Craig Constantine

Post-industrial

But what most energizes Walley is gathering stories that reveal the trauma left-behind industrial workers have suffered. She is also focused on how to prevent such devastating fallout, which can stoke the kind of social and political unrest that’s roiling the U.S. as mining and manufacturing jobs disappear. “This stuff is talked about through things like statistics. People don’t get a sense of what it actually felt like,” Walley says. “Conveying it through stories gives a whole different perspective.”
~ Elizabeth Svoboda, from Life and Death After the Steel Mills

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At one point, the area where I grew up was dominated by a steel mill. Then, slowly over time, it suddenly wasn’t.

Where does it come from?

January 27

Not every time that we talk about consciousness are we talking about experience. Sometimes ‘consciousness’ refers to awakeness. When you’re asleep at night, or blacked out from too much to drink, you’re not conscious in this sense of the term. Alternatively, sometimes ‘consciousness’ refers to awareness. It’s this kind of consciousness that you lack when you’ve zoned out while driving. You’re awake, but not you’re not fully aware of your surroundings. It’s also this kind of consciousness that activists target when they engage in the process of consciousness raising.
~ Amy Kind, from How to think about consciousness

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I no longer get stuck wondering where did my consciousness come from when I was born. Nope. I’m now stuck on: Where does it go every night when I fall asleep. …and where does it come from each morning that I awake?

Reality?

January 26

Ever since Plato started telling stories about people trapped in caves, philosophers have pondered the relationship between the mind and reality. How can we be sure that the world we think we know is the real world? After all, we’ve all been mistaken before – a person in a store window might turn out to be a mannequin, or two lines that appear to be curved might actually be parallel – so how can we be certain we know reality as it truly is?
~ D J Hobbs, from How to think like a phenomenologist

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I’m not sure I want to think like a phenomenologist…

It can also be about empowerment

January 25

Until now, she said, the history of medicine has been the history of doctors, whose priestly wisdom has been delivered to clueless, passive recipients as if it was gospel. Cousins’s story reversed that. Psychiatrists had asked him to map his moods for three months, so he developed a simple means to do it online every day and share his mood map with friends. They provided a supportive network, a bit like Weight Watchers. His moods immediately started to improve and became more stable: the act of monitoring had itself produced an effect.
~ John-Paul Flintoff, from There’s an app for that

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I particularly like, “the overexamined life is not worth living,” twist on that old phrase.

The complexity of relationships

January 24

So why did we evolve a large brain if it wasn’t essential for toolmaking? One reason is that existing in a large social group is very mentally taxing. Those who are better at playing the social game will have more access to mates and resources and will be more likely to reproduce. As the groups get larger, so the computational power needed to keep up with the interconnections grows exponentially, as does the stress.
~ Mark Maslin, from Why Humans Are So Smart—And So Stressed Out

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I’m too often stressed out (ever / at all is too often!) It helps to get really clear on what exactly is stressing me out. Because the complexity of relationships is a feature—not a problem—of our expansive, beautiful, wonderful, modern world.

It’s complex

January 23

So you think your choices have reasons behind them and, if these reasons are good ones, then you think that others, in principle, could see this, too. You recognise in yourself, and think that others should recognise in you, a choice aimed at something worth seeking, and a choice by someone who can make that call. This means that what you are after is ‘good’ not just in a sense confined to you, but visible to everyone. Once the goodness of your choice is visible to everyone, it is a kind of absolute goodness – a goodness that anyone could recognise.
~ Christine Korsgaard, from Philosophers and other animals

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Really complex. The road to hell is marked by unconsidered decisions.

Autism

January 22

Silberman chronicles the history of autism and examines some of the myths surrounding our current understanding of the condition in his new book, NeuroTribes. Along the way, he revisits Asperger’s calculated efforts to save his patients.
~ NPR, from ‘NeuroTribes’ Examines The History — And Myths — Of The Autism Spectrum

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Another facet to an interesting issue.

The benefit is in the effort

January 21

The benefit is precisely in the bureaucracy of it.
~ Matt Webb, from Beaches are for people who enjoy the bureaucracy of going to the beach

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Webb isn’t really making a point about beach-going.

Personal

January 20

Everyone has an atmosphere peculiar to himself, pervaded by all of his characteristics. We cannot radiate anything unlike ourselves or our ideals. The qualities you radiate will either attract or repel people. Your atmosphere will affect your career.
~ Orison Swett Marden, from The Power of Personal Atmosphere

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We could debate whether such atmospheres are a good thing, and what responsibility we each have to cultivate ours. But first, it’s just interesting to study it and wonder about it.

Curiouser and curiouser

January 19

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.
~ John McWhorter from, English is not normal

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It had never occurred to me to wonder if spelling competitions existed in any other languages.

