, singular examples to imitate (but not ape). This definition of rule has gone out of fashion lately, so I’m struggling to find an X to put in that X.¹

Rule, as in legal code. Laws, regulations, norms, and customs. These are pretty familiar.

Oppositions, or duals, or symmetries

Rules can fall somewhere along these three opposites. There are historical combinations that are quite uncommon today, which makes it hard for me to wrap my head around. Fun to think about though.

Rules formulated thickly or thinly. Thick with examples and exception and clarification. Thin if all those crunchily specific details can be ignored or handled elsewhere, and they are simply stated.

Rules applied flexibly or rigidly. “They’re more like guidelines” or “death and taxes.”

Rules with a general or specific domain. General, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, or specific like “only 2 hours of TV per week in this house.”

Generalizations

The application of rules always, unavoidably, inevitably, infallibly, requires the use of judgement and interpretation. The use of judgement may be shifted around, as in the rule only applies when certain conditions are met, or there may be carefully worded exceptions to the rule. It may be assumed that a certain system is being used in the application of the rule. Some intelligence must judge if the conditions are met or not. Blind application of the rules will result in errors. Using rules means also making careful interpretation [p125].

On the one hand, rules are a tool for addressing the chaos of the world, and the chaos that we humans are so good at adding. The predictability gained by some small success with rules can become addictive [p185].

Particularities

The advancement of mathematical calculation from the domain of learned experts to human computers to modern digital computers has not relieved us of either the toil or the intrinsic judgement required. We are able to get a lot more numbers pushed through this specific formulation [p105].

The goal of free markets is not to make people behave virtuously, but to make them calculable (predictable), which is a very useful property for them to have [p182].

We have yet to construct a system of rules that is completely free of exceptions. This is one of the roles of the executive or sovereign [p265].

Used Book Marginalia

I bought a used copy and it came with an inscription in both the front and end flaps. This is one of the things that I hope for when getting used books: little mysteries of history, secret surprises hidden in the covers, more than I bargained for. Sometimes I get the wrong book (online orders) and that can go either way, a dud or an unexpected gift.

It took quite a bit of staring and questioning to extract a reasonable interpretation of this handwriting.

learning skills to switch jobs
A way to provide college degrees–
require skills but not college degrees

and on the back

able to to get a job the return / which
did not allow repayment
anyone in world – get skills to
= oppor[tunity] to learn.
2 trillion/year spent on college degree to get an educ[ation]
RE–INVENTING
educ[ation]
&
access to earning

Well, that’s my interpretation. See for yourself here: front endpapers / back endpapers. The “Francis Bacon” is my note, the other hand is some earlier owner.

The other traces left by the former owner are about 3 pages of quite intense underlining and margin noting: p1, p2-3, p4. That’s it, no other markings anywhere else in the book. It doesn’t appear to be directly connected to the note in the end papers, nor do I get any insights into what all the heavy underlining meant to them. Your guess is as good as mine.

Note: I added the ❶, ❷, etc, so I could link my paper written notes back to specific paragraphs. It’s an experiment, since I expect to find relevant ideas or facts in every paragraph of this book.

The parentheses, e.g. ❪main body text❫, and asterisk, ✱, in the margin are mine too–I’ve been doing that for a few years now. It’s served as a good way to find a specific passage later, and easy to refer to.

It’s kind of a bummer that paradigms are not still in use. There are a lot of useful skills related to applying this type of rule. We may need to bring it back. I might examine this more later. ↑

Knausgaard's Autumn

2025-04-12T14:54:00-07:00

[backfilled on or after 25MAY01]

Autumn, by Knausgaard, is a lovely book of carefully noted observations and connections made from memories, personal experiences, social order, and nature. It could not be more perfect for me and my writing right now. I am working on many of the same problems, such as how to develop an idea or experience without it becoming predictably formulaic. The short pieces are excellent examples of sharing an idea, a connection, a memory, a spiral of thought. One way to look at the essays is as many varied solutions to the challenge of maintaining diverse and interesting writing: starting from a general subject before moving to a specific experience of it, or beginning in a particular memory and then turning more generally to the subject and finishing again on some specific memory or precise detail. Of course Knausgaard is more than just these structural forms; mood and tone and register are all varied too. That’s just a taste, the short essay richly rewards closer reading. There are so many pieces that I enjoyed, plus I get an extra scoop when I go back to study those other non-narrative elements, the other textures of the writing. The short essay format is no hindrance to being profound or astonishing. It’s like I am not reading them but living them as he lived them. There is a lot of art to making it so effortless yet still feeling authentic and natural; it never feels like he’s playing a trick on me. Kudos to both Karl and the translator, Ingvild Burkey!

I can’t wait to read the remaining three in the quartet.

Some non-fiction recommendations

2025-03-05T19:00:00-08:00

A friend of mine is breaking into non-fiction books. They’re currently reading 4000 weeks, by Oliver Burkeman. I loved that book, so much practical, and accessible, advice on dealing with the constraints of living in time. Yesterday, I volunteered to put together a list of half a dozen other non-fiction books that I similarly liked. I’m putting it here too for later reference.

Several books about reorienting our attention toward our surroundings: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, A Natural History of Empty Lots by Christopher Brown, and On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz. All of these are primarily about “getting outside, mentally and physical, and noticing more of the world”.
How to Think by Alan Jacobs. I would call it How to think for yourself. I sent B a copy not because he doesn’t already think for himself, but because seeing it clearly articulated can be helpful with any parts of that skill that are still challenging.
Books about working with your brain: The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt and How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok. Both of these are about how our brains work. The first one is more focused on what our brain does, and the latter is thinking about thinking from several different aspects. I gave my copy of Haidt’s book to my dad, and I think I’ll just buy myself another (used) copy. A book that is related to the previous two, but from a completely different angle is When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. There are many excellent lessons for how our own brains / psychologies work and respond to the world.
The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit by John V. Petrocelli. This book is a manual. Some things this book codified for me: the difference between lies and bs is that bs doesn’t care if it’s true or not; humans default to accepting new information as true, it’s easier than skepticism; humans prefer not to update their world model, they will make up stories (bs) to excuse information that they’d rather not integrate. Another book that relates to truth vs just talking is Nexus by Yuval Harari, but only the first ~half. It’s an excellent exposition on the differences between information and truth, and the tools that humans brought to bear on that problem at ever-larger scales (stories, books, bureaucracies), and some of the problems that have resulted (e.g. literal witch hunts). It becomes less compelling when he starts speculating about the consequences of our latest AI hype.
Last is a writing book, The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker which is about writing well and clearly. It sounds like an absurd book to recommend, but I found it to be (mostly) really quite interesting and engaging, and informative. Very practical: it’s also helpful as a decoder for noticing when writing is bad, and can help with figuring out what is wrong so you can decipher the underlying message.

In 2024 I read 27 books

2025-01-04T08:21:00-08:00

I read 27 books last year.

If I had to pick a theme here, it would be the ways we approach our own lives. In looking to the past, I read How to Live by Bakewell, which is a biography of both the man Montaigne, and his Essays. I have had no other introduction to the essays and this book offered dual contexts. There was the historical context, it was a messy time in France during Montaigne’s life. And the context of the history of study and understanding of the Essay’s multiple lives and influence after publishing and republishing. In this telling, the Essays have been hugely influential for being so direct and accessible to any who read them, possibly that is their core achievement. I have started reading them, and I agree that when they are working their best, it is like both me, the reader, and him, the author, have similar lived lives.

The second back looking book is The Year 1000 by Lacey and Danziger. This is a quite interesting, but not too deep, survey through the lives of people in England at the turn of the last millennium. Nonetheless, it is well researched and contains many useful references, which is good because if I had to say it had one failing, it is that it is too short.

Non-fiction
- How to do Nothing
- The Year 1000
- How to Live
- When Things Fall Apart
Fiction
- Neuromancer
- Blindsight
- Ancillary Justice
- Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey

January

The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. Some useful things, some dated things (iPod, machines will solve all), some things that make me question this man’s life choices, in particular his approach to time. The time thing feels of that era; the book was published in 2006.
The Street Photographer’s Manual by David Gibson. I don’t plan to read every page.
How I Make Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz. This was very good.
The Greek and Roman Myths: A Guide to the Classical Stories by Philip Matyszak. It’s not the stories themselves, but an overview of the situation in detail. Kind of a hodgepodge of other facts and details. However. I have found it easy to keep reading, so it’s another one of those.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It was alright.

February

The 9.9 Percent by Matthew Stewart. This has been excellent.
How to do nothing by Jenny Odell. This also has been very good. I plan to read more Odell.

March

Neuromancer by William Gibson. A re-read. Still effing rips. So good.
This Night’s Foul Work by Fred Vargas. Good but a bit annoying at times.

