Category: TD/GDMBR 2024
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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A visit to the Burke Museum
Tl;Dr: I got to visit the Burke with a staff member – awesome. My friend P. works at the Burke Museum at the UW, and gave me a tour. I’ve never been in, it was great. The Burke was founded in 1887 (?) by some of the Denny kids, so it’s one of the oldest…
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4 Corners 2025 pt 2
TL;Dr: More old buildings, Day 4: To Bluff! Bluff is a little hippy community about 30 min south of Blanding. It’s… Less Bland. Good coffee & espresso, nice art & rugs, a felting workshop, and another Petroglyph wall. This one had quite a bit of graffiti on it hard to know what you were looking…
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4 Corners 2025
TL;Dr: SW Utah is awesome, as always. Petroglyphs & Pictographs. Puebloan architecture. Amazing geography and great friends. Just wanna see the pics? Here you go. We have a group of friends to go places – Hawaii, New Orleans, now the 4 Corners area of the Colorado Plateau – Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. One…
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Veritasium Appreciation
Tl;Dr: Veritasium on YouTube is really good, e.g. Nobel, 6 degrees and genetic engineering are awesome & apropos Veritasium is a YouTube channel focusing on science and math, and it does an amazing job. Both in making things comprehensible and relevant. Some recent examples: The story of Alfred Nobel – he invented high explosives, then…
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Book report: Desert Solitaire
TL;Dr: Desert Solitaire is not what I expected – I really like it. I was expecting a cranky old man. And there is some of that. But there’s a lot more thoughtful, beautiful writing than I was expecting. The section on Uranium mining was interesting, then riveting. The descriptions of cow herding seemed very realistic.
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Book report: Altered Carbon
TL;Dr: a pretty good murder mystery with too much pew-pew and humpin I’ve been on a cyber-punk kick lately. Altered Carbon is apparently in the canon, and I liked the show so I gave it a shot. I’m a sucker for cyberpunk concepts, this book has a few that it explores well: what would happen…
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Book Report: Delta_V & Critical Mass
TL;Dr: Delta-V and Critical Mass were fun in a rather clinical way. Nice work Daniel Suarez I’ve been on a cyber-punk/sci-fi kick recently. Wanting to have some of those Snow Crash/Necromancer vibes. Surely there is a broader genre? Daniel Suarez’s books Delta-V and Critical Mass come up on a fair short list of options. These…