Musings
A weekly collection of interesting things
Happy Thursday!
It’s here! It’s finished! It’s posted!
Can you tell I’m a little excited? Well, I am. I’m done my short graphic story, and it’s posted for your enjoyment. It’s called “Mammoth”, because…well… it involves a Mammoth. Weird, right?
If you like it, please share it around. I’d also love to hear any comments you might have, either posted below the comic, or sent to me by email.
https://ceti-ltd.ca/2018/11/06/mammoth/
And now, on to what I’ve been musing on this week…
Do you want to sabotage an organization? The CIA has now de-classified their field manual for doing so, and it looks suspiciously like there are A LOT of undercover CIA agents around. That would explain a great deal about the government, for example…
http://www.openculture.com/2015/12/simple-sabotage-field-manual.html
For some years now, certain groups online have been using a triple parentheses around names to identify those of Jewish descent, and mark them for harassment and threats. There are many other ways of marking groups or ideas, though — language is never politically neutral, and can reveal underlying biases and assumptions the speakers don’t even realize they’re holding.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-deafening-echoes-of-marked-language/
“Why do you insist on perceiving me through binary gender concepts?” A non-binary gendered person talks about the difference between sex and gender, and how a non-gendered identity can be freeing in a world that is obsessed with classifying people as one discrete gender or the other, and enforcing how people of that gender ought to behave. At a time when Trump and his cronies are working to legislate trans and non-binary people out of existence, this is an important perspective.
https://aeon.co/essays/nonbinary-identity-is-a-radical-stance-against-gender-segregation
And speaking of ideas about gender infusing everything in society — here’s an interesting article on how Silicon Valley is working to take over the diet industry, and turn your body into a technical problem to be solved. What I found most interesting (and a little disturbing) about this was the discussion about the gender coding of diets and food that the new diet tech people are trying to get around.
The nature of consciousness is something that psychologists have been arguing over for decades, and philosophers have been arguing over for centuries. New technologies for studying ourselves and the living world around us have forced us to realize that this question, arguably one of the toughest and most complicated we have ever encountered, is even more complicated than we thought. Here is an article discussing a new wrinkle to the old question — do plants have consciousness? If we say they do not because they don’t have a nervous system or other such structures, are we being ignorantly self-centered about our definitions of consciousness? These questions have implications not just for understanding ourselves and our world, but for how we might understand life from other worlds, if or when we meet them.
I’ve never been a big fan of Apple products — not because of the quality of their products, but for how they treated their customers. Now they’re doubling down on the exploitation of customers, and Cory Doctorow has some very pithy comments to make on the choices people face in terms of their spending and their politics.
https://boingboing.net/2018/11/04/how-about-no-monopolies.html
What I’m reading:
Fiction:
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
I first read these books a few years ago, before the TV series based on this series was made, but I decided it was time to re-visit them. If you’re familiar with the TV show, you’ll know that it was a dense, intricate and complex plot that you had to pay attention to follow — it really isn’t light fare you can only sort of pay attention to and still enjoy. The books are even more so. That’s the kind of book I enjoy, though, and Morgan not only keeps the plot moving, he does excellent far-future world building that makes you think about the relationship between one’s self and one’s body, and what the possibility of eternal life and youth would mean for society. If you’re into far-future science fiction, I recommend this book and this series.
Non-fiction:
Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko
Creativity and Innovation is not some strange mysterious process, it’s really all about asking better questions. Michalko has an entire book chock full of better questions, and exercises to help you find your better questions. He divides the exercises into logical and intuitive types, but I personally think that it’s an unnecessary distinction, as there isn’t a clear division between the two approaches and types of thinking, either in life or in his questions. I’ll have to play more with his various exercises to see what ones I find useful, and what I think are not so much, but it seems to be a very interesting list of ways to turn around your thinking.
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Thanks for reading, and have a great week!