April

Do Interesting by Russell Davies. A quick read. There were a few interesting/useful activities suggested.
The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. Fascinating. I wish there were more. More details. More coverage. More cultures. Just more.
How To Live by Sarah Bakewell. About Montaigne and his Essays. Much more interesting than I expected. But it also kind of wandered. Like any life does, I suppose.

I also read some of Montaigne’s essays.

May

Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. Kind of meh, actually. The references seem good, and contains a good collection of data.
Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. Initially was very good, but then got rather tedious and I just couldn’t make myself read more.

I also read some Syntopicon.

June

Continued with Beagle.

July

Continued with Beagle, but probably abandoning it.

Partially re-read Blindsight by Peter Watts.
The Log of the Sea of Cortez, by Steinbeck. I thought this was quite interesting and plan to read more Steinbeck.

Yes, I’ve abandoned Beagle, and wish I had been less dedicated to trying to read it. I probably could have read 3 other books in that time. Or more.

August

On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz. Not quite the book that I wish it was, but excellent as a starting point for more of this.

September

Collected Fictions, the first part “A Short History of Iniquity” by Borges.
Selected Non-Fiction, the first part “Early Writings” by Borges. Everything by Borges is good.
Kissa by Kissa by Craig Mod. All too brief, but also there were a few good observations in those essays. Not very dense. Nice pictures.

October

Nexus by Harari. I found the first half to be quite good at informing and altering perspective. The second half was… less useful.
A Natural History of Empty Lots by Brown. Very interesting. But lacking in endnotes or references, and I think it would have really benefited from that.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Holy eff. This was quite excellent scifi.

November

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. The directness of the translation is quite good, and I plan to keep it. That said, it can be quite difficult at times to separate all the hullabaloo about the analysis of this poem from the text of the poem itself. I do recommend the poem and this translation in particular, just know that a lot of what is said about it isn’t explicitly in the Homer’s words themselves.
When things fall apart by Chödrön. Very good.

December

The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, the middle part “Action”
Richard II by Shakespeare

All in all, a good year in reading.

On Looking by Horowitz, part 3

2024-09-20T07:00:00-07:00

This is the final part of my raw reading notes from the book. See also the first part, and the second part.

“On Looking, a walker’s guide to the art of observation” by Alexandra Horowitz, 2013

I am reading the Scribner paperback, 1st ed. 2014.

This is the 15th book that I’ve read this year.

Chapter 9

Ch 9 is about walking and seeing without sight, walking with a blind person.

188: During normal conversation, people look at each other about one third of the time. The listener is looking at the speaker about twice as much as the other.
200: There are brain cells that are specially attuned to our “peripersonal space,” the area within our reach, and they trigger for sight, sounds, and touches. These special cells enable us to perceive when we are being approached stealthily while distracted; we can feel another presence. If we’re paying attention to them.
201: A blind person who is well experienced with using a cane, the end of it is mapped onto the these specialized peripersonal cells. Slight bumps and touches to the cane tip are sensed in the same way.
208: One plus about the people lost in a conversation on their cell phone is that they are broadcasting their location with all that talking.

Chapter 10

Ch 10 is about attending to sound while out and about. The previous chapter was about the hyper-specialized sound sensitivities of a blind walker. This one is about the more ordinary sonic landscape that is available for us to attend to at any time.

212: The sound of an engine idling could be a soothing sound if listened to for itself. It’s steady state and rhythmic.
213: Exploiting the wave equation of $v = l \cdot f$ to convert sound frequency into a spatial dimension. A potentially useful insight to exploit for sonic explorations.
213: Naming a sound (or any other thing) changes our perspective and experience of it. One pitfall is that we may not hear the sound anymore, we hear what we expect from the name instead and then move on.
213: The “safari phenomenon” is to identify the thing that you see or hear, and then simply move on without actually attentively observing the specimen that is before you. You only learn that you were near the thing that you already knew, and nothing else. Pay attention to that thing!
215: Having a secret mission to find a particular sound (or, well, anything else) is one way to deepen your experience of paying attention to your surroundings. But kind of selectively.
217: “any sound we do not like we call noise”. I’m not entirely sure I agree with that.
219: Sounds that we are annoyed by stimulate a reaction similar to other stressful situations. E.g. final exams, lions, etc.
219: Ears make their own unique sounds. I suspect this means that they reflect the sounds that are impinging upon them in individually characteristic ways. It could be an individuals specific sonic fingerprint. Keyword: otoacoustic.
221: Speed of sound (in air) is 1100 feet per second. Or 330 meters per second.
224: Cocktail party effect: the ability to hear your name or a topic you are interested in across the room of talking people. Complementing this matched filter effect for detection is “auditory restoration.” This is when we fill in sounds (or just their information content, but we still perceive it as sounds) that we are unable to detect for all the noises. This is accomplished out of our awareness usually by paying attention to other peoples faces and mouths.¹
224: It was finally at this point that Horowitz mentions the optic nerve, it seems late for a book on looking at things.
224: I thought that “with our eyes open and daytime in front of us” [we can see] was a novel way of putting it.
225: Bats are the principle reason that the biting insects aren’t so much of a bother. Yay bats!
226: It is not understood (as of 2013) how bats don’t get their own voices confused with all the other bat voices out there, especially when there are a lot of them.²
227: Natural sounds that are more self-similar are preferred. Examples: running water, the in the trees. They sound the same at different speeds or volumes, so they are like fractals in that way.
227: Attempts have been made to create taxonomy (or typology) of city sounds. Horowitz says there aren’t words to mark all the different sounds.
228: People who spend time in the forest are able to identify each type of tree by its species characteristic sounds. I would go further and individual trees are so different that even within species each exemplar is quite possibly identifiable by sound alone.
228: The sounds of a place are not static, we may lose the sounds of cars parking as our modes of transportation change. Speculative “Catalog of Lost Sounds.” More speculative: The Catalog of Future Lost Sounds.
229: The feeling of sound; low frequencies possess your innards, high frequencies are an unidentifiable presence felt everywhere outside.
229: US Government low frequency crowd control / military technology.
230: Sound cleanup in films/foley. Only one person walking in a group is often heard. Maybe just one dominates?
232: Maybe the world becomes an illusion to some when they disconnect the sounds from the events around them by donning sound isolating headphones.
233: 7 Hz is aligned with alpha brain waves, and may cause headaches or nausea.
236: Sound waveguides. The sound travels further in a warm layer that is bounded by a cold layer.

Chapter 11

Ch 11 is about noticing smells, with a dog as the walking companion.

242: Our sight sense so dominates that we do not conceive of another way to organize the world.
244: Does ‘-somatic’ mean smell? As in macrosomatic or microsomatic?
245: Dog nose sensitivity is so good that 1 part mustard in a trillion parts hot dog is still detectable. I am imagining the experiment.
246: A noticed sound of the flagpole rope jostling or banging in the wind so clearly projected the image of a seaside cottage n New England. It’s a nice image and meta-image. Outer reality/external frame?
251: National registry of geodetic survey marks is about the history, and National Geodetic Survey has the current database.
251: “Dogs are perfectly culturally ignorant.”
253: Some good observational skill displayed about the woman with the dog.
253: Similar to the sounds of diseases, there is a set of smells too. Some good descriptions here too.
254: Are linden leaves (wikipedia) ever small? Maybe it’s spring time.
256: The mammal gate is shoulders and pelvis in opposition (the wobbling sausage), whereas for reptiles are in sync because they move the limbs on one side of their bodies together.
257: Horses are very sensitive on the sides of their bellies. It’s how they receive the telepathic signals from their rider.
258: Reporting on the dog walk, there is always something to report. Number 1, number 2, at minimum.

Chapter 12

This is the short wrap up chapter, pulling together everything she has learned in the previous 11 chapters.

260: A person must become quite nose blind to smell nothing in the city, especially one such as New York. Perhaps she just forgets what she noticed before? She said she didn’t smell anything, I have to accept it.
262: Is purple still such a rare color. Thinking about it, I think it might actually be.
264: Walking is a mental escape, a change to engage with something else.
265: We could pay attention. And we could pay attention more.

I’ll do another post later with a few of my thoughts, reactions, or comments.

This is a different “skill” than the one that Henrik is talking about in his article on perception. I mentioned it the other day. ↑
My own hypothesis, being a completely uninformed person on the internet, is something like the cocktail effect already mentioned. They know the sound of their own voice well, so they can pick it out from some background confusion. I was going to also say that maybe they can process the direct and reflected sounds of other bats to get a super image. But as I was about to write the idea it started to sound more and more impossible. ↑

On Looking by Horowitz, part 2

2024-09-14T07:00:00-07:00

This is the second part of my raw reading notes from the book. See also the first part, and the final part.

