noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.
Watching a fire, too, fills the eyes and releases the imagination to drift.
~ Matt Webb from, Beach daydreams, lost at sea
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For a few years now we’ve had a standing date for camping near a beach at the end of summer. This little collection from Webb touches on some of the why.
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If it’s used in the right way, I love it, of course! I mean, I used to joke that the goal of a filmmaker is to be Fellini-esque, you know, when your name means something in that way? We often say something was a very Fellini-esque experience. So if you say a film is Cronenbergian… I like that. The thing that does bother me a little bit is “body horror,” because I never use that term! It was a young journalist who invented that term and it stuck, it’s out of my hands. But I would never have thought that what I did was body horror.
~ Patrick Heidmann from, David Cronenberg – The Talks
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I recently managed to get caught up on The Hansel and Gretel Code, a podcast from my friend Curtis Cates. (I started years behind, so that I had 42 hour+ episodes to listen to.) It was so worth it. First off, great podcast on a very interesting to me topic. Also, I learned about the concept of metalepsis.
Reading the Wikipedia page doesn’t really do it justice. But listening to Curtis talk about metalepsis, and in particular unpacking all the context around some innocent seeming word or phrase really made it clear. For example, in certain centuries and in certain circles of well read people, “planing the planks of our coffins” isn’t just an interesting phrase… for those certain people it brought to mind a whole other complex social and political issue complete with its own colorful players.
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Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers.
~ Gerald Frankel from, How and where is nuclear waste stored in the US?
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This is probably silly, but I’ve always imagined that one day we’d master nuclear fusion. (Fission is “splitting” versus fusion which is “combining.” Our currently nuclear generation is a very complex chain reaction of the fission variety.) To run a fusion reactor requires—literally—the temperatures inside the sun. I’d always hoped we’d be able to dump (teeny tiny amounts) of our current nuclear waste into our fusion reactors… we’re everything is stripped apart to protons and electrons. The perfect waste disposal system. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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And then the light of an older heaven was in my eyes
~ Doug Muir from, Occasional paper: The Light of an Older Heaven
and when my vision cleared, I saw Titans.
— Alan Moore
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A wonderful quote to open a wonder-filled article.
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This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work. As our productivity increases, our standards and expectations rise even faster, creating a psychological Jevons Paradox that threatens to consume our humanity in the pursuit of ever-greater output. We become victims of our own efficiency.
~ Tina He from, Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
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After I looked up Jevons Paradox, I couldn’t agree more with He’s point. It seems the way to break the paradox is to simply sit in “not doing”— To simply be useless. Perhaps not all of the time, but definitely some of the time.
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No one doubts human beings are special—indeed unique. After all, people are (to our knowledge) the only ones pondering evolution, not to mention creating symphonies and skyscrapers. Still, that is not saying much: All species are unique, or else they would not be distinct species in their own right. Each species can do things humans only dream of, whether flying or diving deep under the sea.
~ Alexander Werth from, The Problems of Evolution as a “March of Progress”
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Anthropocentrism is one perspective. There are many others worth considering too because the more one learns, the better one is able to make moral choices.
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The next day NBC’s president decided to make an exception to the network’s ban on recorded sound in order to interview Morrison and play a portion of the recordings. (Yes, both NBC and CBS banned recorded sound over their air, and would continue to do so for another decade. […] ).
It’s telling that the lesson America’s big radio networks took from this incredible eye-witness recording was simply, “Nope, no more of that!” As sound scholar Michael Biel pointed out, “This is…the first time that a recording was allowed to be broadcast on NBC, and I can count on my fingers the other times that NBC broadcast recordings — knowingly and unknowingly — until the middle of WWII.”
~ Julia Barton from, Hell Yeah: Airships!
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Barton’s Continuous Wave is a must read for anyone interested in audio, radio or podcasting— this article in particular.
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As we gathered data, surveyed people and set up experiments, it became clear that those tiny shortcuts – sometimes hailed as a hallmark of efficient communication – undermine relationships instead of simplifying them.
~ David Fang from, Why you should think twice before using shorthand like ‘thx’ and ‘k’ in your texts
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After I thought about this a bit, this seems to be a clear benefit: We’re really good at trying to imagine (and predict) what other people are really thinking. We pick up subtle clues from body language and more, and we do it subconsciously. So why wouldn’t we also pick up subtle clues in a medium like text?
