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You had me at trees →

Published August 4, 2023  ·  All posts on Aug 4  ·  

Trees often have my attention. I find myself thinking about the spot where a tree is standing. Whether its seed fell there, or someone planted it, that spot is it. The tree is simply going to stand there as the sun whips across the sky thousands of times. I imagine the tree turning its leaves quickly (in tree time) to catch what light it can during each flash overhead.

Intrigued by this unheard of species, Wang set out to see it for himself and to collect specimens, which he shared with colleagues. One of them was Hsen Hsu Hu. A diligent paleobotanist, he had read of Miki’s fossil discovery five years earlier. As soon as he saw the peculiar needle pattern, Hu recognized the “water fir” as a Metasequoia.

~ Maria Popova from, The Remarkable Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Living Fossil Brought Humanity Together in the Middle of a World War – The Marginalian

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There’s a lot of interesting leaps in the story Popova shares. Across a war, across two cultures, but the vast time this tree has crossed is insane. We have fossils of this tree… and we still have the live tree. My mind boggles.

But mostly, Popova had my attention at trees.

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Organic →

Published May 7, 2023  ·  All posts on May 7  ·  

The project started with the intent to regenerate a forgotten piece of land in a dense Coburg pocket. Felicity and her husband, architect Marc Bernstein, purchased the awkwardly shaped 250 square metre block to make it happen, but council deemed the land ‘undevelopable’, and banks were unwilling to approve finances.

~ Amelia Barnes from, An Ultra-Sustainable Home On An ‘Undevelopable’ Melbourne Site

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To be clear: The property is 250 square-meters, or ~1,700 square-feet. Get to a large computer screen. Get your beverage of choice. Then, click through and get lost on that site.

Meanwhile, the thing that struck me was the undulating ground cover outside the master bedroom. It’s good (but not particularly original) to use something that doesn’t require a lot of water (as opposed to turf grasses)—but to shape the ground into something interesting struck me as whimsical. If I don’t have to mow it, then it doesn’t need to be flat. I wonder where else, in the design of my own environment, am I stuck in my thinking.

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A form of movement →

Published April 16, 2023  ·  All posts on Apr 16  ·  

If you do not have a movement practice or access to a good movement teacher, then finding a physical practice that you enjoy and makes you feel empowered is a good place to start.

~ Soisci Porchetta from, «https://www.humanpatterns.net/blog/2018/10/3/why-we-should-all-have-a-form-of-movement-practice»

You already love moving, (or nothing I write is going to convince you.) The only question then is where are you in your journey? Are you in the age of roots, fire, water or air? It’s very important to realize there are going to be major transitions in one’s journey through life. I consider myself typical in that movement played a huge role when I was young. There was a significant period in my 30’s where I lost the plot. I was lucky that I didn’t lose touch with movement for too long. Looking back from 20 years on, I believe that I was trying to hold onto an identity.

At the time, what I was doing was a big part of who I saw myself as. I didn’t understand that who I am, was going to change—is supposed to change! Naive, I denied the feelings which were suggesting I change. As I said, it turns out I was lucky.

As is often the case: No takeaway. Just food for thought.

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Sometimes I weep →

Published April 12, 2023  ·  All posts on Apr 12  ·  ,

What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.

~ Jonny Ive from, The Ultimate Productivity Hack is Focus

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I have a lot of ideas. (Perhaps your experience is similar?) For most of my life I thought all of my ideas where good ones. Sure, there were some insane bicycle accidents and spectacular snow-tubing disasters, but in the minutes following an incident, I still thought it was a good idea. Poorly planned, poorly executed, or both, sure. But life seemed to be an endless parade of good ideas each affording an opportunity to grab life by the choose-your-own-metaphor. In hindsight, I think it was all simply poor—or, if I’m honest, a complete absence of—impulse control.

In recent years it has become apparent my time on Earth is limited. (Perhaps your experience is similar?) These days that stream of ideas continues. What if I installed a motion-activated auto-targeting water sprinkler filled with Capsaicin-laced water to keep the squirrels away? (Yes, really.) …and okay, well, the ideas don’t all seem like good ideas anymore. Fine. I’m cool with having limited time, limited resources, and possibly some added social awareness.

But every once in a while, I have an idea which is blindingly awesome. Even if I have one such idea only once in a while, that still means I have more than I can try, and then I have to choose. I have to choose some, and say no to others.

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Ordinary →

Published March 30, 2023  ·  All posts on Mar 30  ·  , ,

The extraordinary doesn’t wipe out the ordinary. People get married in wartime. Babies are born during pandemics. My mom drew water fro my bath while my father did test runs for the end of the world.

~ Mary Laura Philpott

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Are we alone? →

Published March 10, 2023  ·  All posts on Mar 10  ·  

Jupiter’s second Galilean Moon, Europa, with its interior ocean, predominantly crater-less surface, and crisscrosses of cracks and ridges spanning entire hemispheres, makes it one of the most fascinating planetary bodies ever observed. These unique geologic features are possibly indicative of liquid water traveling to the surface from its deep ocean, making Europa a hot spot for the exploration and study of life beyond Earth, also known as astrobiology.

~ Laurence Tognetti from, Will Europa finally answer, ‘Are we alone?’

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My mind boggles. We haven’t quite created intelligence that exceeds our own, but we appear to be close (for better or for worse I can’t really say.) But I’ve been occasionally suffering from vertigo thinking: I may live to see it. The thing that has fascinated us for so long— The thing that I’ve read and seen in fiction my entire life— I may yet live to see that.

