Friday Fodder #17
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Happy Thanksgiving! I haven’t had any time to write, it’s been wall to wall prepping and feasting and decorating. Advent starts Sunday and it’s somehow only a few short weeks til Christmas!
Today, like every day, is something to be grateful for, but on this holiday most of us actually remember to express to others and to the world what we’re grateful for. And there’s so much! I’m thankful for flags and atlases and keyboards. For bison and eagles and whales. For single brains that can come up with networked ideas like packet switching and blockchains. For electrons traveling at the speed of light. For suns that remain stable for billions of years and for supernovae that explode their superheated guts so we have elements like gold and silver and platinum. For sentiment and suffering and striving and for all our human frailties and strengths.
But most of all: for the love of God and the people around me.
On to the reading!
Timely
Authenticity as Dialogue - Henrik Karlsson examines the idea of authenticy, building a model of our thinking, how writing helps, and what John Stuart Mill taught him about examining his thought.
Trump Should Finish What He Started - There’s still a small but vocal minority that think we should move to a consumption-based tax similar to the VAT. This is a deep look into tax reform and the differences that come about between income and consumption based taxes.
Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH - I remember reading the Great Barrington Declaration during Covid and thinking, “this seems pretty reasonable and sound” only to have the media, NIH, and every doctor on TV tear it down, burn it, and defecate on the ashes. There are organizational problems to be solved around risk and CYA and I am interested to see how this goes next at NIH. Also curious to see how GLP-1s fare the next four years - are they frontline drugs to help the obese or shunned as overmedicating?
Ask Questions of SQLite Databases - I’m working on a small Javascript project right now and a significant part of the dev work has been narrating what I want. Dev tools are a-changin’ and this here utility is pretty slick. It’s not only a new way to query, but also resolves the SQL used so you can learn as you go.
Timeless
From 1 to 1000000 - I have a thing for numbers. Especially big numbers. But first let’s get a keen sense of just how big a million really is.
From 1000000 to Graham’s Number - Now that’s out of the way, get ready for some fantastic numeric hooliganism. Graham’s number is profoundly, deeply absurd.
Ideas Are Alive And You Are Dead - Plato wrestled with the fleeting permanence of ideas in the cave and elsewhere and the same idea has settled in the mindspace of nearly all of us ever since.
”Do unto ideas as you would have them do unto you.Teach the children, and in one generation—a new world.”
Make Your Soul Grow - Kurt Vonnegut explains to a high school class how to make your soul grow by creating something new. If we are to believe that ideas live outside of us, one day that thing you create will come back.
Books
What Is It Like To Be A Bat? by Thomas Nagel - Strictly, this is an essay not a book, also referenced in the “Ideas are alive” essay. Nagel asks questions of the mind and consciousness by trying to understand the consciousness of a bat, which is both frightfully similar to us as mammals and yet has a wildly different sensory understanding of reality. Can we split the mind from the body? Is our model of the world really as good as we think? An awesome thought experiment. This is the book version I have.
Tweets
Cheers!