“On Looking, a walker’s guide to the art of observation” by Alexandra Horowitz, 2013

I am reading the Scribner paperback, 1st ed. 2014.

This is the 15th book that I’ve read this year.

Chapter 5

Ch 5 is about insect sign. So much of this chapter applied beyond just spotting insects and their signs. “Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking.” This feels like a gentle introduction, literally introducing the very most basic skill, for accessing more of my bioregion. On my next walk along the trail, I’ll surely be stopping at every tree and leaf, every cement block.

94: Street pigeons are vilified? By whom? I like them.
98: Insects species are paired up with plant species. Or insects have preference for only some plant species.
102: Invasive plants don’t get paired up with native insects, so they’re usually left alone, and so they grow better.
106: Look closely at slug traces, you will see the parallel lines from their teeth (radula) in those traces. What about snails?
109: We see what we look for, and don’t see what we don’t look for. Uexküll again describes an incident of looking for a pitcher of water and not finding it on his table. It was clay pitcher that he searched for, but the table had a glass one.¹
111: “Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking.” -Susan Morse
111: “A small bit of knowledge goes a long way when thinking about where to look.” I want this list of small bits of knowledge.

This last one is probably the key insight of this chapter.

Chapter 6

Ch 6 is about urban animals. Not many of the creatures made an appearance; they are usually out at night. But some clues were offered to see their evidences and preferred shelters.

120: The sizes of holes and spaces that some rodents can fit into: raccoons, 4 inches; squirrels, a quarter coin; mice, a dime. These are quite small.
122: We see what we expect to see, when we have an expectation. It is difficult to turn off this filter for the expected. We simply don’t notice what we aren’t looking for. “expectation is the lost cousin of attention.”
126: Animals that are just hanging out, in the posture of loitering, they are known to be “loafing” by the experts.
127: Thigmo- = touch. Thigmotaxic/thigmophilic = touch-no-likey/touch-likey.
135: The “urban cliff hypothesis:” that the common urban animals (rats, pigeons, mice, bats, and also plants) co-evolved with us from our cliff dwelling past to our current manufactured cliff-like urban environments.
136: People’s preferences are to have the front door set back a bit, and up a bit above ground level. This is similar to a cliff cave entrance.
136: Sound punctuates the beginnings and ends of events. Without it there is neither of these and can feel like “a little peak at infinity.”

Chapter 7

Ch 7 is about the experience of walking on urban streets. I’m very much getting the sense that this is a quite NYC centric book. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is a lot more to the world than that one particular city. And while it’s true that these 1-inch portrait introductions to these topics are nothing but templates for re-use in other settings, the more your context differs from the very dense urban US setting, the larger the denominator below the portrait becomes. I.e. a 1/8-inch portrait.

That being said, I generally quite enjoyed this chapter and collected quite a few notes.

139: “We must always say what we see, but above all and more difficult, we must always see what we see.” -Le Corbusier
140: “Time doesn’t matter.”
141: The sidewalk may be viewed as a theater, as an improvisational dance, as a kind of show.
141: Photograph vender food carts.
143: A platoon is a group of walkers that haven’t got any affiliation with each other.
144: Who runs the Transportation Research Board? It is one of the seven major branches of the National Academies.
146: The rules of flocking behavior: 1) stay close but don’t bump, 2) follow the one in front, and 3) keep up with those next to you. That’s it, those are the rules. See also boids.
147: When we do inevitably bump into each other in crowds, we keep our hands close to our own bodies, and our faces turned away. Knowing that we all do this feels like a kind of magic. Is it learned or instinct?
149: The book predates widespread smart phone use, it is written in the early middle period, and it shows. See also 150.
149: Head motion and angles telegraph where we’re going.
151: There is an urban tradition of walking wherever. Or there was until the cars came and tried to take away that tradition.
152: The term “jay driver” should keep trying to come in.
152: Lots on the act of looking at another person here. To hold in the eyes continuously can mean strong dislike or desire. But it’s also a form of communication, as between walker and driver.
152: When you look at someone directly, you influence their choices. They’ll move around you. They’ll relax when you stop looking at them, and maybe sit down then instead of before if they are looking for a seat.
153: Hans Monderman’s “naked street” proposal, a place without the safety accessories that forces (let’s say strongly encourages) the users to navigate intentionally. Drachten in The Netherlands has such an intersection.
154: Sidewalk glass pavement lights.
155: Do you even notice the sidewalk? It’s a sidewalk.
157: Breaking the flow symmetry by adding something that people have to walk around, like a pillar, can increase the flow rate of foot traffic.

Chapter 8

Ch 8 is about observing the act of walking itself, on the individual level. It is also about what we may notice of others while they are out and about walking too.

170: Over millions of steps, tiny anatomical variations wear into being an acquired deformity. A visible professional deformity? Sometimes (maybe apocrephal).
171: Example of a man that refuses to correct his posture because it’s not the posture of a humble man.
176: Laënnec invented the stethoscope and compiled a list of disease associated sounds. I want this list. There are some examples listed here. See also references on 286.

That’s it for this installment.

Is this a kind of negative visual hallucination? ↑

Plain words about the truth

2024-09-09T07:00:00-07:00

Easy to understand words that tell the truth. Emphasis on easy to understand, and emphasis on telling the truth. I guess there isn’t a lot else to emphasize in that short sentence. Dan^a isn’t the only one to mention it lately. (I’m an occasional reader of his various outputs, including his newsletter “Things That Caught My Attention”.) A similar message also appeared on Aftermath^a, derived from a quite different source.

Maybe it’s in the air. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of it than we have been lately.

Keeping it as simple to understand as possible is pretty much the advice of all the good writers out there. It is easier to connect with people if you are speaking (or writing) the truth. And furthermore, it’s easier for people to understand if you say what you want to say with easy to understand words.

Something else that Dan mentioned is the sentiment that “Nobody is happy, and everybody is making do.” It’s in that very same newsletter. I’ll be reusing that, and referring to it again. Maybe again and again. Because it’s the truth about a lot of different things these days. We can make it better, but first we have to say what it is.

On Looking by Horowitz, part 1

2024-09-06T07:00:00-07:00

This is the first part of my raw reading notes from the book. See also the second part, and the final part.

“On Looking, a walker’s guide to the art of observation” by Alexandra Horowitz, 2013

I am read the Scribner paperback, 1st ed. 2014.

This is the 15th book that I’ve read this year.

Introduction

3: déformation professionnelle, French. What you see is biased by your profession and professional experience.

Chapter 1

Ch 1 is from the child’s point of view. The point is that as we age we learn¹ what is relevant and what is not. The toddler doesn’t have this filter, so they attend to everything that they find interesting.² Everything is novel to them, so everything is interesting.

19: You can observe a lot by watching. -Yogi Berra
23: The new brains that infants have may not yet have learned to separate the sensorial experiences into separate categories. Research suggests that they are synesthesiacs, experiencing the world through crossed wires: a stuffy is mixed up with whisper, or the color green has a distinct flavor.
23: Heinz Werner called this synthesis of senses the “sensorium commune”. A primordial way of experiencing the world, pre-knowledge and pre-categorization.
26: “admire the unlovely”

Chapter 2

Ch2 is about the stones used on city buildings and the traces that they contain.

41: To find new things, take the path you took yesterday. -John Burroughs

Chapter 3

Ch3 is about lettering.

57: To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. -Paul Valéry
58: “…our world is a linguistic one, fashioned in and then described with language.” This is a theme that Horowitz regularly comments on: we notice what we are primed to. In this case the naming of things may blind us to the details, differences, and sometimes new thing that is before us.
59: Surely comment about owning hundreds of dictionaries is hyperbole. I own a preposterous number of dictionaries yet I can count them all and still have fingers left over. Is this an excuse for me to buy more?

I admit that it was around this point that I wavered a bit. Maybe this book is not for me after all. I’m glad that I didn’t give up and continued on to the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Ch 4 is about social space. Public and private spaces, and private spaces that are open to visitors. Personal space around individuals. The “fourth dimension,” or fifth if I were numbering it (but it’s the fourth chapter, so I get it). In this dimension, people become possibilities for interaction instead of the mere obstacles that they sometimes are when we confine our thinking to only three dimensions. Of the chapters so far, this one has been the most electric to me.

