Author: Dave R (Admin)

  • Dawn of Everything: Ch. 3 – Protean Possibilities

    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…

  • Dawn of everything: Chapter 2 “Wicked Liberty”

    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…

  • Dawn of Everything: Chapter 1

    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.…

  • Making miter cuts: It ain’t so easy

    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…

  • Halloween 2025

    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…

  • Muscle Burn & Lactic Acid

    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…

  • Eyes>Stomach: Goal monitoring

    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…

  • Generative AI as a metaphor for consciousness

    Tl;dr: What if we think of GenAI as an immature black box consciousness? Generative AI goes by lots of names these days: ChatGPT, LLM, AI, Chatbot. I’ll be using GenAI from here on out. The field overall contains a lot of interesting and distinct things (Machine Learning, advanced statistics, large and small language models). What’s…

  • Running a (dropship) store

    Tl;Dr: A simple store is easy and cheap, making it real costs at least lots of time I setup a quick Printify Dropship shop called 3rdtime.printify.me to sell Impeachment related shirts to help spread the word, and to maybe benefit one of my Kids a little bit financially. The idea was: use our current situation…

  • Underground Seattle

    My team took the Underground Seattle tour last week. When it was over I was a bit sad it was so short – a sign of a good time. The thing that’s amazing about the tour and Seattle history how quickly things changed. In 45 years the city was founded, burned down, regraded, and built…