I recently found a pdf of an important biography of Omori Sogen, the most important zen master of the 20th century, at least in the Rinzai Lineage. Meido Roshi, my teacher, refers to it in this YouTube video. I encourage you to listen to if you are interested in Zen. Meido is in the lineage of Sogen via his Sogen’s Dharma heir Hosokowa Roshi (who wrote the book below) and then one of Hosokawa’s dharma heirs Miller Roshi after Hosokawa retired.
The book itself is hard to get hold of, and cannot be shipped outside the US, so I decided to post the PDF here in case it is of help.
I’ll post some notes later. Its a fascinating read about the life of an unusual zen master who spent most of his life as a lay person in the real world – most zen masters begin their training in their teens or early twenties (such as Meido).
“Having adjusted your body in this manner, take a breath and exhale fully, then sway your body to left and right. Now sit steadfastly and think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen.”
This is my favourite translation of my favourite introduction to zen meditation, a kind of poem to introduce the central practice of zen: sitting meditation (Zazen). This is also one of my favourite pieces of writing, full stop. Dogen is the key figure in Japanese Soto Zen, which is the most prominent zen branch in the west. People who hear I went on a retreat often ask for a pointer to an introduction to meditation, so here it is.
The words here are largely not meant to be understood literally. They are poetic, as is the case in most zen writings. The key instruction of ‘think non thinking’ is also not meant to be a readily followed instruction – a little like learning to ride a bike, the task of meditation is to learn to find the meaning in the instructions yourself. You may notice contradictions in the writing – zen is full of this. A contradiction is a concept, a thought – part of zen is about seeing through these patterns of thought and seeing they are creations of the mind.
This is not the branch of zen my teacher is in, and the meditation here is different to the breath counting meditation more prominently used in Rinzai Zen, but for beginners like myself and probably for you these differences are not relevant.
Dogen, 1227, Japan – Recommending Zazen to all people
The real way circulates everywhere; how could it require practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available; how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is free of dust; why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this very place; why journey away?
And yet, if you miss the mark even by a strand of hair, you are as distant as heaven from earth. If the slightest discrimination occurs, you will be lost in confusion. You could be proud of your understanding and have abundant realization, or acquire outstanding wisdom and attain the way by clarifying the mind. Still, if you are wandering about in your head, you may miss the vital path of letting your body leap.
You should observe the example of Buddha Shakyamuni of the Jeta Grove, who practiced sitting up straight for six years even though he was gifted with intrinsic wisdom. Still celebrated is Master Bodhidarma of the Shaolin Temple, who sat facing the wall for nine years although he had already received the mind seal. Ancient sages were like this; who nowadays does not need to practice as they did?
Hence, you should stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body-mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.
For zazen, a quiet room is appropriate. Drink and eat in moderation. Let go of all involvements and let myriad things rest. Do not think good or bad. Do not judge right or wrong. Stop conscious endeavor and analytic introspection. Do not try to become a buddha. How could being a buddha be limited to sitting or not sitting?
In an appropriate place for sitting, set out a thick mat and put a round cushion on top of it. Sit either in the full or half-lotus posture. Loosen the robes and arrange them in an orderly way. Then place the right hand palm up on the left foot, and the left hand on the right hand, lightly touching the ends of the thumbs together.
Sit straight up without leaning to the right or left and without bending forward or backward. The ears should be in line with the shoulders and the nose in line with the navel. Rest the tongue against the roof of the mouth, with lips and teeth closed. Keep the eyes open and breathe gently through the nose.
Having adjusted your body in this manner, take a breath and exhale fully, then sway your body to left and right. Now sit steadfastly and think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen.
The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the dharma gate of enjoyment and ease. It is the practice-realization of complete enlightenment. Realize the fundamental point free from the binding of nets and baskets. Once you experience it, you are like a dragon swimming in the water or a tiger reposing in the mountains. Know that the true dharma emerges of itself, clearing away hindrances and distractions.
When you stand up from sitting, move your body slowly and rise calmly, without haste. We understand from past precedents that going beyond ordinary and sacred, where sitting and standing are effortless and boundless, depends solely on the power of zazen.
Furthermore, bringing forth the turning point by using a finger, a pole, a needle, or a mallet, or leading people to enlightenment with a whisk, a fist, a stick, or a shout cannot be understood by discriminatory thinking. How can it be understood by the use of supernatural powers? Zazen is an awesome presence outside form and color. How is it not the path preceding concept?
Thus, do not be concerned with who is wise and who is stupid. Do not discriminate the sharp from the dull. To practice whole-heartedly is the true endeavor of the way. Practice-realization is not defiled with specialness; it is a matter for every day.
Now, in this world and in other worlds, in India and China, buddha ancestors equally carry the buddha seal and teach the practice of sitting immersed in steadfastness. Although circumstances may vary in a thousand ways, whole-heartedly practice Zen, giving yourself fully to the way. Why give up the sitting platform of your own house and wander uselessly in the dust of a remote land? Once a wrong step is taken, you depart from the way.
Having received a human life, do not waste the passing moments. Already upholding the buddha way, why would you indulge in the sparks from a flint? After all, form is like a dewdrop on the grass. Human life is like a flash of lightning, transient and illusory, gone in a moment.
Honored practitioners of Zen, please do not grope for the elephant or try to grasp the true dragon. Strive to hit the mark by directly pointing. Revere the mind that goes beyond study and surpasses all doings. Experience the enlightenment of the buddhas, correctly inheriting the samadhi of the ancestors. Practice thusness continuously, and you will be thus. The treasury will open of itself for you to use as you wish.
Reddit comments on this that I liked:
The translation comes from a book I own, but rather than retype I found it online and copy pasted. Here are comments from the original reddit: both touch on the thing that is often so difficult to understand about zen – you are not adding anything to your mind, you are not grasping some external truth, but rather clearing obstacles that your mind creates. It is only after 3-4 days of near continuous meditation at Sesshin that I felt this long enough for it to be anything but a fleeting sensation, but it is perhaps the most striking state I have ever entered. It cannot be explained in words.
“Zazen is practical self improvement. In that when you practice it becomes obvious that you are improving
This obviousness is what Dogen is speaking to. To chase external mysteries or mysticism is to miss what is right here already, the inner mysteries of ourselves”
“Are you different when you zazen? No. Do you do something different when you zazen? Perhaps but not really. Do you do zazen because you like or dislike it? No neither; it’s just what you do. Why do you do it then? Enlightenment itself.
It’s hard to talk about. When people see Dogen and say they see contradictions or are confused it’s because of this delusion of like and not like, right and wrong or enlightened or enlightened etc. that we are all very fond of holding on to. Dogen in his writing took a step beyond the writing of his ancestors in describing zen in the most non dualistic way possible.”
“The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained. […] The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities.” Don Norman
NB: ‘The Knowledge Illusion: Why we never think alone’ by Sloman and Fernbach- is a good book to read to understand how little you actually internally know, how reliant on the outside world you are.
[this is a rough draft, to be turned into a fuller post once I’ve experimented with the system]
Imagine if that image, times 100, was a map of your thoughts, of a lifetime of research. Not just separate facts, pieces of information, but how they relate. How you could dip into one part, and quickly find all the other connecting parts over decade. To me that’s a dream, and the topic of this experiment and blog post. That topic is known as a Zettelkasten.
