Musings
A weekly collection of interesting…
Here are some things I’ve been musing about…
This view of life makes all sorts of sense — plotting your activities on two axes; one on whether it energizes or depletes you, one on whether the activity is your own priority or someone else’s. The balance of where the majority of your activities fall in the four resulting quadrants can tell you a lot about why you feel your life is balanced or not.
https://qz.com/173703/your-work-life-balance-hangs-in-these-four-quadrants/
Gian-Carlo Rota was a somewhat eccentric mathematician, a professor at MIT who was known for his readable, humorous essays (a readable mathematician — who knew?). Fortunately for all of us, one of his essays “Ten lessons I wish I had been taught” is available freely online, and contains advice that’s written for young mathematicians, but applicable to just about everyone. I especially like the Feynman advice to keep a dozen or so problems that you’re working on in the back of your head, and when you run into a new idea or technique, pull out your problems and give them all a try to see whether it helps. Every once it a while it will work, and everyone with think you’re a genius. That sounds like a brilliant way to come up with great stories…
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~cyan/Rota/tenlesses.pdf
If it were possible to outsource our bad days and bad moments, hire someone else to feel bad for us… doing the feeling bad part would probably end up as a crappy minimum wage job. Charles Yu’s short story is based on just this premise, one that feels a little too true, at times…
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/standard-loneliness-package/
This just made me happy: the Tree Alphabet.
https://kottke.org/17/09/the-tree-alphabet/
What I’m reading:
Fiction:
Inherit the Earth by Brian Stableford
This book was written some time ago (the copyright on my copy is 1998), but it’s held up well in the twenty years since publication, which says a lot about the story about the author. It’s a science fiction story of humanity that has had a couple of very long-lived generations due to Internal Technology, and is now in the brink of achieving full immortality. Within that setting, Stableford spins an interesting and believable tale about generational motivations and inheritance, and the forces that would struggle to control (or not control) the technologies of immortality. It was one of those reads that I especially enjoy — one that is a good story on its own, but also a thoughtful comment on life and society.
Non-Fiction:
Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland
Both authors are visual artists, but they have experienced the fears that are common to artists of all types, and they have written clearly and sympathetically about them, and the ways that they have found to deal with the fears. In general, I found Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art” to be more practical and more inspirational, but Bayles and Orland are a little more gentle and a little less in-your-face about getting the work done, and some readers might appreciate that gentler approach.
Thanks for reading, enjoy your Thursday!
