Category: Reading

Merry Christmas to the two readers of this blog! It will be light reading, I’m still crook, so not a lot of reading today either.

Daily Reads:

I’ve restarted my attempt to learn HTML and CSS specifically because I’m using Obsidian for everything except presentations – and only because I don’t quite grok how the styles apply through all the plugins. 🤞

Slowly going through this 3+ hour conversation between Daniel Schmactenberger, Ian McGilchrist & John Vervaeke on the psychological drivers of the Metacrisis. 🤯

Music:

Carols from King’s: The Choir of King’s College, Cambride

Illness has taken hold of the adults in the household. Only skeletal routines expected, which doesn’t include posting here…

Daily Reads:

Margaret Atwood does some sermonizing and shares the sermons for us to cackle over and idolize.

Tracy Durnell explains how she’s Choosing between ideas for blog posts and her current WordPress plugins and customisations

QOTD:

How do we get people to understand that it is imperative to invest in potential? Both people and ideas deserve to be developed to allow them to reach their full capacity.
– Terence Eden on a book review of von Neuman by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Music:

Flyte: River

A wretched man-flu continues its hold over me so loads of hydration and YouTube keeping me company for the 3rd day in a row.

Daily Reads:

I was reviewing my journals from Feb 2023, and was reminded of these two podcasts. From the Unforgettable Presentations with Darren LaCroix & Mark Brown: Peter Drury, football commentator and Steve Spangler, STEM educator on the Ellen Degeneres show.

Dr. Petre’s talk at StrangeLoop 2022 as a general indicator of the conversation we had last night.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: An Introduction to the Metacrisis

QOTD:

Being well adjusted to a profoundly insane society is not a good measure of mental health
– J. Krishnamurthi

Music:

Blaze Foley in a rare recording of Clay Pigeons. I heard this song first performed by John Prine and loved it instantly:

I’m tired of runnin’ ’round
Lookin’ for answers to questions that I already know
I could build me a castle of memories
Just to have somewhere to go

A wretched man-flu continues its hold over me so loads of hydration and YouTube keeping me company for the 3rd day in a row.

Daily Reads:

I was reviewing my journals from Feb 2023, and was reminded of these two podcasts. From the Unforgettable Presentations with Darren LaCroix & Mark Brown: Peter Drury, football commentator and Steve Spangler, STEM educator on the Ellen Degeneres show.

Dr. Petre’s talk at StrangeLoop 2022 as a general indicator of the conversation we had last night.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: An Introduction to the Metacrisis

QOTD:

Being well adjusted to a profoundly insane society is not a good measure of mental health
– J. Krishnamurthi

Music:

Blaze Foley in a rare recording of Clay Pigeons. I heard this song first performed by John Prine and loved it instantly:

I’m tired of runnin’ ’round
Lookin’ for answers to questions that I already know
I could build me a castle of memories
Just to have somewhere to go

Daily Reads:

I’ve been digging around the Indieweb and its protocols. As a non-programmer, I find it easier to learn by checking out what people have done with the idea than to try and implement it myself (and waste a ridiculous amount of time around this time every year).

Aaron Parecki claims that the letter R is a vowel. He wrote a 100 songs in 100 days!

I organised a conversation with Dr. Marian Petre with a few friends this evening. She is the co-author of the 2016 book Software Design Decoded, with empirical research on the distinctive habits of high performing software engineering teams. One of the many resources she mentioned was the book by G. Polya titled "How to Solve it" that Dr. Mary Shaw recommended to her.

QOTD:

Allow friendships to come and go. Don’t cling onto friendships because they are old. Cling on to them because they bring you joy and comfort and laughter.
– Annie Macmanus

HT: Recommendo

Music:

A version of Have You Seen The Rain. This is the inspiration for the idea that Drew & I will pull off before the end of this decade.

Lying in bed, feeling out of sorts – a man flu perhaps – gave me a chance to catch up on some reading. Sharing a few of the highlights.

Daily Reads:

I was listening to the 2023 Nobel Lecture on Monday, and understood so little. This Crash course in cell theory was my first attempt at reparations.

Hunter S Thompson liked weird things like Burning the christmas tree and the house down

Splendid animation of 4.5Billions years of earth in an hour!

Nick Morgan does small talk – just four minutes spent on exchanging unconscious information.

Cory Doctorow: What kind of bubble is AI? Must read, along with Baldur Bjarnsson’s Bad Business AI: Channel 1 Simon Willison is calling out the AI Trust Crisis. Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, and a whole host of researchers have been calling out the harms of AI for a while. Is anyone listening?

Anne Helen Petersen: One Significant Adult is a moving tribute to a pastor she knew growing up. Took me down memory lane too.

Robin Ince: Who Needs This Blog?

David Epstein: The Christmas Tree Effect and the Subtraction Game in the same article 🙂

Graham Duncan’s Questions didn’t just push at my own boundaries, but seem to be far beyond them.