This Christmas I finished reading a book I hope will hold part of a solution to a range of related research challenges I’ve been toying with since I was an undergraduate. Here I briefly explain what this is, why I am starting one myself, and, mostly importantly, provide an index of resources on the topic, both for myself and for others. I do not attempt to summarise the system myself as others have done it well. I will add my own experiences as I use it over the coming months,.
The book I finished is a book about Zettelkasten’s by Sonke Ahrens, and is called ‘How to take smart notes’. Whilst I cite a range of resources to explore, none come close to explaining what is so attractive about this system and the theory underlying it.
The need for a ‘second brain’
One of the keys to the small amount of academic success I had was to apply simple techniques to address innate cognitive deficiencies that most of us have. Without these I might have got a grade or two lower at University.
I wrote previously about Deep Work in my post giving advice about working in lockdown. I’ll write shortly about another – spaced active recall and memory palaces. Together these address focus and improving memory of isolated facts, and together they addressed key points I needed to be strong at but was not naturally good at.
But there was a major gap in this I’ve been trying to fill since I was undergraduate, and I think I may have found a simple system to address it, just as Deep Work and Spaced Active Recall addressed key points for me.
I always worked in fields where accumulating large amounts of data points, such as results and observations, and then weaving them together, was paramount. This was something I was relatively good at, unlike focus + recall of isolated facts.
If you adopt a strategy of having a broad canvas, of trying to understand disparate areas and weaving them together, you run into a problem over time. Your memory fails, and so does your external memory system such as notebooks.
This is not a problem over a period of a year, and especially not when following a curriculum. As an undergraduate I could keep word docs of key papers and observations, based loosely on the categories I was given by tutors. Likewise, for a narrow topic given at work, you can study for that and keep notes together.
But what about study over 5 or 10 years? You begin to forget where your earlier observations are. You forget they existed. Links you might make between disparate subjects are lost. This is not such an issue if you work serially on a series of topics. But it becomes a big wasted opportunity if you want to work in a much more integrative way.
Most note-taking methods separate knowledge from use of knowledge. A notebook, for example, might have notes on a wide range of things ordered by time. To get around this, you could order your notes by topic. But what if the topic isn’t clear at the time, and will only grow later? And what if an observation is of use to a wide range of topics? Linear writing is not good for developing webs of knowledge.
An intro the Zettelkasten:
This is what the Zettelkasten system addresses. I was attracted to it as it seemed to achieve a number of things I’d been trying to evolve a system to do by trial and error. Zettelkasten centres on the connections between notes, ie how knowledge fits together to form a greater whole. Its not really just a knowledge management system – it is a thinking system where the thinking itself is done in the knowledge system. This is explained well by Sonke Ahrens in his book.
Zettelkasten is German for slip box. It is also a phrase for a note-taking, writing, study, and research system that purports to be both extremely simple and extremely effective.
This is a physical Zettelkasten (image from Wikipedia). I will be using a paper one, as I try to avoid computers as much as I can as I find them impossibly distracting and difficult to think whilst using, and also bad for health as they seem to alter your breathing. I cannot be calm whilst using a computer.
A key reason I was attracted to it is it was developed by Luhmann, a highly productive and influential sociologist who had a ‘rag to riches’ story to which he credited this system he made.
Here is an intro:
Here is a selection of links to intros/deep dives – I recommend reading through before picking which one to follow. Again, none is a substitute for the brilliant book by Ahrens (itself written using Zettelkasten), which is a wonderful exploration of how we may wrongly think of research and writing (never plan!).
And here is a more practical, example-based introduction to how the system should be used, including ‘writing your first Zettelkasten’: https://medium.com/@rebeccawilliams9941/the-zettelkasten-method-examples-to-help-you-get-started-8f8a44fa9ae6 Important suggestion of converting fleeting notes->literature notes on the same day they are made. This resonates with my own experiences. EDIT APRIL 2022: this is the guide most likely to be of use in my opinion, rereading it having experimented with the system for a little while.
Zettelkasten.de seems to be the best living blog on the topic of Zettelkasten, with explorations of particular points of detail: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ < Very good online detail of the system. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/ < Collectors Fallacy. Gathering knowledge without processing and using it as a work pitfall we often fall into. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/idea-index-journal-fiction/ < A piece on indexing your work + others. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/use-real-notebook/ An argument for using real notebooks, not index cards, for the original pre-zettel note stage: This can work with the explanation the YouTube video has, in which the bibliography has a single index card that could ‘point’ to the relevant page in the notebook.
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Zettelkasten ‘It’s an unusual system for developing ideas over long periods of time by slowly iterating on thousands of atomic slips of paper, all densely linked to each other. Over time, it evolved into what Luhmann considered to be an independent thought partner in his research, capable of carrying on a conversation with him and eliciting ideas which genuinely surprised him.’
Your first note doesn’t need to be anything important — it isn’t as if every idea you put into your Zettelkasten has to be “underneath” it. Remember, you aren’t trying to invent a good category system. Not every card has to look like a core idea with bullet points which elaborate on that idea, like my example in the previous section. You can just start writing whatever. In fact, it might be good if you make your first cards messy and unimportant, just to make sure you don’t feel like everything has to be nicely organized and highly significant.”
Updates – this isn’t readable – its a prompt for myself to add the next stage of this piece.
5th Feb 2022
I’ve begun this, and got around 100 cards. I’ve also found index cards are fantastic for keeping a notebook focussed on quality. Notebooks accumulate many wonderful/interesting thoughts/ideas/sections, but this can get cluttered out by the detritus of everyday reminders etc (another way to handle this is to put reminders in pencil, quality thoughts in pen).
Whats working/note working….
Good: 1) the index cards feel like a much better way of organising information than notebooks. Conversely, they are not as good for detailed thinking or writing drafts. They are complementary tools. 2) they promote a sense of flow somewhat better than working on a computer, for obvious reasons. 3) they are very easy to use. Bad: 1) I haven’t found a good way to transport index cards to work and back. Most boxes I can find are too big to carry in a box. I briefly thought of using digital, but this means I have to have my laptop open at times when I am trying to have it off………. 2) they are a little slower than digital, but I don’t think long-term that’s a problem as that slowness promotes quality of thought.
One key error has been to fall into converting it into an index, with title cards such as ‘politics’ or ‘Japanese cooking’. This is the role of a bibliography, not the Zettelkasten, and misses its key role- it is an organiser of ideas, identifying links between them. I won’t start from scratch, but will try to convert the existing slides I’ve got into that format.
As in the 5th Feb update, my original sorting of my ZK into clear headings was a major mistake. It has got me trapped inside the index level approach. I’m weighing up the right way to fix this.