75: “celebrate the ordinary”
76: The visual strategy of children, if it is a strategy since they don’t have the experience to do differently, is to see the world and not know the name or function of all the things that they are looking at. This is a creatively free position to be in since magnetic attraction of prior ideas do not get in the way of considering the options. See also p57.
77: The ordinary, upon close or long inspection, may become strange, odd, unfamiliar even. Try it.
77: Jakob von Uexküll: “The best way to find out that no two human Umwelten [world-views] are the same is to have yourself led through unknown territory by someone familiar with it. Your guid unerringly follows paths that you cannot see.”
78: “walking around the block entered a fourth dimension.” I had a few funny reactions to this one. Isn’t time the fourth dimension? Or maybe it’s the zeroth, which is good because it is often unconsidered as a dimension. Just now, how many fourth dimensions are there? Maybe our numbering scheme shifts there. Etc. Still, I appreciate the additional layers to consider here, visio-spatial is not the limit of our domain.
80: walking is a fundamentally social activity.
80: Heini’s personal zones of social contact. Those we are intimate with at whisper distance; the social zone, conversation distance; and formal interactions where we might use our outdoor voices.
84: Noticing that we are gazed at by another person causes our parasympathetic nervous system to enter a heightened state of readiness, similar to being looked at by an apex predator but less so.
87: The social dimension is not hard edged, but has a smoothly variable field with “an infinitely explorable openness.”
89: An exercise in “divergent thinking:” find more and more elaborate uses for everyday things. Or unusual uses, or off label, or improbable.

Probably the key insight here is (89): “Objects and people on [the] route become possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction….”

This chapter was quite interesting to me. Filled with useful ideas and different ways of thinking about things. Permissions and suggestions.

That’s it for the first portion of the book. One thing that I was surprised to discover is that all the copies at the library are checked out, and there are several holds. This is true for both the physical copies and the ebooks. I’m not really sure why that is the case, especially since it’s not that new of a book.

Or are taught, or just copy what others ignore. By whatever mechanism we adopt the habit of selective attention. ↑
I’m struck by how this indiscriminate openness is co-opted (or coöpted? Dictionary says no.) by advertising. Here Horowitz points out force for good that it can be. ↑

Market logic takes over everything

2024-09-05T07:00:00-07:00

…it has become very difficult to think outside of market logic.

Ezra is making the point that we have been applying the idea of “let the market decide” to a lot of things that it doesn’t really fit well with. This assumes that the market has the correct tools to decide, it’s the correct venue to make a decision, and even that sometimes a winner take all decision should be made. In the conversation with Burnett, Klein is saying that market logic is an imperfect (perhaps very imperfect) framing for determining the best use(s) of our collective attention.

Reference at NYTimes.com^a.

Wool

2023-10-07T12:39:00-07:00

Finished: Wool by Hugh Howey 📚

The short version: this is a book that takes the idea of “good writing is about the characters overcoming challenges” to it’s most extreme limit. It’s all suffering and adversity, almost too much. If you can get past that, then it took 2/3 of the book to get going. Maybe it was that way so the long suffering reader gets a real feel for time, and struggle. However, the last 1/3 really moves and was a page turner. I am interested in reading the later books now.

More details below (vague spoiler warning).

I appreciated that the author did not call attention to the things that are hard to believe like submerging a neutral pressure suit under tens and tens of feet of water will just work and you also won’t get the bends during a panic resurfacing, and where are they getting tea from (this only pops up once) or is it actually hundreds of years old, and how come the people don’t develop distinct accents or dialects, and can they really make these things like semiconductors to last that long or do they have even that manufacturing capability??

Some things that people are knowledgable about seem quite a stretch too, given the other things we learn about the world. Like the have-nots just making up military tactics in confined spaces, on the fly with no training in it, that can succeed (for some definition) against a prepared enemy. I am suspicious of the closed ecosystem being able to sustain for that long. But I don’t know enough about ecology to be any more than that about it, so I’ll leave that one there. Or how come there aren’t problems with diseases in the later parts of the story; you’d think separate populations would generate different strains of viruses and when they meet it would be bad for one or both. Where is the underground/black market economy? It really stuck out as something missing from the world to me. There some scenes that described and used the kinds of connections that would enable black or gray market trade to exist, but it seemingly doesn’t play a part in this story.

There may have been a few too many dramatic coincidences to believe, some of them defying even the most generous probabilities.

Even with these cracks and inconsistencies though, if you don’t notice or think about it, then the story is fine. But the veneer over the true science fiction and obvious dramatic or poetic license is only paper thin. Maybe I do prefer hard sf and a little more effort on the part of the writer to make it believable in a somewhat-ordinary-or-at-least-plausible-turn-of-events-for-the-universe-that-they’ve-constructed sense. In the end, I think this story was more of a cartoon depiction than a live action staging.

All that being said, I’m curious how the author arranged all this to exist, which I think is in the first sequel.

Maybe later I will elaborate on the more constructive thought provoking ideas that I had while reading the book. Things like, this is a mirror of our current times (most writing usually is), intra- and inter- nation-state-wise, and how would I arrange a society to function in such isolation, and this is really just a different setting for the same problems and ideas of one of those generation ship scifi stories, isn’t it? I had a lot of “how could this be different” thoughts to many plot points and story choices as I read, I should keep notes on those for the next book I read.

Thinking as Craft

2023-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

Another book I read recently was “How to think like Shakespeare” by Scott Newstok. It’s a book mostly aimed at educators, I think. About halfway through I almost quit, but the short chapters kept drawing me back in. I ended up reading all of it.

The main idea that I took from the book was that thinking can be modeled as a trade craft, that thoughts are a materiel that must be worked. A craftsperson develops learned skills for working their material, and they develop their own methods. Some of those skills can be learned from books or other people, teachers and other craftspeople. But a lot needs to be learned and fit together in their own mind and abilities (either thinking as craft or some material craft).

I’ve found thinking as a craft to be really a very useful analogy¹ for fitting together many of the necessary skills. And for noticing that if thoughts are the material we craft with, we can separate the actions we do with thoughts (which are still other thoughts) from the resulting thoughts and thinking. It all gets very meta, abstracted, and confusing without the helping structure of the analogy.

Hopefully more on analogies later. Briefly though: analogies are useful because they give you something concrete to hang your idea on, to push against, to test for the limits of the analogy and thereby maybe uncover new insights. ↑

Human Social Distances

2023-08-13T00:00:00-07:00

I read the Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. It’s billed as a revisit of ancient ideas with modern sciences. Kind of a check of selection of wisdoms common to several major world religions.

One aspect that really struck me was how much of it was useful information for understanding the social world around you. I guess that makes sense; your ability to manage your own happiness is dependent on making sense of the environment you are in. There were a number of those type of ideas, but today I’ll just focus on this one, from Chapter 9.

There are two fairly obvious axes of social distance: I’ll call one tribal closeness and the other class/status hierarchy. I think of tribal closeness as being about the people you know and are comfortable being unguarded with. Ordered by increasing distance you have your immediate family, your close friends, maybe work colleagues, then neighbors and acquaintances, people with the same accent or speech patterns, the folks you share national identity with, and then the others are most distant on this axis. On the other axis, for a middle class person, below them is the poor and we can debate if it should or shouldn’t be the case but often race plays a part. On the same level are people of similar wealth and neighborhoods, or professions. Above are the wealthy, and political leaders, the pinnacle of those receiving class respect are presidents, kinds, high religious figures and officials, etc. It plays out in different ways too, age or family seniority. There are many ways.

There is a third axis, one that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States because of how secular the country is. It’s the divinity axis, sort of how holy or spiritual or maybe even selfless or altruistic a person or act is. This is another axis of social respect.

That’s it. Does it sound right to you? What’s missing here, is there are 4th or 5th dimension of social distance needed or do these 3 cover it?

I think that attractiveness and brute strength probably both get reconciled into the class/status hierarchy.

First notes from 300 Arguments

2023-06-23T00:00:00-07:00

Part 1 of my notes from this interesting little book. The book is not organized into chapters, so my notes won’t have any natural break points.

Notes

I was unaware of my assumption that we would always have more time. It’s so easy to slip into that assumption. Inspired by page [4].

Notice. Practice noticing who you truly are and be that person. [5]

At some level our instantaneous language skills are always inadequate to what we feel. [8]

What might be the consequence of this? This = having a worst regret mean you believe there was an origin, a decision you made, that lead to all your undeserved misfortune (folly). This ?= trying to write perfectly (don’t do that!). Hold that question while writing stories. [12]

Other people, stupid ones, may decide what’s best for you about your grief. Your friends will give you options. [14]

This “fragment” claim, I don’t necessarily agree. The claim being that a fragment was once whole and now isn’t. Fragments can be unfinished too. [27]

When learning about each other, how much of that is automatic vs what we think is intentional? [29]

4kw Afterward and Appendix

2023-06-22T00:00:00-07:00

These parts are a condensed and reapproached take on the whole thing.

The post is just some raw notes and thoughts from my reading of Four Thousand Weeks.

Afterward Notes

You can’t change everything. But you can change some things. Don’t discount that.

Hope is not a plan, nor is it an action. Don’t hope. Plan and do. Think, plan, do/act.