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Only with Substack does anyone perceive creator branding as being subservient to the platform — something that ought to be seen merely as an interchangeable CMS — like that.
~ John Gruber from, Daring Fireball: The Substack Branding and Faux Prestige Trap
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I’ve tried a few different things on Substack. (None of them ever took off, and each of them I subsequently moved to web sites I directly control.) I’ve always felt something was off, and lately I’ve been souring more on the whole platform. This piece by Gruber puts a clear, fine point on what I dislike about Substack.
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Here’s the actual thing. Robots: Make incorrect assumptions. Misinterpret clear direction. Claim they know when they don’t. Make mistakes. Lie.
Who else does this all the time? Every single human. Like. Always.
~ Michael Lopp from, Every Single Human. Like. Always.
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This is what makes the LLMs feel different. So far, computers have always been perfect—except when they’re wrong/broken. That’s fundamentally not how people are. LLMs came along and they’re imperfect. Always. Just like people.
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So Verizon’s new CEO sent me an email…
Where shall I begin?
First — You can’t simply reply. I get it. It’s hard to have a mailbox on the Internet these days. So many bounces, to deal with (I’m serious.)
Second — So when you go to drag-select, copy and paste that “s.sampath@verizon.com” email address, you discover it’s not what it seems.
Pasting into your email client’s “To” field, you actually create a list of multiple recipients: The first recipient is “s”, then the second is “sampath”, etc—none of which are the email address you meant to copy and paste. So you have to type it into your email client. Not a big deal, but probably enough to stop most people. If they really cared, they’d just give us an
<a href="mailto:s.sampath@verizon.com">s.sampath@verizon.com</a>
and let us just click or touch it, et voila!
Okay, but why can’t we copy and paste? Because in the HTML source in their email, it’s actually:
If you can read HTML, you see there are HTML entities jammed in various places in that email address. I had to lookup the entity ‌ — that’s a Zero Width Non-Joining space. Meaning it’s not visible (“zero-width”) and it’s job is to keep whatever is left and right from “joining”… in the sense that complex characters can join to make a glyph— For example: An ‘a’ and ‘e’ can join to make the single character ‘æ’ if your language supports that. (But, of course, English does not have any joining characters at all.) I’m confident this is just an artifact of their bulk-email-sending composer software; it’s common for such things to “defend” an email address in the middle of text from harvesting looking for emails. So this wasn’t maliciousness on Verizon’s part.
Third — …but it’s ironic that, in a message that contains, “It’s not just better service — we are setting a new standard, beginning today,” I have to flip between windows as I retype that email address.
Fourth — Because I’m a level-39 nerd wizard, I do reply to these things. (I mean, I start a new email message addressed to that email address.) And because we (said wizards) are quick to anger and regular Internet users (ie, Sampath) are tasty with ketchup, I send things like this…
I’ll followup when I get my 17.5%.
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What does that mean? It means you can write a post that is directed within the network. If you want to get on the radar of a blogger – write about their ideas and reference them. The lowly hyperlink is a connective tissue that creates a network graph between the nodes.
~ Tom Critchlow, from Experiments in Networked Writing
Critchlow wrote that in 2018. 7 years down the road, all the technology (for the web and blogs) works great, it’s easier than ever to blog, and in 14 years / 5,000 posts I’ve never had anyone (an author of something I’ve linked to) reach out to me. I’m not complaining—I don’t blog as a way to fish for connections like that. (I blog as a way of working with the garage door up.)
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Also, how is this the first time I’ve used the tag “Blogging”?
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How did these trillions of potent proteins, originating in thousands of human bodies, find their way to my son’s blood circulation? What historical, social, and economic conditions enabled this extraordinary exchange of substances?
~ Ben Belek, from Is Donated Blood a Gift or a Commodity?
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There are a slew of interesting questions explored in that piece. The question of “gift or commodity” hadn’t even occurred to me.
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With the passing years, I’ve come to recognize that this was Ballard’s true calling—not as a writer of imaginative works, but as a genuine futurist. This is even evident in his novels.