QOTD:

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”
– Calvin Trillin

Music:

Tommy Emmanuel caresses the guitar to tease out What A Wonderful World

Daily Reads:

Not winter down under, but the general mood around me seems like it. Which is why David Cain’s post "Nobody has a Seasonal Affective Disorder" caught my attention, and I’m glad it did.

Robert Wringham: The lost art of declining politely There are times I wish I said no. I’m not alone, says RoWri, and has some ideas.

In The Reality of Tomorrow, Bob Ewing makes the compelling case for creating the reality of the future.

Peter Gruber: The Four Truths of the Storyteller are simply Truth to the Teller, Truth to the Audience, Truth to the Moment, and Truth to the Mission.

QOTD:

Concepts should be held loosely, because they’re nowhere near as complex as the reality they’re supposedly explaining. Not by many orders of magnitude. They have no truth value in themselves, they just point you to some possibilities, while simultaneously pointing you away from other possibilities.
– David Cain

Music:

FourPlay & Neil Gaiman: Bloody Sunrise

Daily Reads:

I listened to the 2023 Nobel Lecture by Dr. Katalin Kariko & Dr. Drew Weismann. For the record, I felt dumb, and yet amazed at the creativity and imagination that gave us the CoVID vaccines.

I had the privilege of listening to and discovering some incredible scientists who live in town. Prof. Toby Walsh was one of them, & his paper on "The Meta Turning Test" is one I’m currently attempting to read and understand. He also recommended his latest book

Gaping Void: The Power of Changing Your Mind

QOTD:

a sign of epistemic humility is speed. Anyone can change their opinions slowly, over years, sneakily sliding from a wrong view to a right one so subtly that they can pretend they were on the right side the whole time.
– Gaping Void

Music:

Sanya Vrancic’s mandolin cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game is, wicked.

Daily Reads:

Jim Nielsen shares his workflow on taking and publishing notes.
I’m fascinated by how simple this looks – and know enough about my own habits to know that beneath that simplicity is a great deal of discipline (or habits) that will take me another lifetime to learn.

Om Malik on AI’s bumpy road ahead
Work involving physical presence and craftsmanship continues to be valuable. Work that’s expanded to fill time (isn’t that much of the corporate world?) that involves computers is being automated. AI as augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence is a different way of looking the mania sweeping the world.

Rob Walker features Dan Heath on this post titled Why (and how) to ask Craft Questions.
Heath featured recently in Dan Pink’s podcast. I went down the rabbit hole and this was a fun read, and one that gives me ideas on how to ask good questions of people I likely won’t have deep conversations with, but will still want to connect.

I listened to several conversations on Dan Heath’s What it’s Like podcast, but the one with Howard Hart, who spent 35 years as a stadium beer vendor was the first, and the most moving of them.

Ryan Holiday: A reminder to say NO. I don’t have people to say no to at the moment, but I do have a lot of things on my "todo" list that I should/could.

Winston Churchill’s Five Golden Rules for communication:

• Begin strongly.
• Focus on one theme.
• Use simple language.
• Draw a picture in the listener’s mind.
• End with an emotion.

A celebratory video of Dr. Katalin Kariko & Dr. Drew Weismann by the UPenn.
HT: Ewan McIntosh for both

Very Clever play on words!

Erika Gezmer has some solid advice for me, and for all the job searchers out there.

QOTD:

Almost everything spoken by the retired Howard Hart on the first episode of Dan Heath’s What It’s Like podcast. Just listen to it.

Music:

Florist: Spring in Hours

Daily Reads:

Listened to Rishad Tobaccowala interview side hustle expert Chris Guillebeau on his podcast What Next. It prompted me to follow Chris’ podcast – Side Hustle School and listen to several stories of side hustlers earning their first $1,000. The stories are <5 minutes long, and reflect on both the successes and failures of getting there. He’s done over 2500 episodes, which is stunning discipline.

In Regretful accelerationism, Ben Thompson comes around to the idea that despite the riches of the internet for his personal benefit, there is merit in humanity finding ways back to what is real.

His post also had the phrase Schelling point so had to look it up. It refers to a solution or focal point that people tend to use in the absence of communication because it seems special or relevant to them. Named after Thomas Schelling who introduced it in the context of Game Theory. It’s based on common knowledge, knowledge that everyone knows everyone knows.

Is the idea of unit economics back in business vocabulary? I’ve heard it mentioned in nearly every recent product podcast recently. Making a profit on each unit of product or service guarantees that the company will be profitable at whatever scale it reaches. For the last 20 or so years in the cheap finance world, that seemed like a quaint idea, but is now coming right back into fashion.

Efoso Ojomo is a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institue for Disruptive Innovation. He argues in this post that corruption is ‘hired’ to make progress. When society offers few legitimate options to make progress, corruption becomes attractive.

Matt Webb shares a framework for exploring Generative AI as a tech savvy org.

QOTD:

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content.
– Ben Thompson ^QOTD

Music:

Zach Bryan: Something in the Orange