The apocalypse is here.

Stop hoping. Start living. Stop caring. Start doing.

Appendix Notes

Fixed volume productivity. Be real about it.

Open to do list: a brain dump for all tasks, limitless.

Closed to do list: ten items at most, can’t add until something is removed.

One project at a time. Or one work project and one home project? It sounds very liberating.

Finish first (or quit) before starting another.

Nominate areas of your life where you won’t excel. Strategic failing. Cyclic failure. Focus on something that really matters, then switch to something that had to be neglected.

Keep a done list.

Cancel the morning productivity debt.

“You must focus your finite capacity to care.”

Set your phone to grayscale to make it less eye candy attractive.

Keep only mono-taskers out of the kitchen. It means that devices (tools) should only do one thing, so that don’t have the ability to distract you. Except in the kitchen.

Novelty slows the perceived passage of time. Find what’s new in a thing or activity. There are many strategies for this.

Research with curiosity, not with an outcome orientation. It opens you up to the novel. It’s an attitude of finding out e.g. who a person is. Your curiosity can be satisfied in ways you like or dislike. It doesn’t matter which, because now you know.

The generous impulse can be many things. Check in on a friend, send praise, donate money, etc. Do it right away.

Sometimes not acting is the right thing to do. Can you bear it?

4kw Chapter 14

2023-06-21T00:00:00-07:00

This chapter is about Now.

The post is just some raw notes and thoughts from my reading of Four Thousand Weeks.

Notes

Surrender/vulnerable.

It’s not really four thousand weeks. It’s just now. That’s what we get. Four thousand weeks of Now.

Bobin: “life only ever gives a series of wonderfully insoluble problems.”

Hollis: does this choice diminish or enlarge me?

There is no point in waiting for someone else to validate your life. No one else will. No one else can. Only you can do it. Even then, security will not be a solved problem.

Piver: “how would you enjoy spending your time?” I don’t always/often know. Worth trying to find out, I think. Don’t avoid the question.

Confirmed: everyone is winging it.

What if I didn’t expect to see the fruits of my labors? What labors would I choose then? What leisures?

Jung: do the next most necessary thing.

AA: Do the next right thing. For navigating crises.

Me: finish the current thing. Or abandon it. Focus on one thing.

4kw Chapter 13

2023-06-20T00:00:00-07:00

What control we really have is what this chapter is about.

The post is just some raw notes and thoughts from my reading of Four Thousand Weeks.

Notes

Ecclesiastes: striving after wind. You can’t do this. Or, it’s meaningless to do this.

Be an agent of deciding what post-pandemic normal looks like.

Only 35 Betty Whites ago: the Pharaohs. Knowledge could be handed down word of mouth, only 35 steps in the telephone game. I’m sure has been, but what? Or what not?

The massive indifference of the universe vs my need (preference) for a secure future.

I thought ‘nothing matters’ was Nihilism. Without the book in hand, I’m not sure what this is referring to, again.

How to accurately value what you spend your time on is probably not even the right question.

Surrender control of expecting neither too much nor too little of the weeks you are given. Take them as they come, one at a time, and just live them to the relaxed best of your ability.

4kw Chapter 12

2023-06-19T00:00:00-07:00

Sharing time is what this chapter is about.

The post is just some raw notes and thoughts from my reading of Four Thousand Weeks.

Notes

Time is a network good. That’s not all it is, but that’s one way to think about it.

Some (all?) activities have a price of admission.

The Soviets had a 5 day week at one point. Four days on, one day off. Sounds like hell.

Time’s value increases when yours is in sync with someone else’s. That’s the network good thing.

Noticing a parallel: free will vs conformity; free time vs coordination.

Work creeps into all the crevices of life, like sand.

4kw Chapter 10/11

2023-06-18T00:00:00-07:00

Taking the time is what these chapters are about.

The post is just some raw notes and thoughts from my reading of Four Thousand Weeks.

Notes for 10

Things take the time that they take. Just admit it.

Patience is my super power. How do I also trust in that in my work?

Notes for 11

Admit that you don’t know and slowly examine the situation with care.

Having problems is a good thing. At the minimum, it is something to do.

The experience of patience is “tangible, almost edible.” -Grudin

Do smaller, more sustainable amounts, as little 10 minutes, and always with weekends off. Less is done in the short term, but way more in the long run. Because you don’t stop.¹

Don’t hasten. Relish instead. Attend to one thing at a time.

Keep going. You’ll get to your own originality eventually. Stay on the bus.

Look at me, not stopping on the weekend. ↑

4kw Chapter 9

2023-06-17T00:00:00-07:00

The chapter is about how to spend this moment.

The post is just some raw notes and thoughts from my reading of Four Thousand Weeks.

Notes

In ancient Rome/Greece, work was fundamentally undignified and not the point of being alive. Leisure was life’s center of gravity. I wonder how much of that is more about the authors and audience at the time? Maybe that’s too cynical.

Sequence of social control: church, print, radio, tv, interactive internet?

Clock time driven work of the industrial revolution put work before leisure.

Remember to be lazy, you need it.

The absurdity that is the doctrine of predestination.¹ How insidiously am I infected?

A day of rest (sabbath) is a formal way of conceding that we’re on the receiving end of this existence.

Stepping back, aren’t all activities atelic? Atelic = hobby.

Hobbyist as subversive, even (especially) those pathetic hobbies.

Having no hope of doing some activity well is an excellent reason to stop optimizing how well you use your time.

Reminder to put cross link from here to How to Think bit about animal automata. ↑

4kw Chapter 8

2023-06-16T00:00:00-07:00

In this chapter, the focus is on being in the moment.

More (mostly) raw notes and thoughts from my reading of Four Thousand Weeks.

Notes

Don’t say to yourself “when I finally accomplish X” all the time. Maybe even minimize the amount that you say that.

“Causal catastrophe.”¹ Well, no. Reaping the benefit of the present also means experiencing it undistracted.

So many things that we are doing for the very last time. But it’s also wrong to spend much time in the present moment focused on that aspect. Notice that it may be true as a reminder to pay attention and then do that: attend to this moment.

Don’t be absurdly oblivious to the fact that this moment is the only one we’ll get.

Capitalism instrumentalizes everything in encounters. It always asks the question “what value can be gained from this?”

How much do I struggle with the billable hour concept? I walk slow-ish, but dislike waiting in the line for lunch. Maybe if I stopped to notice more while in line it wouldn’t be so bad. This is what I do when there is no alternative to waiting, e.g. at the airport or the DMV.²

There isn’t some future, free from worry, to get to. That time is now.

Another thing that I don’t struggle with: you cannot force savoring the moment. You just relax into it, while being open to (by not anticipating) what happens. Relinquish (surrender?) control of that moment and let it work the magic. Where else does that skill apply?

You are already inescapably in the moment. (Maybe you just forget sometimes.)

I wish I still had the book. My note here doesn’t include enough context, so I don’t remember how causal catastrophe might have inspired the reaction. ↑
Or try to use that time for thinking/contemplation as I do while walking. Somehow the walking seems to help though. It could be also that there are obvious alternatives; I could choose to wait, it’s not only the food at the end of the line that is the reward. ↑

4kw Chapter 7

2023-06-13T00:00:00-07:00

This chapter is all about the reasons we don’t focus on the present, and why those reasons are wrong.

These are (mostly) raw notes and thoughts from my reading of Four Thousand Weeks.

You might be wondering, where is chapter 6? I guess I didn’t take any notes. I’ve returned the book to the library, so I can’t check to make sure I actually read it and just didn’t find anything noteworthy. I suppose it’s possible that I didn’t have my notebook with me while I read it, so those potential notes are lost. Such is life.

Notes

Hofstadter’s law (the planning fallacy that projects always take longer than we think) is a kind of cousin to the tendency of physical objects to not do what we expect. Straps catch on things, cups aren’t where you expect and get knocked over, forks resist going into the dishwasher’s utensil receptacle. It may be a degree or two removed. I think all these fall under the Murphy family tree. It’s a case of us assuming we have it more in hand than we really do, for various reasons of a lack of understanding. The future isn’t knowable, so planning starts off at a disadvantage. But assuming you know where something is well enough that you can dodge around it when you aren’t looking, that’s another kind of information deficit. Let’s call it the problems of missing information.

Beware of over investment in actually accomplishing your goals, or when they’ll be done. Have a looser hand on the plan tiller.

It reminds me of the ‘long defeat’ mentioned by Tolkien. Is that a pessimistic view?

Review the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:34). Why worry about the future (or the past) when there is enough to worry about in the present?

Don’t mind what happens → love your fate.

Goldstein said “a plan is just a thought.” And that’s a good reason to not anchor too much on it. What if I extend it a bit to something like “a plan is just a though, rational as any other.” Or instead of rational, what about “sane”, or even just “same”.

