..............................made me feel smarter.
Monday, July 20, 2026
be stories worth examining............
It seems that there's quite the divide between the happy face we post online and the disinterest we actually have in the narrative of our own years.
The first step is to take a breath and dare to entertain the thought that in the debris of your life would be stories worth examining. That they are, as I just wrote, a kind of treasure.
The less we do this, the more unanchored we become, and susceptible to a virtual reality that will fill our entire waking hours given a ghost of a chance. To give your lost stories some attention is a surprisingly radical act.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
Let's blame Napoleon...........
For most of human history, children learned by living. A mother's hand guiding yours through bread dough. A father's voice teaching songs that carried ancestral memory. Village elders telling stories that encoded wisdom. Learning was intimate, immediate, and integrated with life itself. No grades, no bells, no sitting still for six hours. Knowledge flowed through relationship and practice.
Then Prussia lost a war. 1806. Napoleon crushed the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt. The Prussian government blamed their people. Too undisciplined, too free-thinking, too human. So they built a machine to manufacture better humans.
The created the first compulsory state-run school system in history. Children were sorted by age like industrial products. Marched between classes at the sound of bells like factory workers, forced to sit in rows like soldiers, and taught to memorize and repeat, never question or create.
The goal was to produce citizens who obeyed reflectively, solders who followed orders without thinking, and workers who showed up on time and did what they were told. Humans began confusing obedience with morality and conformity with intelligence.
It worked so well that America imported it wholesale. Horace Mann, the "Father of American Education," traveled to Prussia in 1843 and came back evangelical about their system. He called it "the perfect system for shaping citizens."
a metaphysical quest...............
Michelangelo identifies with the biblical hero, casting himself as a patriotic warrior who uses his particular gifts not only to advance his art but as a weapon in the virtuous struggle of Florence against its enemies.
But there is more to these lines than mere chest-thumping. Michelangleo always conceived the sculptor's craft as a metaphysical quest. This most material of art forms becomes in Michelangelo's conception a means of probing for pure spirit beneath a shell of gross matter, one that defines the artist as well as the matter upon which he works his will. This was not merely an abstract conceit: Michelangelo saw the art of sculpture as, crucially, a process of self-discovery, of self-actualization. In a passage that was almost certainly known to him, the late classical philosopher Plotinus used the art of sculpture as a metaphor for the means by which we perfect our moral selves: "Withdraw into yourself and look. If you do not see beauty within you, do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes it there, he makes this line lighter, this one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble. Do you do this too. . . ." Reversing the analogy, the artist, discovering form within the mass, experiences release from his own carnal nature. The giant slain by the sculptor's bow, then, is in some sense Michelangelo himself, or at least the grosser aspects of his nature that he defeats through the redemptive power of his art.
-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces
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| Michelangelo David 1501-04 |
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Glitches..........................
When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding.
Not quite true for us...................
.........................the critters beat us to them:
We ate our first tomato and cucumber from the garden today. The garden is a good one this year but I made the mistake of planting too closely.
Monday, July 13, 2026
a free hand................
In this petulant note—written in haste by an old man whose crankiness was exacerbated by a recent attack of kidney stones—we can sense the frustration that came from a lifetime spent battling those who viewed his profession with contempt. In the face of the skeptics and scoffers, Michelangelo promoted a new conception of the artist, one in which the crass demands of commerce and the demeaning associations of manual labor have been sloughed off to reveal a creature as yet ill-defined but still thoroughly magnificent. . . .
