Those detail-oriented readers may notice a change to the site's main menu. The "What I'm Reading" link has been changed to "Books to Read." This is part of a series of small changes I'll be implementing over the next few months to better emphasize to potential visitors what the site is all about, and what they can expect to gain by coming here.
Scattered
It was probably in the sixth or seventh grade that I first can recall being referred to as a "renaissance man." Like many of the appelations which have been applied to me throughout the years, I adopted this one and made it my own.
5 Minutes a Day
Five minutes a day is not some kind of magic number or formula, but merely a stand-in for the idea of incremental, rather than drastic, changes to create new habits and routines.
The Father of Invention
In woodworking, and a lot of other fields, there exists a variation on the saying “a poor woodworker blames his tools.” The thought that if only I had those tools, or those resources, or that setup, I wouldn’t be having this problem is a convenient and difficult-to-disprove balm to pride and psyche. It’s also a crutch that can ultimately retard a person’s ability to improve.
A Close Encounter with Ryugu
This Saturday article thing is probably not going to continue being every week, no matter what the past three weeks might indicate. However, I did want to share this article I read in Science about an asteroid sample return mission to Ryugu, a C-type asteroid that is, as the saying goes, in the neighborhood, (by … Continue reading A Close Encounter with Ryugu
The Audiobook Moment
xpanding for the past few years, to the point where major authors from Gladwell to Sanderson are releasing some of their new pieces first as audiobooks, and only later sending them to print (if they send them to print at all). The way people are talking, this is a new thing, the next big thing to accompany the podcast moment.
Missing Books
None of those advantages have changed, but I've recently reached a position where the possibility of having bookshelves again is more viable, and I've been thinking about what kinds of books would be on those shelves. Mostly, my physical book collection consists of nonfiction tomes, and books from my childhood. Contemplating this, I've been thinking how nice it would be to have some of the books that I've read on Kindle, the ones I've really enjoyed or reference/re-read very frequently, as "real" books. Yet buying duplicate books seems terribly inefficient.
Dragon’s Egg Review
I like to consider myself open-minded, and I have long argued for the inadequacy of our definition of life and the limiting ways in which we conduct our search for extraterrestrial beings, but even I would not have considered the possibility of life existing on a neutron star. Sometimes, I think the more we know about a thing, the more limited our view of it becomes. It’s not that I had dismissed the possibility of life existing on the surface of a neutron star, but that I had never even considered it. Fortunately, Dragon’s Egg corrected that unfortunate deficit.
Origins of Imagination
the neurological ones. We sometimes seem to forget that our brains are as much a product of evolution as the rest of our bodies, as if somehow the brain was derived from a different process than produced that enlarged cranium that contains it. Plus, it’s one thing to understand the history of the amygdala or the hippocampus, and something else entirely to understand the evolutionary underpinnings of something more nebulous, like imagination.
Thoughts on Losing the War
Perhaps I could have made this into a “book review” – the essay is certainly lengthy enough to justify it – but I rarely have trouble keeping up with book reviews, while writing Tuesday’s blog posts can be more of a challenge. More pertinently, I don’t so much want to review Losing the War for you, as I do want to share my thoughts on this peculiar, rambling essay. It was something my dad first found and shared with me several years ago, and it somehow came up in recent conversation, so I decided to revisit it. If you haven’t read it before, you can find it here: Losing the War.
IGC Publishing 