A plan is a statement of intent. I suppose sometimes it’s a commitment, and other times it’s more aspirational.

4kw Chapter 5

2023-06-12T00:00:00-07:00

The theme this chapter is on our experience of attention.

More unsorted, undeveloped, and raw notes and thoughts from Four Thousand Weeks.

Notes

Attention is the experience of being alive - you pay for attention with the minutes of your life.

Variable reward is used to keep us pulling down for refresh. For checking our phones, inboxes, feeds, etc. I hate being manipulated. It takes a will, but batched delivery is much better for our brains.

The industry of the attention economy distorts our model of reality by bringing to our attention the things that we find most compelling. Our model of reality is just that, a model, and it’s all we have for interacting with reality. It’s assembled out of the things that we have attended to with our minds.

Non-engineered reality struggles to compete with the engineered meta-reality that the attention economy folks present to us. Actually, real reality is much richer, more subtle, so interactive and present, full of surprises. But you have to show up for it.

Focusing on this moment, no matter how unpleasant, can make it completely engrossing.

Boredom is the pressure of our finitude. Finitude is another word for our mortal limitation. I’ll have to pay more attention, but this is not what my recollection of boredom is. I’m not even sure that I feel bored anymore; those times are an opportunity to notice what I notice.

Distraction just needs to make you feel unconstrained (contrasted with finite); it doesn’t need to be fun.

Finitude is also another way of saying “this is it.”

4kw Chapter 4

2023-06-09T00:00:00-07:00

Continuing to collect all my random jottings and notes from Four Thousand Weeks here.

Notes

How to decide what NOT to do, but wisely?

Try a three task limit. It’s a hard upper limit on works-in-progress. I typically do a short list, a handful, three, five, maybe seven. I can usually tell when it’s too long, but also have refused to admit I need to do a tradeoff and drop something (for now), but struggle to actually do that last step.

These should be bite sized chucks so they don’t occupy a slot for months. Wait, these slots persist for more than a day? I typically organize it on a daily basis, but maybe I should rethink that.

This is hard, but you have to say NO to things that you want to do. Which ones?

Finitude Acknowledgement Distress = FAD.

Avoiding making something (a task? a project?) concrete and limited, just we ourselves are, is an appeal to the vague mystery. The not understood is always interesting. I think I am mixing up a few thoughts here, but the one quote I do recall is attributed to Tacitus via Doyle through Stoker: Everything unknown seems magnificent. The ill-defined is also safe because we can make it in our minds to be anything.

4kw Chapter 3

2023-06-06T00:00:00-07:00

Continuing this series of my notes and thoughts about the book. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive summary of the material of the book. Honestly, in looking over all the notes that I’ve collected, each one of these paragraphs could be expanded into a full blog post of my own extended thoughts and questions and reflections about just that one idea.

Notes

Heidigger book “Being and Time” sounds like it could be interesting. I am, however, pretty allergic to the fact that he was an actual Nazi. WTF am I supposed to do with that?

“To be…” is for humans an unfinished, or unresolved, sentence. e.g. Hamlet.

To be temporarily. The temporary-ness is inseparable from the being-ness.

“I can’t entirely depend on a single moment of the future.”

Whatever I am doing today is only one of a handful of times that I will get to do it. And of these, this time is unique too. Does it make everything just too precious?

Being, in an absolute temporary way, really grants you the opportunity to focus on living. If you can keep that in mind. Being and temporary are contrasting opposites?

On the left is zero being, never having been born at all. On the right is existence (effectively/practically) of all time- the permanent atoms bearing witness to eternity.

When annoyed by some inconvenience, remind yourself of the alternative that is not experiencing anything at all.

Ask yourself “which activity do I want to [spend] this moment on?” This moment, and this activity, is an opportunity. Even if it’s something that you may have considered an annoyance. I do not like the word choice of “spend” here.

Consider also JOMO = joy of missing out.

Deliberate selection of activity gives it meaning. Remember that you can say “I choose this.” I don’t think that means you always get to choose that activity of every moment. But you can choose how your mind approaches it.

Notes from Four Thousand Weeks

2023-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

Just some quick notes about different ideas that struck me as I was reading the first couple of chapters. I might develop them more later. Or just leave them here.

They’re not verbatim quotes; I have rewritten them in my own words.

Chapter 1

(A farmer’s work is) work is infinite. There are theories of idea generation (be it art, science, engineering, invention, anything) that map to hunting, farming, foraging, gardening, etc. Even pirates.

Comparing the value of some future benefit earned by this moment against the value in just living this moment, the future value often wins. Maybe the future value idea shouldn’t win so often. It really shouldn’t.

Fear is just part of the deal and it will not destroy you.

Reality is a painful constraint and time is only one aspect of it.

Facing the way that things truly are (as best as you can tell) is pretty effective, and it should be self correcting. The best guess at the way things truly are is bound to be wrong, either some of the time, or by a little, or even by a lot. With more information, the way things “truly” are will update and be closer to the truth.

Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.”

Eigenzeit = the time inherent in the thing (process) itself. It takes as long as it takes, no need to rush it.

Chapter 2

The painful truth of our limitations: which people to disappoint. You can decide, or ignore it and default into some choice.

One option is to more efficiently use your time. Or even choose to use more of it, like that tired time at the end of the day. That over withdrawal, it comes due though, you go into deficit that way. Another option is to experiment with the other side of the equation, what if you free up more time by choosing to do fewer things and regale in that down time. Charge up and background process.

Be less invested in the getting to that finish line, any finish line. This is taking that idea of future value all the way to zero. The only value you get out of that project is what comes in the current moment. It doesn’t matter if it ever finishes. Not always the right choice, but maybe it’s a good baseline, so you at least capture the current moment’s value.

Parkinson’s law: what qualifies as “needs doing” expands to fill the available time.

Sisyphus was a king. TIL.

The surface area of all your interests and projects and ideas is vast. The potential surface area of that surface is multiplicatively vaster again. Of course you can think of so much more than can actually be done. Just appreciate that for a moment.

“Existential overwhelm” = the modern world’s never ending supply of things that might be worth doing.

Reminds me of RINORIN = read it now or read it never. Seen here, yesterday.

The fact that we don’t default to believing in an afterlife, plus our modern belief that the future is ever improving (not static, or cyclic, as historically thought), added to the awareness of our finite life, leaves us feeling the pressure to experience it all or as much as is possible. FOMO to the infinite.

Do not become a limitless reservoir for other’s expectations. Learning to say no.

The anti-skill is not getting it all done, and being ok with that.

Since you actually cannot do it all, be present for the things you do get to experience. And, choose those things better.

Friction is just one of those things. It can forge bonds of connection with place, give humanity. Some things are worth those costs, so don’t just toss them out for more convenient ways of achieving the same ends. Invest that cost in the things that are worth it. Or at least be intentional about choosing to.

The relentless improvements of these conveniences, which remove that friction, also sometimes remove the humanity. This leads to “tech-induced loneliness”. The innovation ladders maybe also just shifts around the friction or inconveniences, it’s never ending. I don’t think abandoning the improvements is always the right choice. I’m not advocating for being a Luddite here.

It isn’t the thought that counts, it’s the inconvenience you went to for the gift. It was worth it to endure that so you could give the small happiness to your friend or relative. Solving the inconvenience makes the give empty for the both of you.

Reading Two Tolkiens

2023-03-31T14:43:00-07:00

Currently reading: The Return of the Shadow by Christopher Tolkien 📚

and

Currently reading: The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚

I read the first chapater of FR, and then the same in RS (first phase, anyway), and it was totally unsettling. Like reading the twilight zone version of some history you know really well. What a trip. I’m going to do the reverse order for chapter 2 and see if that is less unnerving.

It’s been quite a while since I read LotR (I pronounce it loter), over 20 years, I think. I have seen the extended version of Jackson’s films quite a few times over those years, and the memory of the films has really modified what I thought was in the text. So this is kind of like re-reading with fresh eyes. I’m pretty excited!

The RS / history of the text, after the alternate history take is absorbed, is also super-duper fascinating. Like a mystery novel in construction. I’m enjoying what I’ve read so far.

Nerd alert 🚨

😁

Blindsight

2023-03-23T22:23:00-07:00

Finished reading, with satisfaction: Blindsight by Peter Watts 📚

Well that was rather excellent. I will read the sidequel book too at some point. Some quick notes:

not always the most graceful writing, particularly in the beginning
it’s hard scifi, so expect jargon and nonchalant use of unexplained technicalese. Keep a dictionary handy, wikipedia will tell you which sections to expect.
there are nontrivial elements of horror, in several flavors. Reminded me of House of Leaves in that way.