But when we find life somewhere besides upon our precious blue marble… I’m gonna lose my mind. Life on (in?) Europa seems bonkers, right? There’d be absolutely no light in that ocean… and yet. We find the bottom of our own tiny (compared to Europa’s) oceans teaming with life around sources of heat. That sounds exactly like Europa.

Also, you should totally go watch the film, Europa Report . . .

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The gaming problem →

Published March 1, 2023  ·  All posts on Mar 1  ·  ,

As the power of AI grows, we need to have evidence of its sentience. That is why we must return to the minds of animals.

~ Kristin Andrews and Jonathan Birch from, What has feelings?

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This article ate my face. I was scrolling through a long list of things I’d marked for later reading, I glanced at the first paragraph of this article… and a half-hour later I realized it must be included here. I couldn’t even figure out what to pull-quote because that requires choosing the most-important theme. The article goes deeply into multiple intriguing topics, including sentience, evolution, pain, and artificial intelligence. I punted and just quoted the sub-title of the article.

The biggest new-to-me thing I encountered is a sublime concept called the gaming problem in assessing sentience. It’s about gaming, in the sense of “gaming the system of assessment.” If you’re clicking through to the article, just ignore me and go read…

…okay, still here? Here’s my explanation of the gaming problem:

Imagine you want to wonder if an octopus is sentient. You might then go off and perform polite experiments on octopods. You might then set about wondering what your experiments tell you. You might wonder if the octopods are intelligent enough to try to deceive you. (For example, if they are intelligent enough, they might realize you’re a scientist studying them, and that convincing you they are sentient and kind, would be in their best interest.) But you definitely do not need to wonder if the octopods have studied all of human history to figure out how to deceive you—they definitely have not because living in water they have no access to our stored knowledge. Therefore, when studying octopods, you do not have to worry about them using knowledge of humans to game your system of study.

Now, imagine you want to wonder if an AI is sentient. You might wonder will the AI try to deceive you into thinking it’s sentient when it actually isn’t. We know that we humans deceive each other often; We write about it a lot, and our deception is seen in every other form of media too. Any AI created by humans will have access to a lot (most? all??) of human knowledge and would therefore certainly have access to plenty of information about how to deceive a person, what works, and what doesn’t. So why would an AI not game your system of study to convince you it is sentient?

That’s the gaming problem in assessing sentience.

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Titan →

Published October 26, 2022  ·  All posts on Oct 26  ·  

Titan is like Earth with its rivers, lakes, and seas filled by rain, but as stated, this is liquid methane and ethane as opposed to liquid water on Earth. Like Earth, Titan also has sand dunes, but they are made of hydrocarbons instead of silicate-based substances. Also, much like Earth, Titan is known for having a seasonal liquid transport cycle, also known as the water cycle on Earth, linking atmosphere, land, and oceans.

~ Laurence Tognetti from, Titan is an Alien World, but Surprisingly Familiar – Universe Today

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Back in the 1980s I read a lot of science fiction weaving epic tales and describing alien landscapes. These days, I continue to read things which are weaving epic, and describing alien—but they are no longer fiction.

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Emotional flooding →

Published October 17, 2022  ·  All posts on Oct 17  ·  ,

Whenever I hear about these incidents, I think of the best life advice I ever got, from my older brother: “Don’t freak out.” He was giving me a parenting tip, but really, it applies to everything in life. Freaking out—“emotional flooding,” in social-science jargon—never seems to make matters better, and we nearly always regret it. The fact that freak-outs may be happening with particular frequency right now is an opportunity to understand the phenomenon in ourselves and learn to manage our emotions better. If we do, we will be equipped with a skill that helps us be better friends, parents, spouses, and professionals, even when the pandemic is nothing but a distant memory.

~ Arthur C. Brooks from, How to Stop Freaking Out – The Atlantic

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I truly hope you’ve not experienced flooded emotions, recently or otherwise. For me, this is a big part of how my atypical brain works. I don’t have an emotional range. I have two settings labeled zero and eleven. Eleven means I love sappy movies, can get really engaged in helping people, and much more. But, I had to learn how to disengage when my emotions flare; I had to become a master at pausing while deciding what I want to happen.

But having a level–zero non-response to most everything means I can function very well under duress. For example, if the roof of the house is mid-repair, it’s been raining hard for hours, the ceiling is leaking in various places, and then the hard-wired fire alarm shorts out (ie, goes off) when water gets into a sensor, the deafening, in–house klaxon sounds, my cellphone rings as the monitoring company reports there’s a fire… Well, level-zero means I can repeatedly work the keypad to disable the fire alarm, even though it goes off again in a few seconds, give the person on my cellphone my alarm code to avert the fire department’s being dispatched, and then quickly work to physically disable the alarm system (even though it’s intentionally tamper– and disable–resistant.) All without my heart–rate rising; while actually feeling bored by it all.

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Great lakes →

Published October 16, 2022  ·  All posts on Oct 16  ·  

The Great Lakes of North America’s midsection—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario—together span nearly 100,000 square miles, with a combined coastline just shy of 10,000 miles. They hold more than a fifth of Earth’s unfrozen fresh water, straddle an international border, and help move more than $15 billion dollars worth of cargo each year.

~ Gemma Tarlach from, Are the Great Lakes Really Inland Seas? – Atlas Obscura

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This article didn’t strike me as particularly interesting. But after I was about half–way through reading it, it became clear it was in fact interesting. It’s worth the read. It’s worth read just to find out was a “meteotsunami” is. It’s worth read to learn about that time the water in Lake Michigan sloshed to one side and then sloshed back creating a tsunami that swept into Chic– wait, wat?!

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