Marks were made →

Published July 23  ·  All posts on Jul 23  ·  

A friend and I recently did a 48-hour fast. (One of the low-lights was going to dinner with people on our way to a concert… everyone’s having burgers and salmon, and I’m drinking black coffee. Anyway.) Our design was to finish the fast by doing one of my usual quadrupedal movement (QM) workouts at my favorite tennis courts, and then a run (as best as possible) around 1.75 mile trail loop. Then break our fasts by eating.

By the end of the QM, I was utterly exhausted. For a cool down I worked on a sweat-angel for about 5 minutes. Left a legit puddle where my head was. And then we did the trail run. Several people joined us for the QM and run, and much fun was had by all.

There’s no real takeaway here. Just a photo and a note to myself: Sometimes I push things. Sometimes I push things too far. Where’s the edge?

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What nature requires →

Published July 22  ·  All posts on Jul 22  ·  ,

What nature requires is close by and easy to obtain. All that sweat is for superfluities. We wear out our fine clothes, grow old in army tents, hurl ourselves against foreign shores, and for what? Everything we need is already at hand. Anyone who is on good terms with poverty is rich.

~ Seneca, letter 4:10-11

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And 7 years later? →

Published July 21  ·  All posts on Jul 21

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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Strategy →

Published July 20  ·  All posts on Jul 20  ·  

What matters is whether a certain approach gets you to where you want to go. And let’s be clear, using obstacles against themselves is very different from doing nothing. Passive resistance is, in fact, incredibly active. But those actions come in the form of discipline, self-control, fearlessness, determination, and grand strategy.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Infused →

Published July 19  ·  All posts on Jul 19

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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Temptation →

Published July 18  ·  All posts on Jul 18  ·  ,

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

~ Oscar Wilde

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A genuine futurist →

Published July 17  ·  All posts on Jul 17

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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Passions →

Published July 16  ·  All posts on Jul 16  ·  

He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.

~ Cicero

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Always the horizon →

Published July 15  ·  All posts on Jul 15  ·  

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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Rowing →

Published July 14  ·  All posts on Jul 14  ·  

I am rowing toward the past. I am trying to squeeze out of each stroke a better image of myself, and I am trying to enlist the ghosts of history to help power the oars. I want them as friends, as comrades, as partners, as ancestors.

~ Barry Strauss

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