Thought provoking work, I’ll consider other Watts books going forward. Taking recommendations, as always!

The Fifth Season

2023-02-04T15:01:00-08:00

Finished reading, with satisfaction: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin 📚

Good story, it really moves. Not sure exactly the genre. Probably not science fiction. Maybe fantasy? Elements of young adult, but also romance (I think, very adult topics anyway). I very much appreciate the natural, non-judgy, and often kind but not holding back, point of view. Casual writing style works better for me than I expected. Some of the best interpersonal arguments/fights with about the right emotional sting that I’ve read. Bravo! Can’t wait to read the next one.

Some other things I liked:

geology! And rocks
a building’s structure plays a critical role for a plot point
Fun made up words that are suggestive of their origin. I am not a linguist but I still enjoy it

A Brief History of Equality

2022-07-06T18:01:00-07:00

Finished reading, with satisfaction: A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty 📚

5 out of 5 stars for this one: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I found this book to be very informative and overall a good read. I’m looking for more context in this area. In particular:

Why did progressive taxation and the welfare state become the chosen option beginning around 1915? What events lead to that conclusion? I don’t find “because World War 1” to be sufficient. It must have been a long road leading up to that.
How did the free movement of capital around 1980 come about? Also, there are consequences of this globalization, and I want to have a firmer grasp on the connection between this cause and effect. It really seems to be a defining frame for so many issues in the world; is that true?
And at the same time, circa 1980, the decline of progressive taxation. Was is the same fundamental forces? And no wonder our infrastructure is poorly maintained and failing: we built it all in an entirely different budgetary situation. (Edit: added this one)
Generally more of a connection between the historical context and the basically economic story that Piketty tells here. I would really like to compare the events that are emphasized by different authors in the same time periods.
Exploring the conceptions of private property as a concept for common good. I assume that this is a regular socialist topic, but I haven’t read much of that.
Finding an accurate description of the global economic system, meaning capitalist, socialist, and the hybridization.

There are some few details in the text about these events and ideas, but I want to understand more concretely. If you’ve got good book recommendations, I’m interested. I have a few books in house already that I can credibly start to expore some of this stuff.

Bullet Journalling?

2022-06-16T18:07:00-07:00

Just doing a quick tour through this. I kinda feel like my notes aren’t gelling, and I’ve started collecting kind of a lot of them. A friend said this was working for him, so I’ll take a look. Not planning to read every page though. I’ll set a reminder to post an update in a couple of months.

Currently reading: The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder Carroll 📚

Public library for the win, it’s even a physical copy!

On setting aside The Discourses of Epictetus

2022-06-15T22:01:00-07:00

I’ve had to move Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Oxford Worlds Classics) by Epictetus 📚 to my Reading, but like not right now shelf. I have completed Book 1, and will shortly finish Book 2. Books 3 and 4, the Fragments, and the Handbook will have to wait until some other time. I’ll probably start with the Handbook when I do pick it back up. I have some more thoughts…

I may do a more well thought out review later, when I finish the rest of it. But here is my hot-ish take right now:

Is it me or is he brining up death, exile, and suicide-as-a-legitimate-option kind of a lot? Maybe times were a lot different back then and these were common concerns. Or maybe these things loomed large in the minds of his target audience: the wealthy men that could afford to hire philosophy teachers.
He has his moments when he’ll say directly what he means. But a lot of the time he is pretty round about with getting to the point, or saying clearly what he is trying to tell his students. It can be rather indirect. Is it a mysterious affectation? A conversational style to engage the listener? He was speaking these words, after all. Something else, like giving the audience what they want to hear, what they’re expecting a philosopher to sound like?
Come to think of it, I get the sense that he doesn’t think too highly of a lot of the students or interlocutors he’s addressing. Even if they are just hypothetical people he sets up to knock down, it seems like not the most trusting of teaching styles. It also seems like his students maybe had a habit of coming all haughtily arrogant and he’s got to take them down a peg. I find it off putting and boring. Tiresome. The teacher is not taking the students seriously.
At several points he makes rather unserious arguments. That a god or gods exists isn’t even said as an axiom, it’s just so obvious that anyone who says differently is a fool. This, Epictetus, is not an argument. Instead of treating the competing philosophical schools seriously, they are usually rather casually characatured, or straw man/person’d and considered dealt with. Frankly, I can hear the guy yelling about it through the ages and pages even today.
Not a very inclusive group either. It was the times, sure. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t color the rest of the work. How are you going to just paint over those pieces and not see/wonder how they have distorted the rest?

All that said, there have been a few passages that seem quite useful. There were some interesting points made that are worth pondering. But there was a lot of wading through sections that wavered on the edge of just not worth reading, with the occassional bit of useful life observation hidden in there that makes you not give up. Even if the life observed was almost 2000 years ago, some things are still familiar.

↝ morrow

Journeys and Stories and Secret Destinations

2022-06-09T20:22:00-07:00

< blockquote pre=”Martin Buber” >All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.< /blockquote >

There were many charming and interesting things mentioned in The Grail by Brian Doyle 📚, more than I expected for such a local interest book.

I like the framing of this as “secret destinations” even though I don’t think those destinations are pre-decided and don’t need to be. You find them in you, in the place, and in the moment, alone or with those around you. The destinations can even remain secret to you alone.

They’re kind of like a very condensed version of the way that Doyle describes stories:

< blockquote pre=”Brian Doyle” cite=”The Grail, p. 148” >…this is what happens to people and stories, you sense them and collect them and tell them and savor them and then you and the stories move along down the road, sometimes together and sometimes not.< /blockquote >

Those secret destinations in every journey are our own personal poetry, resonant in our hearts and minds. Even on the longest journey.

< blockquote pre=”Dag Hammarskjold” >The longest journey is the journey inward.< /blockquote >

Dracula Daily May 9-18

2022-05-18T22:02:00-07:00

< summary >Spoiler Warning.< /summary >

Here’s a recap of the last few days.

We met Mina and her friend Lucy. Based on literary reasoning, I assume that Lucy’s fiancee Holmwood, and one Dr. Seward, will feature in the story’s future.

Unfortunately for Harker, he went exploring further into the castle during the Count’s absence, and willfully fell asleep. While on the cusp of sleep three Ladies approach, but are stopped by the Count who says Harker is his alone. The Count returns Harker to his rooms. Later, when he checks the door where it happened, it’s shut tight.

‘til next time!

Dracula Daily 3-8 May

2022-05-08T14:31:00-07:00

< summary >The events of the book so far are summarized and discussed. Spoiler Warning.< /summary >

The events so far (from memory, going forward I will keep my own running summary notes):< marginnote >For other posts in the series, see here.< /marginnote >

We meet Harker on his first night in the Carpathian mountains of Romania. It is the eve of the final leg of his jouney.
Harker departs the hotel with a quite singular scene of the hotelier and townfolk trying to pusuade him from finishing the journey. I have never seen, heard, witnessed, experienced, nor participated in such an event in all of my travels or life.
The transfer from the coach to the carriage is quite strange, and the ride to the castle is also beyond experience, and harrowing. I find it troubling that Harker is so matter of fact about what he witnessed. Perhaps he is questioning what he truly saw, or perhaps at this time over a century ago there was more credibility about this type of thing.
Harker meets the Count. They talk to the morning.
They discuss the Count’s new London property. Evidently the Count is planning to move.
Harker determines that the Count is without servants.
Harker understands that he is captive.

There we have it, things have gone quite badly for Harker it would seem. A few things are worth it to me to note about this reading.

First, the immediacy and intimacy of the writing is quite successful. The food, the experience of travel, the scenery. The layer of reading it on the same day as it was written helps to build the connection with the character. I noticed that upon entering the castle, discussion of the particulars of the food stop being listed. It makes sense to drop that sort of trivia given other factors.

Second, Harker seems oddly lucid and accepting about these experiences that he is having. Even upon noticing that he is imprisoned, he doesn’t list his options for escape. Maybe Stoker thinks readers will accept that all the avenues are in fact closed. Maybe readers in that day did. I am not satisfied with the short discussion of cliffs and locked doors.

Third, I am quite satisfied with my own interest and engagement level. Of course having never been interested in horror as a genre, or in Dracula in particular, I was quite surprised at my own interest level. Glad to see it hasn’t waned yet. It’s quite possible that the novelty of real time reading is keeping my engangement level up.

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching by U. Le Guin

2022-05-06T22:54:00-07:00

Finished reading, with satisfaction: Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚

But like, I’m going to have read it ten more times at least. There is an extra dollop of mystery in this poetry, and calling it that seems to be understating it. I’m not even sure what to say right now, so much good stuff here.

For future ease of reference, I leave here one of Le Guin’s sources: Carus’s word-for-word translation of the text from 1898.