“Many famous authors and artists used index cards in their work. The Russian-born American novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote his last novel The Original of Laura (subtitled A Novel in Fragments) on a set of 138 cards that were put together and published after his death. He also used index cards for his (in)famous Lolita. ” from – https://www.taskade.com/blog/zettelkasten-method-software-remote-work/ Note this is also how ‘Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance’ was written, as outlined in its sequel.
https://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/book.pdf – This link was recommended by one of the LessWrong posts as an alternative system to this – I have yet to study but will try to look at it before I get too deep into Zettelkasten – (I have tried briefly reading but it is incredibly irritatingly written, as though the author was on cocaine at the time)
The exact physiological basis of crown shyness is not certain. The phenomenon has been discussed in scientific literature since the 1920s. A prominent hypothesis is that canopy shyness has to do with mutual light sensing by adjacent plants [read more: https://t.co/SfCYqzWHqz] pic.twitter.com/wunrsQqq0X
Can you see the crowns not touching forming a canopy with jigsaw like spacing…this is crown shyness
Many reasons hypothesised for this, but such “social distancing” or personal space may be necessary for each tree’s self preservation and survival 1/3pic.twitter.com/esb8mZFtwM
@Rainmaker1973 is quickly becoming one of my favourite twitter feeds… a reliable source of enwonderment.
Floodings at the Rio de Prata Ecological Preserve in Brazil in February 2018, turned the nature trails into a surreal, underwater fantasy world. What makes this phenomenon so startling is that the water is so clear and calm [source, read more: https://t.co/9Pjk1TSa92] pic.twitter.com/Wfbq11XIBl
The ambiguous illusion objects invented by mathematician Kokichi Sugihara now include a Batman logo, printed and sold by 3DNY Design [source, more: https://t.co/0EupQY7SWE] pic.twitter.com/6wjlVMFGxD
The radial canals that move nutrients through the Halitrephes maasi jelly's bell form a starburst pattern with bright splashes of yellow and pink [source, full video: https://t.co/P6zRHQyp0o] pic.twitter.com/sqteR82VyV
A long-extinct lineage of insect, known as the 'hell ant', has been discovered frozen in 99-million-year-old amber, with its scythe-like jaw still pinning its prey. This predator is a newly identified species of a prehistoric ant: Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri https://t.co/IFjdqav7eipic.twitter.com/51Zr7qpQos
"Cellular landscape – the most detailed model of a human cell to date, obtained using x-ray, nuclear magnetic resonance, and cryoelectron microscopy datasets." pic.twitter.com/vS6khXlFzs
A reminder that you can go to the zoo and experience a time machine of sorts:
Crocodiles today look the same as they did 200 million years ago – new research strongly suggests crocodilians have remained unchanged for such a very long time because they have landed upon an equilibrium state that does not require them to change often https://t.co/lshIU2niYkpic.twitter.com/m6r8nvTbg2
If you see us in your garden please feed us cat food and/or vegetables. Fresh water not milk. We wander the streets at night and our paws don't allow us to run fast . . so if you see us on the road, lift us off of it. If you lift us below the belly, we won't jag you. Thank you. pic.twitter.com/26nbOcAaxa
— Dàibhidh Earrann Buachaille 🏴 (@ThonJacobite) September 28, 2021
I should post my favourite Da Vinci documentary (there are two versions – one with interviews w/historians interspersed), one just Capaldi acting. I prefer this one:
This illustration by Kimberly Elliott of the (predominantly leftish) cultural elite is so great. It's hard to imagine how anyone could surpass it. I think this is now the iconic image for that concept. pic.twitter.com/QSwnRmBmaD
Can you see that vibrant green defiant patch? That part is kept alive by the larvae of leaf mining insects, and even though its long fallen off the tree it’s still photosynthesising.
This is what an amateur astrophotographer can see from their backyard. Philip Smith imaged the SpaceX Dragon DM-2 docked to the International Space Station on june 30, 2020 from his backyard in Manorville, New York [source + equipment: https://t.co/D5pgz7FpYb] pic.twitter.com/Ldjx3mA0se
The Earth’s largest waterfall, the Denmark Strait Cataract, is 3 times the height of Angel Falls, dropping water a whopping 3,505 m, carries 2000 times more water per second than Niagara Falls during peak conditions, and is located completely underwater https://t.co/YB4VW0JBwHpic.twitter.com/U443Z9n1ZY
Tonight I head off to Sesshin and will be away from all email and phone contact until the 22nd of August. I will be doing a week of preparation then a week of Sesshin (beginning Friday week). I’ll post an update on how it went here.
Here is the approximate schedule we will be following. Zazen is meditation:
DAI-SESSHIN – TYPICAL DAILY SCHEDULE
First Night: Arrive by 6:30pm. Trainees to be dressed and in the zendo by 7:15pm
7:30 Opening of sesshin (in zendo).
7:45 Sozarei (opening tea)
8:00 Daza (zazen)
9:15 Sosan (interview with the Roshi – mandatory for all present)
10:00 Sarei/Kaihan/Kaichin (tea/striking the han/formal lights out)
10:15 Group meeting in the dining hall. Optional snack available.
10:30 Yaza (mandatory solo zazen practice, inside or outside) until 11:45pm.
12:00am Sleep or continue practice.
Typical Day
4:30am Kaijo (wake up)
4:50 Baito Sarei/Daza (umeboshi tea/zazen)
6:00 Dokusan (interview with the Roshi)
6:30 Choka (morning chanting)
7:15 Shukuza (morning meal)
8:00 Samu (work period, indoor and outdoor)
10:00 Daza (zazen)
11:00 Saiza (mid-day meal)
12:00pm Suiza (free sitting)
1:00 Sarei/Daza (tea/zazen)
2:30 Dokusan (interview with the Roshi)
3:00 Kaiyoku (wash)
4:15 Daza (zazen)
4:45 Yakuseki (evening meal)
6:30 Daza (zazen)
7:00 Kaihan/Kentan/Daza (striking the han/zendo inspection by the Roshi/zazen)
8:00 Dokusan (interview with the Roshi)
8:30 Teisho (lecture)
9:00 Daza (zazen)
10:00 Sarei/Kaihan/Kaichin (tea/striking the han/formal lights out) Afterward, optional snack followed by yaza (solitary sitting practice).
12:00am: Sleep or continue practice.
Final Morning
4:30am Kaijo (wake up)
4:50 Baito Sarei/Daza (umeboshi tea/zazen)
6:00 Sosan (interview with the Roshi – mandatory for all present)
A friend said he bought a collection of Godel’s proofs, and often enjoys sitting flicking through it, despite not being able to understand most of it.
Likewise with me and notebooks of old masters/brilliant scientists. I blogged here about holding Newton’s Fitzwilliam notebook in 2016. Perhaps a subconscious dream that a tiny bit of the magic will rub off on my inadequate hands….
I’ve been buying facsimiles when I can find them reasonably priced. Facsimiles are life sized replications of full documents. They are hard to find, perhaps because its a very quirky hobby to collect/read them. Anyway I’ll post them here as I get them, partly as an advertisement for ones I’m happy with + ppl shd buy if interested! Or ppl can borrow mine….
Codex Madrid Leonardo
The first is the first section of the Codex Madrid by Leonardo (it is two volumes in real life).
Newton’s college notebook (another one)
This is another college notebook – not the Fitzwilliam one. Its actually not all that different to holding an original…..
I’m publishing this now to get back to a monthly schedule. Less reading than a usual post so just doing it as a data dump. Next month I’ll largely be reading Zen stuff as I’m off on a retreat. Closing my mind off for a while from the buzz! This list is not comprehensive.