Small changes

January 18

The most obvious way to stabilize blood sugar levels is to decrease sugar and carbohydrate intake. However, this is not the only way. Research has proven that simple changes can drastically mitigate volatile blood sugar fluctuations. Some strategies to stabilize blood sugar and optimize mood include […]
~ Mary J. Scourboutakos, from Blood sugar fluctuations after eating play an important role in anxiety and depression

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Worth reading just for the little 6-point bullet list at the bottom…

A small number

January 17

[…] a small number [of books] were truly transformative for me. They served as intellectual lighthouses on my journey, helping me understand what was happening to me as I explored my past, my psyche, and my pain.
~ Tiago Forte, from The 10 Most Transformative Books on Personal Development I’ve Read

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An interesting list. I’ve not read any of these books. I do have one of them in my pile of books at hand. I’m not endorsing the specific books. I do very much endorse the idea of making top-ten lists to share what one has learned.

Archeology and music

January 16

Simply sound-related things today: An image of a babbling brook and archeology…

It is possible that some 8,000 years ago, in this acoustically resonant haven, people not only hid from passing coastal thunderstorms, they may have used this place to commune with their dead—using music. That’s a possibility hinted at in the work of archaeologist Joshua Kumbani, of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and his colleagues.
~ Sarah Wild, from What Did the Stone Age Sound Like?

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Seems obvious that archeology would be interested in sound— but I’d never thought of that aspect of it before.

Detailed

January 15

I often stroll around exploring all the little nooks and crannies of places. I found this at Winterthur as part of small display of dried flowers. The display was barely mentioned at the info center, off the normal route (especially if one had taken the minibus ride to avoid walking the slightest distance), and hanging in the back of gazebo mostly out of sight. On the other hand, the sun peeked out just as I was standing there.

Can you explain it?

January 14

Physicist and science communicator Richard Feynman came up with another criterion, one that applies directly to the non-scientist likely to be bamboozled by fancy terminology that sounds scientific. […] Rather than asking lay people to confront scientific-sounding claims on their own terms, Feynman would have us translate them into ordinary language, thereby assuring that what the claim asserts is a logical concept, rather than just a collection of jargon.
~ from Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966)

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Confronting scientific-sounding things on your own terms is actually very difficult. What he’s described is not meant to be a way to decide if something is true—that’s much harder. He’s giving you a tool for quickly spotting scientific-sounding rubbish.

Having a clear why

January 13

It’s become cliché to talk about finding our ‘why’. That’s a shame because it’s absolutely, still, critically important, to us as podcasters. I was recently reminded of this point…

Ask yourself, why am I podcasting as a host, or as a guest? You must have a clear why, and it should be bigger than just “me.”
~ Alex Sanfilippo

Tell me your ‘why’.

And if you just hesitated— If you don’t immediately have an answer— Then you do not actually know your ‘why’.

You don’t have to post it! But you better know exactly and clearly what it is. Posting it just puts it out there, ensuring it remains real for you.

Whether or not you post it, you absolutely must have a ready-to-mind answer for your ‘why’.

For the longest running of my shows, Movers Mindset, my why is…

Each conversation feeds my insatiable curiosity, but I share them to turn on a light for someone else, to inspire them, or to give them their next question.

When I started that show, I did not have a clear ‘why’. It wasn’t until I took the Akimbo podcasting course in 2019, that I took the time to reimagine a lot of the two-year-old Movers Mindset podcast, and prompting from the course material and the coaches turned me onto asking myself, “uh, yeah, why?!”

Getting back to podcasting

January 12

Working with the garage door up, means I’m really just thinking out loud. I’m talking mostly to myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve done an episode for one of my own shows. Obviously the break was begun because of health issues in 2024. In the last couple of months though, I again do have the time. And I miss it. So I shall resume.

Mitochondria

January 11

That’s how I got mitochondria.
~ Randall Munroe, from Stromatolites

No one asked me, but if I was asked to summarize Munroe’s work I’d say: He’s mastered the art of finding insight by shifting the scale. Why is that hard? Why is that helpful? Why is that great? Because to it at the mastery level (as Munroe does) requires one to have integrated a lot of knowledge. A lot.

Sometimes I simply have to clean up

January 10

14+ years ago I started this blog. For many months it was basically my way of posting photos, which were also posted to a particular social platform. After about a year, I started posting more quoted stuff, and including the URL. There’s a little feature in WordPress (which powers this site) that if you drop a bare URL into a post, it will be auto-improved to be a clickable link when the post is displayed. So I took advantage of that and dropped bare URLs into thousands of posts.

Fast forward over a decade and obviously link rot is happening. So I’m changing to use page titles, and linking to the URLs. That way, when the link rots, at least a reader can see the title of where it used to go.