Michelangelo's determination to chart a new course embroiled him in endless quarrels as his claim of superiority clashed with his employers' own considerable egos. While patrons tended to regard him and his colleagues as, at best, highly trained professionals tasked with carrying out their vision, Michelangelo insisted on an unprecedented degree of freedom to pursue his own vision, on his own terms. Cardinal Cervini (soon to be elected Pope Marcellus II), in charge of overseeing the rebuilding of St. Peter's, was one of many who discovered how difficult it was to control the headstrong artist. When he asked Michelangelo to inform him of his plans, the artist snapped; "I am not obligated, nor do I intend to be obliged to say either to your highness or to any other person what I am bound or desirous to do." Even when his relationship with a patron was one of mutual respect, Michelangelo chafed at any restrictions placed on his freedom. "If Your Holiness wishes me to accomplish anything," he wrote to Pope Clement VII, "I beg you not to have authorities set over me in my own trade, but to have faith in me and give me a free hand. Your Holiness will see what I shall accomplish and the account I shall give of myself."
Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces
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| Michelangelo Moses c 1513-16 marble sculpture |
Sunday, July 12, 2026
The problem with AI ..........
.........................is its current untrustworthiness and error rate. If a startup has some crazy glitch on an AI-generated web site, it probably is not that damaging but the stakes are much higher for established companies. The problem in my mind boils down to the AI's lack of skepticism.
Everyone has heard of Descartes "I think therefore I am," but his actual logic was a bit different. It can best be summarized as "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am." The core of thinking for Descartes was doubt, or as I call it, skepticism. By Descartes' definition, can AI be actually thinking without skepticism?
This isn't a problem limited to AI -- much of the human race seems to have lost the ability to be skeptical. It seems everyone is really good at a knee-jerk skepticism of anything originating across the political aisle, but the capacity for skepticism for one's own work or for inputs that reinforce one's core beliefs is limited.
-Warren Meyer, from this Coyote Blog post
Yep......................
Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments.
Saturday, July 11, 2026
Active optimism...............
Always assume things will work out, then do the work to make it true. That combination creates a quiet confidence that allows you to tolerate uncertainty better than anything else.
-Sahil Bloom, from this newsletter
politics......................
The Democratic Party no longer has a knack for its business, which supposedly is politics. In America, this means cobbling together majority coalitions from a politically and culturally diverse continental nation. The second proposition is that the nation cannot have just one healthy party. When one welcomes contamination by the extremism and stupidity on its side of the spectrum, the other, relishing the collapse of standards, does likewise.
-George Will, as excerpted here
thinking about burnout.................
The old system said: “Obey.” The new system says: “Realize your potential,” which can be a much crueler thing because potential’s infinite, and people, last time I checked, are not. There’s no stopping point in an achievement society. “Potential” is the modern world’s term for whatever you haven’t done yet and, frankly, should already kinda feel bad about.
-Eric Barker, from this post
It's an art......................
It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.
-Françoise Sagan, as quoted here
Friday, July 10, 2026
the tidal wave of being..............
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
-Jack London, The Call of the Wild
reciprocation................
I explained to him something we at Echelon Front call the "reciprocal nature of leadership," which put simple means that what you give, you get in return. When you show that your care for your people, they reciprocate; they care in return. When you listen to your people, they listen in return. When you treat your people with respect, that respect is returned. And so on.
-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead
anti-fragile.............
The Harvard Grant Study followed subjects for 80 years and found that participants who chose comfort over challenge aged faster, died sooner, and reported less life satisfaction.
We are anti-fragile systems. We require stress to maintain basic functions. Remove all challenge and we literally decompose.
In the background.....................
Lynyrd Skynyrd.................Simple Man
Mama told me when I was young
Come sit beside me, my only son
And listen closely to what I say.
And if you do this
It will help you some sunny day.
Take your time... Don't live too fast,
Troubles will come and they will pass.
Go find a woman and you'll find love,
And don't forget son,
There is someone up above.
And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?
Forget your lust for the rich man's gold
All that you need is in your soul,
And you can do this if you try.
All that I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.
And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?
Boy, don't you worry... you'll find yourself.
Follow your heart and nothing else.
And you can do this if you try.
All I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.
And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?
maps......................
Opening it one night in my house, an ordinance survey map of Connemara made little sense to Martin. Mostly, it was what was isn't in it that he had an eye for. Refolding it, he handed it back to me saying, "What chance have we when that's where we think we live."
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
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