I have imposed a ban on buying books, as as of 31st July I bought 73 books this month, and a large pile in my basket ready to buy. This is unsustainable, though month is a clear outlier… But it makes me realise how much I like to read and how little time left in my life I have to read them……
PS, just after I posted this, I realised Newton & Nimbus have come and fallen asleep on my foot. So cute! And as I don’t want to disturb I will have to sit here and read for as long as they rest…..
A piece on how Apple/Google are having employee/executive tension re-ending WFH.
Seems a sensible development might be WFH days synchronising across the company? And will different companies align their WFH days? Will we end up moving to a situation with 3 work from work, 2 work from home, and 2 weekend days?
At some of tech’s biggest companies, tensions around remote and hybrid work could be on the rise. Many employees want to work from home permanently, without taking any kind of pay cut — while executives want their teams back in the physical office as much as possible.
Many of those employees who do manage to secure permanent remote-work privileges may also see their salaries slashed, with the amount of decrease determined by a custom-built internal tool. Google isn’t alone in weathering this controversy, of course. Various other tech giants, including Facebook and VMware, have announced that any employees deciding to move from Silicon Valley will see a lighter paycheck as a result.
Repeated surveys have found that the majority of technologists actually like the idea of hybrid work. In Dice’s 2021 Technologist Sentiment Report, some 85 percent of technologists found the prospect of hybrid work anywhere from somewhat to extremely desirable. That included 94 percent of younger technologists (i.e., those between 18 and 34 years old), who clearly see the physical office as an opportunity for collaboration and mentorship opportunities. Other Dice surveys have found that technologists generally aren’t willing to take a pay cut for remote work — and only 12 percent have said their companies are slashing pay in exchange for permanent work-from-home.
ProfSerious on Culture/Control tradeoffs in organisational management
I worked closely with Antony when he was NatSec Chief Scientific Adviser. Shades of Alan Kay here re degrees of control vs self-organisation…..
Nature – Massive DNA ‘Borg’ structures perplex scientists
“Researchers say they have discovered unique and exciting DNA strands in the mud — others aren’t sure of their novelty.” Not yet peer reviewed.
Named Borgs after the sci-fi creatures after a suggestion by the lead scientist’s son over dinner, these entities are argued to be a novel kind of extrachromosomal elements (ECE), ie a new kind of DNA structure like plasmids in bacteria. Argued to be much larger than existing – perhaps 1/3 the entire genetic material in an organism. They seem to be associated with Archaea, a kind of bacteria. They were found in east river, Colorado. Currently they cannot be cultured in the lab (a common problem with many kinds of bacteria).
River in Colorado where the proposed Borgs were found
Borgs seem to house many genes needed for entire metabolic processes, including digesting methane, says Banfield. She describes these collections as “a toolbox” that might super-charge the abilities of Methanoperedens.
So what makes a Borg a Borg? In addition to their remarkable size, Borgs share several structural features: they’re linear, not circular as many ECEs are; they have mirrored repetitive sequences at each end of the strand; and they have many other repetitive sequences both within and between the presumptive genes.
“They’ve made an interesting observation,” says systems biologist Nitin Baliga, at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. But he cautions that when researchers sift through fragments of many genomes and piece them together, as Banfield’s team has done, it’s possible to make errors. Finding Borgs in cultured Methanoperedens will be necessary for the finding to be considered definitive, he adds.
Form Energy claims to have made an iron battery for cheap long-term storage
Folk who know their stuff say a big deal if true, a battery cheap enough to fully replace fossil fuels in combination with renewables. Too heavy to use in cars however.
Q: does anyone know why simply lifting heavy weights isn’t a useful form of battery, ie use gravitational potential energy? Lift it up, then lower it down again when power needed…….. why don’t we just use this? not enough energy density?
On the sociology of mathematics research, and its subjectiveness in practice
One thing I think about a fair amount these days is how different fields of research operate sociologically. These two links/tweets were very interesting in that respect (first is a thread). The first outlines how in number theory, very few understand all the relevant things they must rely on in the field even for one of their own papers, so often rely on patching together what are to them black boxes.
Interesting in the second link that whilst we think of mathematics as a kind of opposite to the problems of the rest of academia (with false papers etc), actually mathematics often knows whats true or false solely by what ‘elders’ say, as papers can take many months to read and understand (pg4/5 of the second link).
A quote from within: “Voevodsky: “A technical argument by a trusted author, which is hard to check and looks similar to arguments known to be correct, is hardly ever checked in detail.””
I never realised maths was so subjective in the way it is actually practiced…
I had a fascinating conversation yesterday with a former roommate who's now a postdoc in number theory. I learned a lot about how math research works! Some stuff I found interesting:
The outdoors and its benefits – spending time outside is good for your brain
I’d been meaning to read a book called ‘the nature fix’, about an emerging science of the benefits of nature for healing and wellbeing. This study, preliminary, is interesting also with respect to fluctuation of brain size over rapid timescales. If you need a nude, quitting drinking increases brain size over a period of a week (maybe dehydration related, maybe functional activity, maybe both)…
I’ve been meaning to read more broadly about the medici (I once stayed in one of their old villas on the eve of a wedding…).
I’m not saying that the Renaissance geniuses who came together in great concentration during Medici’s reign are the same as the Thiel Fellows. What I am suggesting is that the idea of patronage seems to not have transmitted all that much through the centuries. What seems the simplest trade-off; I pay some of my enormous sums of money to get exposure to smart people, and increase my social stature and secure posterity by helping them achieve greatness, seems to have disappeared.
…….Individual patrons are far more risk seeking than organisations, especially organisations at the later, scaled, stages of its lifecycle. If there’s anything that’s particularly emblematic of this problem it would be the Ivy League universities. Extraordinarily prestigious but extremely ossified. YC probably isn’t there yet, but then they’re only a decade and half old!
…… The modern version also seems to revolve a fair bit around putting your name on buildings, mostly museums and university departments, but little beyond that. There is no movement from the larger scale to the human scale. There’s little interest in the actual details or the specific people who are supposedly leading the research work. The aura that comes from being a renowned patron has now separated from the actual patronage.
It is precisely this increased institutionalisation of what used to be more eclectic that’s rubbed away the corners of that made it interesting. A substantial number of top scientists across fields claim that they would never get past their respective doctoral/ departmental/ review committees today, and this reduction of iconoclasticism is a miss.
The theme of Patronage hits on one of Alexey’s best blog posts, reviving patronage and revolutionary industrial research – its well worth a read:
China’s Sputnik moment was not alphaGo, but the Trump tech ban – which forced entrepeneurial Chinese companies to work with the state companies, not with US, thus driving self sufficiency. Cian Martin’s comment is helpful:
Not an easy question to answer.
For the west in general I guess it’s that nothing will substitute for innovation & competitiveness in tech & then keeping tech supplies at home or in friendly places.
You can’t ban/sanction your way out of this as Trump tried to.
Ie, the only answer to an adversary competing with you on tech is to up your game and make sure you don’t let key assets get poached.
