Technology is indistinguishable from magic
Hey friends,
Your weekly dose of the Knowledge Bottle Newsletter. You can think of this as a caffeine jolt of not just inspiration but also of tactical advice you can use.
📚 Book I’m Skimming: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They're also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see.
🍕Article I’m reading: Disposable People
Coronavirus and the lifestyles of the professional-managerial class
The relative ease and comfort that many in the professional-managerial class are experiencing during the pandemic is dependent on thousands of low-paid “invisible” workers.
IN NEW YORK CITY AND throughout the country, the professional-managerial class is hunkered down and making the best of a bad situation: working remotely, enjoying time with their families, making sure their children stay up on their schoolwork, finding ways to work out, exercising self-care, and catching up on all the shows they’ve wanted to binge-watch. This could be told as a story about the wonders of technology and capitalism. Social media, communication platforms, delivery services, and streaming entertainment make life under quarantine more bearable and productive. But such a narrative would miss the main story.
🧠 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice - latest one by Kevin Kelly
The ones I enjoyed:
• If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.
• For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal by the end of its life.
• When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.
🎧 Podcast I’m listening: AI for Good: clean water access in Africa
🍕 Oldie but goldie - Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.” On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole by Amazon.com.
🍕 Pallets: The single most important object in the global economy
Pallets rest outside of our imagination, regarded as scrap wood sitting outside grocery stores or holding massive jars of olives at Costco.
🍕 Schizotypal personality disorder and Henry Darger
About Henry: He was a reclusive man who worked various dishwashing jobs for most of his life. He only had one real friend in the course of his life, and although he occasionally interacted with the other residents of his apartment complex, they just saw him as a peculiar, taciturn eccentric. But when Darger was on his deathbed, his landlord Nathan Lerner began to clean out his room and discovered something incredible. Unknown to everyone around him, Darger had been writing and painting. Writing and painting a lot. Among the objects Lerner discovered were fifteen massive volumes comprising one continuous fictional work entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. In total, the typed, single-spaced text was 15,145 pages long -- one of the longest fictional works ever produced by a human being, if not the longest.
🍕 Relying on 'local food' is a distant dream for most of the world
The study also showed that foodsheds are mostly relatively compact areas for individual crops. When crops are looked at as a whole, foodsheds formed larger areas, spanning the globe. This indicates that the diversity of our current diets creates global, complex dependencies.
Cool tweet
Each time I view this clip, I think of Clarke’s third law. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The Quote
A person’s best thinking is rarely communicated through synchronous conversation.
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