< newthought >I read this book< /newthought > as a physical book, and a very nice copy too! Good thing because I’ll be back!

A few quick thoughts after having just finished The Grail by B. Doyle

2022-05-05T09:59:00-07:00

Finished reading yesterday, with satisfaction: The Grail: A year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world by Brian Doyle 📚

It is, as Brian Doyle says, “a thirsty book.” In just one sentence: a great many enjoyable personal essays on the growing and making of the Lange Estate wines. And really it did make me want to head out and pick up one or several bottles of pinot noir from all around, Oregon or elsewhere, because that is a wine that I do enjoy, among others.

I made many underlinings, and asteriskings, and otherwise notings and dogearings while reading this one, which is my new habit. I am going to let those marginalia age for a month and then come back and I might have more to share about this book. And after I talk it over with my dad who recommended it because he knows many of the people in the book and worked in the Oregon wine industry for almost 30 years, I suspect I’ll have a few more things to say then too.

Oh, and a very unexpected cross connection: this is “a thirsty book”, and so was the chicken< marginnote >”paprika hendl”< /marginnote >”very good but thirsty,” that Jonathan Harker eats for supper on the 3rd of May in Bistritz, Romania in the very opening of Dracula that I just started reading yesterday.

< newthought >I read this book< /newthought > in the form of a physical trade paperback that was printed very very well, however if I had one thing to mention it would be that the typesetting was left aligned instead of justified, but I think that may have been a design choice to support the author’s rather conversational, and often long, sentences. Good bright white paper and clear text throughout. A joy to read.

PS: my writing style may, just a bit, have been affected by the writing style of the author of this short book.

Too much to know by A. Blair

2022-05-04T16:55:00-07:00

< summary >In which I report a couple of very interesting things I found in the book, and why I ultimately abandoned reading it.< /summary >

< newthought >The other book that I recently abandoned reading:< /newthought > Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair 📚.

There is a ton of fascinating history in managing and accessing all the information in books. A lot of the tools and technology you and I use today are much older than you might think! Tables of contents probably started out as the outer layer of a scroll.

Also, lots of fun random trivia. And not at all presented as fun random trivia. This is a serious scholarly book after all. Example: incipit: “the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label.” I didn’t know that word or definition. I didn’t even know that was a thing. I might be able to use that. Cool!

Or the crazy random rabbit holes you can get to on the internet now. I learned about the Bibliotheca of Photius, which is Photius’s< sidenote “Who is Photius” >Photius of Constantinople, 810-893.< /sidenote > list of all the books he read, and his reviews< sidenote “Inventor of book reviews?” >Maybe he even invented the book review, or at least the written form.< /sidenote > of them. Like this gem about Socrates of Constantinople: “There is nothing remarkable in the author’s style, and he is not very accurate in matters of doctrine.” Ouch. You can check out the rest of Photius’s big list of books with commentary here! Never would have found something like this in a million years.

< newthought >But, what am I going to do with it?< /newthought > Right now I haven’t got many plans that this would fit in. Maybe one story idea could use it for texture, so I’m glad I found it. Reminds me a bit of The Ninth Gate (book or movie, take your pick). But there was a lot of reading to find these two and the few others too.

So, I’m a bit more bummed about quitting this one than the other one. It was interesting, often fascinating. But, in the end there was too much to read here to get the useful bits out that I wanted to use for my own practical gain. I’ll probably graze occassionally, maybe I’ll pull out more random gems.

< newthought >I read this as an Apple Book< /newthought >, and my comment is the same as last time: I’ve seen the end notes done in a more useful way in other books. But I was able to get to the good stuff, so they are at least workable. Really appreciated that about it.

cc @chrisaldrich

It Begins

2022-05-03T13:01:00-07:00

Oh oh, oh! Dracula Daily began today! I don’t know why I am so excited about this! Maybe it’s the travelogue nature of the beginning, or the comparison of weathers< sidenote “About Weather” >I mean, the experience of comparing and contrasting my weather against the atmosphere of the book, which I assume will follow some seasonal trend and be called out. Just a guess on my part.< /sidenote >I’ll be having over the next 6 months (weather: I’m a fan). I plan to do some realtime commenting on the reading too.

Started reading: Dracula (Norton Critical Editions) by Bram Stoker 📚. Nicely formatted ebook from Standard EBooks if you’re into that.

The things I noted in the first day’s reading: the food (I see cooking opporutnities here), the locations, the corporeal inhabitedness,< sidenote “About Immediacy” >Harker mentions how he slept, and talks about food, and not wanting to miss the train. It seems all very personal/experiential, and immediate.< /sidenote > and the sense of mystery and even a bit of calamity. The world is being set before me, and I don’t know which of the possibilities is a probability. It was only a couple of pages worth. The annotations in the Norton Critical Edition help and also distract a bit.

Anybody want to start a reading club?

Lena

2022-05-02T16:57:00-07:00

Lena @ Things of Interest is a short-ish piece of sci-fic posing as something like a Wikipedia article. It’s about the first successful brain image create in the year 2031. I’d say the piece is a success because my reaction was “oh god, the horror.” And this is not a piece of horror sci-fi.

Have you read Lena? What did you think?

The Extended Mind

2022-04-30T16:59:00-07:00

Abandoned reading: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul 📚. I was reading this book on my iPad with Apple Books.

I approached it with the mindset that these ideas are options for me to consider in my own mind practice, and there were a number of interesting ideas. But yesterday I had to admit to myself that it is time to abandon my comittment to reading this book. I have to do the same with another book it was partnered with, but I’ll get to that another day. I think I read about 30-40% of the book before my calculations told me a sustained effort would require more energy than I had to give it at this time. I will keep it around for the option to browse different sections look for useful tidbits.

I found the idea of the Magpie Mind to be a useful one for understanding how I assemble bigger ideas from whatever is around. Want better ideas? Have better stuff around. Also remember to pause and examine the ideas you have constructed.

I also found the ideas discussed around the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock to be really helpful for inspecting and understanding some things about my own computer art practice that had been quite mysterious to me. My random search for what works and what doesn’t work for me will probably be much more effective with this clue.

There are many other ideas that were also useful and that I will continue to personally explore. You can get a pretty good sense of the type of ideas from Ezra Klein’s podcast with the author.

But some sections were less obviously plausible. I did not see the connection to thinking in groups in the tale about the aircraft carrier and the sailboat. If one of you did find a connection there, I would listen. There was also quite a bit of text related to the ideas presented that I didn’t feel added all that much; some stories about trainings and their audiences that I didn’t think clarified what I was to do with the idea at all. Maybe it’s just me.

Now, some comments about the (virtual) book itself as an object. This is a thing that I care about and might explore at a later time. One thing that I greatly appreciated the author and publisher for including is rich end notes. I was able to use these to track down more technical materials on some of the concepts that had been diluted beyond recovery in the book. Those breadcrumbs are invaluable. However, I’ve seen it done in an easier to use way in Apple Books before, and the increased friction was an annoyance. I have nothing else worth mentioning in my review of the experience of reading the book on an iPad.

Did you read The Extended Mind? What did you think of it?

Dracula Daily

2022-04-29T17:00:00-07:00

Found out about Dracula Daily, a Substack that will mail out the contents of the book on the dates that they happen. That starts next week, May 3. I’ve not read Dracula before, so I’m kind of excited about this. Got me a hard copy too: Dracula (Norton Critical Editions) 📚.

In general I enjoy an episodic driven story. The Name of the Rose has a time driven story, and for me it adds an extra dimension to read it around the time of the year that it happens (late November, if I recall correctly).

Anybody have suggestions of other good writing like this? There are some suggestions on the Epistolary novel wikipedia page, but that focuses more on the document aspect of the novel materials, rather than the time/season aspect.

justing.net/reading

2025 in Books

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Pushing Ice?

Criticisms

Questions

How did the Memorial Cube arrive at Janus?

Spican Scale

It’s a Zoo?

More questions about Chromis’s civilization

Questions about the later civilizations

Conclusion

Daston's Rules

Reaction

Partial Reading Summary

Origins

Oppositions, or duals, or symmetries

Generalizations

Particularities

Used Book Marginalia

Knausgaard's Autumn

Some non-fiction recommendations

In 2024 I read 27 books

Recommended

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

On Looking by Horowitz, part 3

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

On Looking by Horowitz, part 2

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Plain words about the truth

On Looking by Horowitz, part 1

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Market logic takes over everything

Wool

Thinking as Craft

Human Social Distances

Axes of Social Distance

First notes from 300 Arguments

Notes

4kw Afterward and Appendix

Afterward Notes

Appendix Notes

4kw Chapter 14

Notes

4kw Chapter 13

Notes

4kw Chapter 12

Notes