The Chinese government has long had twin ambitions for industrial policy: to be more economically self-sufficient and to achieve technological greatness. For the most part, it has relied on government ministries and state-owned enterprises to pursue these goals, and for the most part, it has come up short. In semiconductor production, for example, China has barely crossed the starting line. Rather, China’s private entrepreneurial firms have driven the bulk of the country’s technological success, even though their interests have not always aligned with the state’s goal of strengthening domestic technology. Beijing has, for example, recently begun cracking down on certain consumer Internet companies and online education firms, in partto redirect the country’s efforts towards other strategic technologies such as computer chips. This has meant that China’s most impressive technological achievements—building state-of-the-art capabilities in renewable energy, consumer Internet services, electronics, and industrial equipment—have as often been driven in spite of state interference as they have because of it.
Then came U.S. President Donald Trump. By sanctioning entrepreneurial Chinese companies, he forced them to stop relying on U.S. technologies such as semiconductors. Now, most of them are trying to source domestic alternatives or design the necessary technologies themselves. In other words, Trump’s gambit accomplished what the Chinese government never could: aligning private companies’ incentives with the state’s goal of economic self-sufficiency.
The piece is useful for milestones in Chinese tech strategy, and also highlighting the weaknesses in Chinese Industrial policy. I won’t post my broader thoughts for obvious reasons but its worth reading.
Particularly interesting section for a variety of reasons re-‘purchaser of first resort’ style government:
The combined efforts of China’s state drive and its innovative industry will accelerate the country’s technological advancement. In the 1960s, integrated circuits were developed when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was willing to pay any price for technology that could send astronauts to the moon and bring them safely back. Today, the U.S. government is putting Huawei in NASA’s position: a cash-rich organization willing to pay for critical components on the basis of performance rather than cost.
Bryar and Carr’s ‘Working Backwards: insights, stories, and secrets from Inside Amazon’
I bought this book for the ‘working backwards’ section on Bezos docs, which a colleague adopted at work. But I ended up skimming over it, and finding a section which was highly relevant (the 6 pager), which I then turned to during an afternoon when nothing was working, read, blogged about, then used and made huge progress on said issue. Its available here. I’ll try and blog on some other interesting sections (single threaded leadership, for example).
COVID
Also read book on COVID…. I won’t comment on it now as it gets political…
Reminds me of a similar tweet re doing research – find the biggest unsolved problem you face and solve it. Position the rest of your work around that. Then, in downtime, think long-term and strategise. For me at least, I otherwise get stuck on the latter part, not the solving crux of the problem. I endlessly try to find the perfect long-term plan, and not get stuck in. Working on it…
Regarding the news US (again) lost in its fictional war games exercises re China/Russia. Curious: do these war-games include the full complement of Black Budget capabilities? I presume they keep some stuff back, which might be reassuring a little.
Am I crazy to think it’s good DoD is losing some of its war games? I’d be way more concerned if they kept winning all of them.
“The reason powerpoint is so popular is the same reason Bezos banned it: it saves you from having to think” Paul Graham
“As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution-intense, the more damaging the bullet list becomes.………For serious presentations, it will be useful to replace Powerpoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together. High-resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualise, compare, narrate, and recast evidence. In contrast, data-thin, forgetful displays tend to make audiences ignorant. and passive, and also to diminish the credibility of the present…….. Making this transition in large organizations requires a straightforward executive order: From now on your presentation software is microsoft word, not powerpoint get used to it.” Edward Tufte
This covers the six pager method to move organisations beyond using powerpoint. Amazon uses this to ‘evaluate 10 times as much information as the typical company does in a similar time frame’ (p18, ‘working backwards’).
I’m interested in it not only because I dislike powerpoint, but because I’ve been trying to work out a better way to align disparate groups of people in the job I currently do, and also am looking for ‘tried and tested’ methods as I don’t have time to experiment. Here I’ll collect some high level thoughts on it, and link together some resources that people might find useful if they want to give it a try.
The is based on two sources (all quotes are from working backwards, which I will blog more on later). The first is ‘working backwards: insights, stories, and secrets from inside amazon’ by two former employees, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. It also references an essay by Tufte which is linked below also.
Tufte & Amazon: The ‘powerpoint style’ is not conducive to meetings
Hour long amazon meetings instead begin in silence. 20 minutes of silence. Instead of talking, they read the ‘6 pager’, a narrative document that is a key, maybe the most key, communication and discussion tool at the company. This is a ‘narrative information multiplier’ as Bryar and Carr describe it.
6 pagers came about in Amazon due to dissasitification with powerpoint presentations – Amazon found they were ineffective communications mediums, and ineffective meeting mediums. They described even deep dives into a topic using powerpoint as ‘frustrating, inefficient, and error prone.’ The slides needed a narrator, so sharing them afterward is less effective. If you get lost in one part whilst listening, you can’t catch up. People are forced to interrupt in a way that throws off the sequence of the speaker, as slides are only up momentarily. Few are good at using it, and even if they are the format is simplistic, missing nuance, preventing complex communication of ideas. Its like a succession of movie still frames, yet without clear connection between them. It isn’t good for exploring complex ideas as a group or conveying complex information. Powerpoint is bullet points plus images and little more. If you are unconvinced, I suggest reading this: Wired – Powerpoint is Evil.
They often discussed how to improve it, then in 2004 read Ed Tufte’s anti-powerpoint essay, ‘The cognitive style of powerpoint: pitching out corrupts within’.
Bryar quotes a single sentence from Tufte as capturing the problem Amazon faced: “As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution-intense, the more damaging the bullet list becomes.”
Tufte proposed a solution: “For serious presentations, it will be useful to replace Powerpoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together. High-resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualise, compare, narrate, and recast evidence. In contrast, data-thin, forgetful displays tend to make audiences ignorant. and passive, and also to diminish the credibility of the present…….. Making this transition in large organizations requires a straightforward executive order: From now on your presentation software is microsoft word, not powerpoint get used to it.”
Big Amazon meeting change in 2004: they banned powerpoint, moved to the ‘6-pager’
Bezos liked Tufte’s solution. So Bezos banned powerpoint at Amazon. This led to a predictable backlash within Amazon: powerpoint is not just habit but easier for a wide range of reasons. But it was backed by Bezos so was forced through.
Bezos wrote this in a 2004 email pushing back:
Amazon eventually settled through experimentation on a 6-pager format, optimised for a meeting length of an hour. This was because it takes roughly 3 minutes for one page, and a prior powerpoint presentation typically took 20 minutes followed by 40 minutes of feedback & discussion. The length of the ‘6 pager’ therefore is varied to meeting length. For a 30 minute meeting, you could do a 3 pager, etc etc. A ten minute meeting would be a one pager.
To me this timing issue is an important point: the concept here is partly that the unit of written organisation/communication should also be aligned to that which can be discussed in a meeting within the organisation. This is rarely if ever the case with powerpoint, where presentations invariably involve skipping slides, rushing, ending early etc with little consideration of how the presentation will actually be digested and discussed.
6 pagers can vary widely in composition style depending on whether they are covering an idea, review, a decision etc. The authors of ‘working backwards’ provide an example, a 6 pager about 6 pagers, which I copied into the appendix below. If you’re interested in adopting this, I recommend reading it.