~ Ted Gioia, from How Did a Censored Writer from the 1970s Predict the Future with Such Uncanny Accuracy?
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This is where I admit that I’m not sure if I’ve ever read any of Ballard’s works—although it seems that if I had read them I’d surely remember them?
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You could see artificial intelligence as a kind of frontier, then, which moves forward as computerized machines take over the tasks humans previously had to do themselves.
~ Colin Marshall, from Isaac Asimov Describes How Artificial Intelligence Will Liberate Humans & Their Creativity: Watch His Last Major Interview (1992)
I prefer the metaphor of the horizon: always just out of reach. But it’s our curiosity to see what’s there which pulls us ever-forward.
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Those last few reps are the money makers — the best return for your effort you’re going to get, but many people don’t even know they’re possible. My usual stopping point felt like just about the end of the road, but it was actually the beginning of a hidden, hyper-rewarding territory where exceptional results happen.
~ David Cain, from Doing More is Often Easier
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That is a critical life-lesson which I learned through Art du Déplacement. Therein we talk a lot about such things as sharing, being strong to be useful, and community. However, the biggest gains are in the personal development. It’s a journey of growth, yes, but more so it’s a journey of personal discovery. «Allons-y!»
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It turned out in retrospect that the messy diversity of the forest had been the source of its resilience. When stresses such as storms, disease, drought, fragile soil, or severe cold struck, a diverse forest with its full array of different species of trees, birds, insects, and animals was far better able to survive and recover. A windstorm that toppled large, old trees would typically spare smaller ones. An insect attack that threatened oaks might leave lindens and hornbeams unaffected. The rigidity and uniformity of the system meant that failures were not small and contained but systemic.
~ Tiago Forte, from Productive Disorder: The Hidden Power of Chaos, Noise, and Randomness
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I’m simply stuck, staring at: “The rigidity […] of the system meant that failures were […] systemic.” I’m filing this under Stuff I Wished I’d Learned 30 Years Ago. I often say that I use systems and structure as a way to multiply my efforts. And that’s true. But I’ve learned that the real reason is that I’m afraid. The big why behind my hyper-organization, maximally-complex systems, and endless aligning of figurative ducks is my desperately trying to control the world around me. With realization comes… the recognition that I have a lot more work to learn to not do.
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I recently returned from a whole bunch of movement. I was at the annual American Rendezvous event in Somerville MA, followed by taking the Level 2 ADAPT Coach Certification course. Immediately followed by some just-for-fun hard work at Vandrar Hem.
This morning I sat down on the concrete for meditation and it was sublime. 10, 15, or maybe even 20 minutes of simply sitting and breathing. Weeks of continuously have a “next thing” on the schedule every minute of every day is its own type of exhausting. This morning I was recharging via stillness. But completely still (like being totally active) is not the correct state.
What I had failed to cultivate in my recent travels was equanimity.
Too often, equanimity is described as a practice or technique that aims at the production of something – usually a state of stillness. Other proposed aims include a ‘countercultural’ refashioning of the self: eg, ‘to disarm the way we define ourselves in terms of achievements, fame, praise, and what we’re told should make us happy’, as the meditation teacher Christina Feldman and the psychologist Willem Kuyken put it in Mindfulness (2019); or being compassionate and caring instead of discriminatory and judgmental.
~ Michael Uebel, from Equanimity is not stillness – it is a mobility of the mind
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Whether you’re a binge-watcher or a doomscroller or some other type of time-bider, the following is probably true for most people reading this: There are things you want to do with your life that you’re not doing. You know these things are worthwhile. You know these things are possible.
~ David Cain, from How to Start Doing the Things You Daydream About
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Cain draws our attention (often in his writing) to the noticing part. That is the really difficult part. If you’re not noticing that there’s a tension in your life, then you’ll surely never change.
Beyond noticing comes relaxing into the feeling. Then deciding whether the tension and the feeling represent something to allow to bloom. And deciding what to let go of to make room for that new growth.
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What did I do to lose 60 lbs? […] Based on all that, I am pretty much convinced that the main factors were the following:
~ Ned Kock from, My transformation: I cannot remember the last time I had a fever
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Over the years on this blog, I’ve linked to a bunch of things from Health Correlator. This—like everything—is well worth the read.
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