Author: Dave R (Admin)

Still haven’t finished chapter 1, but I’ve been really interested to learn about Lynn Margulis. She’s the reason Blaise talks about Symbiosis (and also is perhaps the reason the book is called ‘What is Intelligence’ (she wrote ‘What is Life‘). To recap: in the book ‘What is Intelligence’ Blaise Agüera y Arcas writes about the…

Tl;Dr – starting a new book called What is Intelligence. It’s pretty great. A friend of mine suggested I read the new book by Blaise Agüera y Arcas called What is Intelligence. The basic premise of the book is that Intelligence is intrinsic to what we call Life, but is also present in things we…

I guess I thought CDMX would be like the big european cities. In some places it feels very classically European – 4-5 story buildings butted together uniformly across a whole block. In other areas it feels more modern European: highly diverse architecture butted together uniformly across the block. Most of the first floor is some…

Tl;Dr: Chapter 3 argues against the idea that social inequality is our ancestral heritage It’s easy (and naive these authors argue) to imagine life in the distant past as either In this chapter, the David’s argue that those conceptions are not supported by current evidence, are likely due to evidential bias from older sources and…

Tl;Dr: the idea that private property lead to social inequality came from Native Americans I gotta say – this chapter blew my mind. I (and perhaps you) thought that Jean-Jacques Rosseau wrote Discourse on the Inequality of Man more or less on his own. Turns out it was written as an entry in a national…

Tl;Dr: Rosseau didn’t think up ‘private property is the source of inequality’ on his own. Native American Intellectuals came up with it. So the Dawn of Everything is a really big book. Not really so huge in terms of number of pages, but definitely in terms of breadth of ideas and number of rabbit holes.…

Tl;Dr: making precise miter cuts in wood takes skill that is not obvious when coming from the virtual world. Mostly because nothing is square I like making physical things (ok, mostly food). But a lot of what I’ve made in the world is digital. When I tell my friends I’m doing wood working, those that…

Tl;Dr: Edwin P. Abbott Jr, furloughed park ranger. And the love child of Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons When I was in Junior Highschool my band instructor always had awesome halloween costumes – one memorable year he went as a Rock Lobster. He was great. He inspired me to make fun costumes, which I did…

Tl;Dr: Muscle burn isn’t caused by lactic acid, but it might be OK to think that anyway When you exercise hard your muscles feel like they’re burning. Most people think of this as ‘Lactic Acid’, annnnndd… that’s wrong. Here’s a very good article, backed by this scholarly research. The short version is: Lactic Acid is…

Tl;Dr: Data nerds want to check if they’re doing their plan. Todoist data should help. I’m a data nerd – always have been. Data is great to understand how systems are working, especially systems that have expectations associated with them. For example: I have 37 different ‘projects’ in ToDoist, and I expect to things on…