Example headings within a 6 pager for an Amazon quarterly business review could be: Introduction Tenets Accomplishments Misses Proposals for next period Headcount P&L FAQ Appendices (including graphs, spreadsheets, mock ups, tables etc).
In the resource sections below you can find an example of a 6 pager, which is a ‘6 pager on 6 pagers’, which gives more information on how these documents are composed.
What happens next when people have read the 6 pager?
A key guide at amazon is that a 6 pager should anticipate and reflect alternative points of view and objections. These can be dealt with in a Q&A, as in the appendix doc, and I’ll cover this in part in a different blog. This in turn allows the next phase of the 6 pager process.
The meetings themselves, following the 20 minute read, have a particular routine to them. From Amazon’s experience, the authors strongly warn against having the speaker run through the 6 pager once it has been read. This defeats the point, wastes time, and repeats many of the flaws of powerpoint.
Instead, they advise trying one of two strategies to discuss the document, then tweaking to your circumstance: Discussion approach 1: High level comments by all, then work through the document line-by-line together. Discussion approach 2: Go round the group in a circle each giving detailed feedback on the document.
They then move to a discussion, which its imperative to write down and keep a record of. I find this helps grow the ‘paper trail’ relatively easily in a nonbureaucratic way, and drives progress to the next meeting such that the 6 pager begins to include follow up actions, and grows into the next is pager.
I like this section re Bezos:
Adopting this for 6 months as an experiment
I’m going to adopt this method for the various projects I work on. One can imagine a process. A 6-pager spins off more 6-pagers, collectively working toward a much longer, finished document, with 6-pagers as building blocks.
II’ll add a slight experimental quirk to begin with: I’ll add a one page summary to the front of every document. Before I started my current job, an old Whitehall veteran said to me ‘no one reads anything longer than a page in Whitehall’. Not only will it act as a quick summary for readers without time, it will also serve as a useful index for picking up the project again quickly in the future, without having to re-read the entire document.
In essence, I can imagine ‘thinking in 6 pagers’ as a unit of planning out weeks and projects.
A couple other resources explaining 6 pagers, and the example ‘6 pager on 6 pagers’ from amazon employees:
By the rivers and streams of Costa Rica lives this water anole (𝘈𝘯𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘴)
This semi aquatic lizard escapes predation, plunging into water and exhaling air to create large, oxygen-filled bubble that clings to its head 1/ pic.twitter.com/Gy7bidLH9j
The follow up tweet explains: “This acts like a breathing device, extending its time underwater, possibly even drawing oxygen from the water, expelling carbon dioxide in a process known as diffusion, morphological adaptations like the shape of its head may make it easier for the bubble to cling”
Did some follow up scrolling on twitter and found this terrifying underwater spider that basically builds its own submarine:
Look at this moth from the genus Phalera
It looks like a fragment of twig complete with chipped bark and even the layering of wood tissue at the “cut” ends…perfectly resembling a broken piece of wood to avoid predation. pic.twitter.com/PShHPk25jE
Welcome to a higher reality. The Mandelbulb is a three-dimensional fractal constructed using spherical coordinates. It's related to the Mandelbrot Set. https://t.co/qN1esBbcAOpic.twitter.com/3f3LEwJPdK
No other subject makes me dream such weird motifs and have such abstract and unreal thoughts as spending parts of the day occupied with consciousness research. It is unlike anything that I've experienced, and perhaps closest to a certain drunken variant of hypnic jerks.
Increasing innovation will enhance productivity across the economy, and in turn bring jobs, growth and prosperity to all parts of the UK. We need the whole system of businesses, government, R&D-performing organisations, finance providers, funders and others to come together to achieve our innovation ambitions.
This strategy focuses on how we support businesses innovate by making the most of the UK’s research, development and innovation system.
Our vision is for the UK to be a global hub for innovation. In this strategy we set out our plans against 4 key pillars, which will support the achievement of that vision:
Pillar 1: Unleashing business – we will fuel businesses who want to innovate
Pillar 2: People – we will make the UK the most exciting place for innovation talent
Pillar 3: Institutions and places – we will ensure our research, development and innovation institutions serve the needs of businesses and places across the UK
Pillar 4: Missions and technologies – we will stimulate innovation to tackle major challenges faced by the UK and the world and drive capability in key technologies
Through these pillars, the strategy aims to both establish the right underlying policy environment and clearly signal those areas where government will take the lead.
Posting some of what I’ve been reading. I noticed I read far less than I did 10 years ago, and starting keeping a log of it as a spur to read much more. Might be of interest to others, also useful for myself to keep records. I feel much smarter when I read lots. Quite a bit of my personal reading has been for an upcoming blog post, and isn’t covered here, regarding Zen & some related topics. Forcing myself to prepare something for a third party reader, and the scrutiny of the internet, helps in various ways.
Also in future it will be a useful place to post predictions + calibrate my thinking, though I won’t be posting such opinions whilst in my current role.
Note: posting here doesn’t mean that I agree with it!
I’ve been filling a knowledge void by studying economics. I realised I seem to learn best partly by reading lots of books on the same topic, rather than reading one book v carefully. Perhaps it helps do a kind of Principal Components Analysis and identify the core features….. I’ve always been skeptical of economics as a discipline, and still am, but its an important language to learn in my role. I’m working my way through the following. I’m also using it as an experiment in different forms of note taking – I might blog later on on both economics & the results of the note taking experiments (which have been ongoing for 10 years but I’ve recently systematised!). Economics poses interesting questions that make you see the world differently, even if I’m not confident it can answer them in a rigorous way…. its seems to be more art than science. But so is life and that’s no reason not to live….
Moretti’s on New Geography of Jobs is a stand out so far.
Robert Reich’s 2019 piece in the Guardian on the US economic system compared to China is interesting/provocative
“The American economic system is focused on maximizing shareholder returns. And it’s achieving that goal: on Friday, the S&P 500 notched a new all-time high.………
At the core of China’s economy, by contrast, are state-owned companies that borrow from state banks at artificially low rates. These state firms balance the ups and downs of the economy, spending more when private companies are reluctant to do so.“
Samo Burja on the merits of status signalling exercises, and the prestigification of engineering by Musk/Bezos et al
Samo Burja is a thinker I’ve been reading more and more of, he thinks about why civilisations don’t last forever. ( longer piece to read soon – https://samoburja.com/gft/)
[Re Musk launching a Tesla into space etc] – When examining the exceptional and the powerful, nearly everyone underestimates how reasonable their actions are. What some denounce as whimsy or waste is often a wise investment that solves real and difficult problems, sometimes in very prosocial ways. Perhaps we can find better ways to solve some of these problems, but these attacks are mere wishful thinking, resting on the assumption that some unstated alternative will naturally spring into existence.
Status is one of the irreplaceable currencies whose necessary transfer is often denounced in this way. Michael Sauder et al. define status as the relative respect and patterns of deference accorded to people, groups and organizations by wider society. I think this is basically right. People cannot engage in any common projects without some commonly agreed-upon deference to people, groups or organizations, nor can they engage in common projects without someone or something holding, and yes, spending status. Status is a coordination mechanism, and this makes it valuable.The celebration of such people isn’t merely a personal reward: rather, it is how we replenish this social capital of engineering, which in turn powers the social fabric that enables these people to do what they do. Without it, you can’t go to space.
