I was hoping that I could do this every Saturday/Sunday morning, but I let other stuff jump the priority queue this weekend. Better late than never.
Music I’m Listening To —
Max Richter’s ” Sleep”- an eight hour ‘song’ for sleeping or just ambient listening. Not been sleeping well this solstice season and this is helping. Here is the link in case you can’t access the Spotify embed below.
Article I’m Jonesin’ On —
What Wittgenstein Learned from Teaching Elementary School
Every philosophy major has at some point had to answer the standard challenge: “What are you going to do, teach?” It’s especially frustrating after you realize that, for someone with a humanist bent and a disinterest in worldlier things, teaching is a pretty good career choice.
I love this back and forth between Wittgenstein and his sister Hermine discussing his choice to enter teaching as a career path.
His sister Hermine told him that applying his genius to teaching children was like using a “precision instrument” to open crates.She reports his response:
You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet.
Book/Story I’m Living With —
I have two items to share. Both are worth anyone’s time. Both are short or can be read in short bursts. The first is Sum : forty tales from the afterlives. The link will take you to a Worldcat page where you can preview the book and read the first one which I highly recommend. Also, read this New Yorker piece that prompted my interest. The second is “Telling the Bees” by T. Kingfisher. You can listen to it here and it is even more magical.
Concepts I’m Messing With —
Book smarts v street smarts v stream smarts. These ideas originate in Venkatesh Rao’s ever evocative collective blog, Ribbonfarm. The idea above is addressed in what Rao calls a “newsletter in tweetstorm format“. I was reading the last one of the year and Rao discussed how important it will be for us to become stream smart. And what is a stream? Rao writes, ” A stream is simply a life context formed by all the information flowing towards you via a set of trusted connections — to free people, ideas and resources — from multiple networks.”
Quotes to Die For — More from Venkatesh Rao
An observation due to Arthur C. Clarke offers a way to understand this second trajectory: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The networked world evolves so rapidly through innovation, it seems like a frontier of endless magic.
Clarke’s observation has inspired a number of snowclones that shed further light on where we might be headed. The first, due to Bruce Sterling, is that any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from its own garbage. The second, due to futurist Karl Schroeder,1 is that any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature.
To these we can add one from social media theorist Seb Paquet, which captures the moral we drew from our Tale of Two Computers: any sufficiently advanced kind of work is indistinguishable from play.
Putting these ideas together, we are messily slouching towards a non-pastoral utopia on an asymptotic trajectory where reality gradually blurs into magic, waste into wealth, technology into nature and work into play. `
This is a world that is breaking smart, with Promethean vigor, from its own past, like the precocious teenagers who are leading the charge. In broad strokes, this is what we mean by software eating the world.
For Prometheans, the challenge is to explore how to navigate and live in this world. A growing non-geographic-dualist understanding of it is leading to a network culture view of the human condition. If the networked world is a planet-sized distributed computer, network culture is its operating system.
What I’m watching/hearing —
RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) Animate has been producing these incredible sketchnote videos for years. After what has seemed like a very long hiatus, they have produced a nine-minute animation about Carol Dweck’s research into ‘mindsets’. I have some misgivings about the research, but generally I think it is useful. You can join with me here at Vialogues to join in the discussion.
What I’m buying —
I bought some of these gamma tops recently. They solve a problem for us. The tops fit over five gallon buckets and we fill them with water for travel out to the field to water the sheep. They are also handy for storing all manner of dry goods. We keep bulk beans and flour and nuts and lots more in these buckets along with a packet of desiccant to reduce the moisture. You might find them handy as well. Good company to buy from–good service and excellent product.
