I just heard that Annie Dillard, a writer who expressed the wonder and wildness of the natural world, has passed away. Reading Dillard I became aware that, far from being conservative…selecting for the least amount of energy consumption…the creative forces that bring us life are wildly playful, exuberant, and wealthy. After the one extravagant gesture…
I just got from the library Kevin Kelly’s book Excellent Advice for Life: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. It’s a pithy little volume, packed with tiny bits of wisdom. It’s like a cross between the best package of fortune cookies you’ll ever find and the Biblical book of Proverbs. Friends are better than money.…
It took about 50 years for the automation of elevators to eliminate the job of elevator operator. Once you can reach your floor with the simple push of a button, why would you pay someone just to push the buttons? The problem is that elevator operators delivered other services besides being sure the lift was…
If we design and construct buildings to suit our purposes, why do some buildings adapt with us as our purposes change, but other buildings refuse to change? That’s the question Stewart Brand asks in this six part series created by the BBC, based on his book How Buildings Learn. Over the course of the series…
Did Jorge Luis Borges foresee a future crafted by Artificial Intelligence? Hear me out. Two weeks ago we had a Google rep come to our workplace to demo some of Gemini’s agentic capabilities. She gave us links to some sales data, inventory stats, a code block, and a prompt. Everything was precooked, and I entered…
You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for. Ted Turner. There’s a problem with “reaching for the stars” that self-help brokers won’t tell you. Beyond the star you’re reaching for, there’s always another star. It’s not that goals are bad. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noted that having a clear goal…
I’ve been using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology almost as long as GTD has been around. But I’ve been struggling with the “Someday/Maybe” portion of the Weekly Review. This week I found something that put it all together for me. Luke, a commenter on the GTD website writes: It’s not a parking lot for…
Correlation is not the same as causation, I get that. But the past week I felt positively wrung out, crumpled up, and stomped upon at the end of every workday. And every day was a full-court press to write four pages of user documentation by EOD, using Anthropic Claude as my research assistant. Are the…
I’m old enough to remember the warning about social media, “if you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product.” In any social club, somebody’s got to pay to keep the lights on. With online platforms there is a process of growing a customer base, locking people in to the platform by making it…
I have to say that “respect” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Slab City, an informal community of faded snowbirds, desert rats, creatives, burnt-out meth heads, and a few others who simply want to drop off the grid. But there it is, emblazoned on the side of a concrete…
Here’s to the start of another year. My personal goal for the coming year is to spend a part of every day simply “writing to be writing.” Not writing for blog posts, not writing for publication, not writing to anyone in particular. Just putting my butt in the chair and putting words to paper…or whatever…
One way to bring life back to the internet is to make it weird again. According to software developer Jonas Hultenius, quirkiness is one of the things that made the early web feel alive. Today’s obsession with metrics and vitality are starving off everyday treasures, small wonders, and genuine oddities. If you were online in…
Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon use the word Waldsterben, meaning “forest death,” to describe the state of the internet today. Just like a forest that has been clear-cut and replanted with a single species, the internet is quickly depleting itself of life and vitality. The walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter, and Google each act to…
In the final act of Picasso at Lapin Agile, a mysterious visitor from the future, wearing blue suede shoes, enters the bar and makes a striking pronouncement. VISITOR: ‘Cause this century, the accomplishments of artists and scientists outshone the accomplishments of politicians and governments. The rest of ensemble, including Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and a…
When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system. This quotation, attributed to the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, gives me hope that small groups of people working together may be able to shift our chaotic politics into something better. But is it realistic, or…