Piece by my friend Alexey arguing that our modern notions of intelligence has killed the creative and disruptive genius.
“The first requirement to do genius-level work is to not be afraid to do things only geniuses can do, i.e. to have the internal feeling of being better than everyone else in the world. The concept of intelligence kills this feeling. However smart you are, there is someone who is smarter than you. And if there’s someone smarter than you are, it doesn’t make sense to work on the hardest possible problems and to try to change the world – it’s the smartest person’s job.”
“Genius is like synesthesia. It’s the stray connections between parts of the brain that were not supposed to be connected that make your picture completely different, but might leave you just 2-4 sd to the right in g, orthogonal to intelligence.”
Paul Graham, Fierce Nerds
I quite liked Paul Graham’s article/biography on Fierce Nerds, a special type of competitive/assertive nerd and the good they can do…..
“When you combine all these qualities in sufficient quantities, the result is quite formidable. The most vivid example of fierce nerds in action may be James Watson’s The Double Helix. The first sentence of the book is “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,” and the portrait he goes on to paint of Crick is the quintessential fierce nerd: brilliant, socially awkward, competitive, independent-minded, overconfident. But so is the implicit portrait he paints of himself. Indeed, his lack of social awareness makes both portraits that much more realistic, because he baldly states all sorts of opinions and motivations that a smoother person would conceal. And moreover it’s clear from the story that Crick and Watson’s fierce nerdiness was integral to their success. Their independent-mindedness caused them to consider approaches that most others ignored, their overconfidence allowed them to work on problems they only half understood (they were literally described as “clowns” by one eminent insider), and their impatience and competitiveness got them to the answer ahead of two other groups that would otherwise have found it within the next year, if not the next several months.”
Quite an interesting video on what a nuclear bomb actually sounds like. Answer is its not like you would think if you go on prior videos to set expectation, most videos dont have real audio, its usually dramatic sound effects. Try thinking from first principles. For some odd reason I find this video fascinating, eery, and disturbing.
This is an interesting contrary take on the role of AI in transforming war. Jack McDonald is a lecturer in war studies at KCL. Essentially argues that the failures/hype around autonomous vehicles should make us skeptical about the transformation of war by AI. Argues that key social decision making factors re-ethics will be difficult to automate, moving humans to validation stages (worker reallocation not replacement). The argument seems to be around one of timescale – ie, its a long time till AI can supplant key aspects of human judgement. Note the piece is very focussed on targeting issues, other aspects such as automated cyber intrusion not covered. Worth noting also it doesn’t touch on Intelligence aspects, nor ‘gray zone’ warfare: its very focussed on kinetic kill operations. And it also feels, in its focus on asymmetric warfare in urban environments, focussed on the war of past 20 years not great power wars.
“I see this as a hard limit: most of the concepts we use to make sense of war are too nebulous for machines to efficiently automate. Attempting to use AI for strategic goals will inevitably lead outcomes akin to a paperclip maximizer – where the modelling of a necessarily indeterminite set of desired goals leads to unwanted optimal solutions. Similarly, things like “combatant” or “civilian” are likely never going to be amenable to machines – at least in the sense that human beings approach them.”
“Military objects that are not easy for machines to distinguish as military objects (e.g. a Toyota truck with a heavy machine gun on the back) will be less vulnerable to these systems than things that are easily distinguishable (tanks, large artillery pieces, etc).
I am not predicting the death of the tank, by the way, only that in order to survive, machine-recognisable pieces of kit will need a protective bubble that defeats LAWS that function akin to loitering munitions, whatever form that takes. I’d imagine that such a bubble would be expensive to generate and maintain, so this hunch is particularly likely to apply to middle powers who might not be able to afford it.”
“Even in the case of an AI washout, I think one of the long-term effects of increased AI use is to drive warfare to urban locations. This is for the simple reason that any opponent facing down autonomous systems is best served by “clutter” that impedes its use.”
“My technological predictions here are pretty limited by design: small further advances in computer vision, weaker versions of bleeding-edge weapon technologies being developed by middle powers, commercial object recognition technologies that can be bodged into functional weapon systems by non-state actors. This is a world of kinda-good loitering munitions used by non-state actors, rather than unsupervised uncrewed ground vehicles coordinating assaults on the basis of higher level commands by human beings. What does warfare look like when an insurgent can simply lob an anti-personnel loitering munition at the FOB on the hill, rather than pestering it with ineffective mortar fire? From the perspective of states, and those who defend a state-centric international order, it’s not good.”
I wrote in my blog on ‘lessons for the bunker’ about Deep Work – purposefully isolating yourself and focussing for periods of 30 mins+ as the critical skill to master for modern work. Newport has an interesting update on this, saying ‘work near home’ is the optimal approach.
We need to consider a third option for our current moment, and if we look to authors for inspiration then one such alternative emerges: work from near home. Quite interesting work routine from Maya Angelou contained in there – “Benchley isn’t the only author to abandon a charming home to work nearby in objectively worse conditions. Maya Angelou, for example, would rent hotel rooms to write, asking the staff to remove all artwork from the walls and enter each day only to empty the wastebaskets. She’d arrive at six-thirty in the morning, with a Bible, a yellow pad, and a bottle of sherry. No writing desk was necessary; she’d instead work lying across the bed, once explaining to George Plimpton, in an interview, how this habit led one of her elbows to become “absolutely encrusted” with calluses.”….. Angelou said of it: “I don’t want anything in there,” Angelou said, when elaborating on her spartan hotel habit. “I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended. Nothing holds me to anything.” Also Steinbeck: “John Steinbeck went one step further. Late in his career, he spent his summers at a two-acre property in Sag Harbor (which was put on the market this past winter for $17.9 million). Steinbeck told his editor, Elizabeth Otis, that he would escape this waterfront paradise to instead write on his fishing boat, balancing a notebook on a portable desk.” Newport cites an interesting UK start-up, flown.com, that allows you to rent places for DeepWork.
The China Study reading and a few related articles.
Regarding diet and food….. quitting drinking permanently transformed my health, mental clarity, and mood/calmness. I stopped being fat also…. So I resurrected my interest in how diet alters your body, that I had whilst sick. This time my goal is to have greater focus. Read some articles on China Study, trying to break my habit of buying entire books when an article might be easier after my father said I couldn’t house any more books at the family house (I have well over two thousand books stuffed in an attic conversion)…….
Experiment: I’ll follow China Di for 6 months starting 21st July 2021. Note: I’ve noticed my focus is reliably worse after drinking diet soda. So I’ll quite that too.
“launched via a partnership between Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine, with data collected over a span of 20 years.”
“The study they created included 367 variables, 65 counties in China, and 6,500 adults (who completed questionnaires, blood tests, etc.). “When we were done, we had more than 8,000 statistically significant associations between lifestyle, diet, and disease variables.” They also incorporate a wealth of additional research data from other sources.”
