links and bookmarks
Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.
Apparently We Just Give Up And Call It Magic Now
On The Speaking Of Names: TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK, Steve Erickson
Swim Against The Current: NOVELIST AS A VOCATION, Haruki Murakami
One Hell Closes, Another One Opens
Audiobooks Without Audible, Books Without Amazon
(Edith) Wharton always kept a donnée book (a French word meaning the nascent elements of a story) in which she recorded the plot outlines, little one-liners, social critiques, and clever analogies that would someday be used in one of her books.
Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, Sarah Stodola (shop)
Manuscript notebook with names of characters, pieces of dialogue; excerpts of what would become The House of Mirth.
Saving the ones I like from this Casual Optimist post:
EDITED TO ADD: A Spanish edition of Cynan Jones that caught my eye:
That’s how we came to start a school called HOME. When people ask us what kind of school it is, the first answer has always been, ‘It’s a school that starts from the conversations that happen around our kitchen table.’ It matters that it’s the kitchen table, because these are the conversations that happen in the room where the cooking and the washing up get done. ‘When people start to wake up to the assumption of separability,’ I remember Vanessa Machado de Oliveira telling us one time around that table, ‘there’s this desire to rush out the door of the house modernity built, into the garden, to feel connected to all the beauty of the living world.’ But there’s something missing here, she went on: a willingness to feel our connection with what is going on in all the other rooms of the house of modernity; not least where the dirty work is being done, who is doing it, and the ways it has been kept out of sight.
And as I write this, I think again of Eno’s definition of culture and see it from another angle. For in some sense, all human cultures are riffs on the same theme: living and dying, eating and getting eaten, the feast and the funeral. Comedy and tragedy cycling like night and day. For a while, we rolled out street lamps and sat in front of screens at all hours and the stars hid themselves, like animals retreating into the forest from our noise. We outsourced the growing and making of food and kept the dying out of sight lest any of these things spoil our appetites. But when the street lamps start to go out – as they did in many European cities this winter – we find the old rhythm still there, however much damage we have inherited, and so we have to find a way of adding our variations to all the others that humans have come up with in all the times and places where we have been human together.
Superb little essay by Dougald Hine in his newsletter.
a pair of researchers want to rebuild the concept of the habitable zone using a more fundamental concept of computation. They argue that the best chances of finding signs of life are where there is easiest access to computation. The researchers argue that these so-called “computational zones” require three characteristics. One, there must be the capacity for computation, which means that there is a rich set of chemistry available. Two, there must be a raw form of energy, like sunlight or hydrothermal vents. And lastly, computation requires a substrate—something in which the computation can take place.
The traditional view of habitable zones can now be seen as a subset of a much larger concept of computational zones.
As seen in Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes’ newsletter, from an article he published at this link here:
The core argument is that “Metaphysics should be used to integrate and understand psychedelic-induced metaphysical experiences.” No shit Sherlock, you may be thinking, but the fact of the matter is that something so obvious does not happen. This text seeks to remedy that, making the case that psychedelic therapy is not the sole province of psychology or psychiatry, or neuroscience for that matter. Beyond therapy, it also points to societal enrichment. References provided span two and half millennia, slightly over the ten-year period that my psychology students (for Philosophy of Mind) said they were told not to transgress in their discipline.
Fascinating read by Cory Doctorow:
With a Kickstarter campaign now underway for the audio edition of his new book, ‘Red Team Blues,’ Cory Doctorow shares the mistakes of his past campaigns—and why it’s all worth it
It’s a mystery why this is all so complicated. And actually, it doesn’t have to be. You can skip all of this nonsense and just sell the files within an app that can handle all the downloading, unzipping, and playback behind the scenes. But every in-app purchase comes with a 30% commission to Apple or Google, which would explain why these two tech giants have completely enshittified direct downloading: the worse the direct download experience is, the better handing over a third of your gross revenue starts to look. It’s the mobile duopoly’s version of the airline industry continuously dreaming up new petty cruelties for their coach fares.
One of the US nuclear bombs stored at a Dutch air base may have been damaged in a recent accident, according to a report published on Monday, which comes at a time when a new generation of the weapons are due to arrive on the continent.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) discovered a photograph of a B61 bomb being inspected for damage by US soldiers, including two from an explosive ordnance disposal unit, and a civilian. The rear of the bomb appears to have been twisted by an impact and one of the tail fins is missing. There is pink sticky tape covering an apparent hole.
Sometimes you just have to hold on to these little gems of language: “Bent Spear”:
Any damage to a nuclear weapon is known as a “bent spear” incident, and generally kept secret.
The invention, by a University of Bristol physicist, who gave it the name “counterportation,” provides the first-ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space, as a probe into the inner workings of the universe.
By deploying a novel computing scheme, revealed in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, which harnesses the basic laws of physics, a small object can be reconstituted across space without any particles crossing. Among other things, it provides a “smoking gun” for the existence of a physical reality underpinning our most accurate description of the world.
Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.
Chekhov’s Water Bottle: BULLET TRAIN (2022)
Dennis Potter’s Last Interview