“Animal protein promotes the growth of cancer. The book’s author T. Colin Campbell, PhD, grew up on a dairy farm, so he regularly enjoyed a wholesome glass of milk. Not anymore. Dr. Campbell says that in multiple, peer-reviewed animal studies, researchers discovered that they could actually turn the growth of cancer cells on and off by raising and lowering doses of casein, the main protein found in cow’s milk.”
“You should be worried about poor nutrition more than pesticides. The food you eat affects the way your cells interact with carcinogens, making them more or less dangerous, the authors explain. “The results of these, and many other studies, showed nutrition to be far more important in controlling cancer promotion than the dose of the initiating carcinogen,” they state.”
“Heart disease can be reversed through nutrition. The authors share the work of other respected physicians that they say supports their own data’s conclusions, and some of the most interesting are on heart disease. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., MD, a physician and researcher at the best cardiac center in the country, The Cleveland Clinic, treated 18 patients with established coronary disease using a whole food, plant-based diet. Not only did the intervention stop the progression of the disease, but 70 percent of the patients saw an opening of their clogged arteries.”
“Carbs are not (always) the enemy. Highly-processed, refined carbohydrates are bad for you, but plant foods are full of healthy carbs, the authors say. Research shows that diets like Atkins or South Beach can have dangerous side effects. While they may result in short-term weight loss, you’ll be sacrificing long-term health.”
“Cancer isn’t the only disease plants can ward off. It’s not just cancer and heart disease that respond to a whole food, plant-based diet, the authors say. Their research showed it may also help protect you from diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, bone, kidney, eye, and brain diseases. Are you getting that plants are pretty miraculous by now?”
“You don’t need to eat meat. “There are virtually no nutrients in animal-based foods that are not better provided by plants,” the authors say. Protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals—you name it, they’ve got it, along with major health benefits.” Would be good to see the ‘virtually no’ broken out – what is lacking?
“The takeaway is simple: Eat plants for health. “People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest,” the authors state. Whether you’re going vegan or not, they suggest putting as many plants on your plate as possible at every meal.”
Why is it so hard to walk into a station and not find food that is raw plant-based, without lots of rice/potatoes stuffed in? Startup idea: a shop chain that serves only pure vegan food, and you buy memberships so you have to eat there. Exploiting pre-commitment. A bit like hello-fresh but for office workers. Volume via subscription->cheaper cost. Might be a useful experiment to run through numbers on whether this could work. The idea here is you are not selling to them cheaper food per se, but a commitment to eat healthy via pre-commitment, as when people buy a gym membership in order to commit to going to the gym.
This study doesn’t eliminate seasonal change – maybe hunter gatherers lived off the land in summer then in winter fasted and had occassional binges on large animals?
“A new scientific review has found that steaming your vegetables may boost their nutritional value, making them even healthier. Lettuce explain. (Sorry. We had to.)Researchers analyzed 21 studies that looked at how different cooking methods affect the nutritional density of vegetables, Men’s Health reports, and steaming beet out the competition. (OK, we’re done with the puns now.) Steaming can increase polyphenol content (a type of antioxidant that may fend off cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other health concerns) by 52 percent, since it uses a gentle heating process and doesn’t submerge the vegetables in water, according to Elizabeth H. Jeffrey, a professor of nutritional sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign……
Some tweets in lifestyle/self space:
Underrated and acquirable founder superpower:
The ability to stay very calm while a hurricane of crises turns around you.
“There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard.”
At 74, Wodehouse wrote
with each new book of mine I have, as I say, the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one’s toes and makes one rewrite every sentence ten times. Or in many cases twenty times.
“It’s straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined, externally imposed goals, as you do in school. There is some technique to it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate (which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline seems to be within the reach of quite young children, if they want it.
What I’ve learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You’ll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.”
“The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I’m not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can’t be sure I’m getting anywhere when I’m working hard, but I can be sure I’m getting nowhere when I’m not, and it feels awful.”
“That limit varies depending on the type of work and the person. I’ve done several different kinds of work, and the limits were different for each. My limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I’d kept going much longer, I’d probably have needed to take occasional vacations.”
“Some people figure out what to do as children and just do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly from one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identify one as their calling — we can wish Newton spent more time on math and physics and less on alchemy and theology — but this is an illusion induced by hindsight bias.”
“along with measuring both how hard you’re working and how well you’re doing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in this field or switch to another. If you’re working hard but not getting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple expressed that way, but in practice it’s very difficult.”
“The best test of whether it’s worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it’s probably the most accurate one you’re going to get.”
Science/Science Policy
‘All possible views about humanity’s future are wild’
Like a galaxy wide version of sagan’s pale blue dot, which is one of my favourite pieces of writing.
Major quantum algorithm advance, speeding up Shor’s algorithm.
“So computer scientists have attempted to calculate the resources such a quantum computer might need and then work out how long it will be until such a machine can be built. And the answer has always been decades. Today, that thinking needs to be revised thanks to the work of Craig Gidney at Google in Santa Barbara and Martin Ekerå at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. These guys have found a more efficient way for quantum computers to perform the code-breaking calculations, reducing the resources they require by orders of magnitude.”
One of my favourite articles, and gives me hope that ageing will not render me imminently brain dead, one of my long term paranoias since I noticed in my teens almost all great maths, poetry, chess, music etc is done by 20-40 somethings.
Samuel Hammond – How Congress Ruined the Endless Frontier Act
One of the best articles ive read this month re science policy. Aside from telling the story of what became of the Endless Frontiers Act, there is an interesting example of how the applied/discovery dichotomy is wrong:
“Solar companies spend less than 1% of their revenue on R&D. Exponential cost reductions have instead come through a learning-by-doing process, as those same companies scale-up their production. This isn’t a story of pure scale economies, however. Rather, the need to scale forces genuine process innovations; things like a production engineer realizing, through hands-on experience, that they could improve efficiency 10% by tweaking this or that chemical solvent. Thus the notion that we first do basic science first and then translate those findings into applied technology isn’t just wrong — it’s often just the reverse. The solar panel production boom has even inspired some scientists to talk of “Solar-Driven Chemistry,” as insights derived from the solar industry’s learning-by-doing continue to spill-over into new ideas for basic research.”
There are also some interesting sections on how ‘embedded autonomy’ – setting of high level objectives by central government then letting decentralised action do the detail – gives China an edge and how its reflected in other successful industrial policies.
“The second edge China has over the United States isn’t so much technological as institutional. While often characterized as a command-and-control style economy, the day-to-day of Chinese industrial policy is surprisingly decentralized. Five year plans like “Made in China 2025” mostly serve to set high-level targets and aspirations, helping to coordinate the expectations of bureaucrats and industry partners at multiple levels of government.
A similar story holds true for the successful examples of industrial policy in Korea, Japan, and the United States. As Steven Vogel argues in Level Up America: The Case for Industrial Policy and How to Do it Right, investments in technology and industrial capacity work best when done through institutions with “embedded autonomy.” The central government should set clear, outcome-oriented goals with mechanisms to evaluate progress, but leave implementation and execution to mission-driven organizations with the autonomy to take risks and act nimbly. Embedded autonomy is particularly important when the agency in question has “a strategic position as the central nodes in networks of collaboration among industrial sectors and firms,” and might thus be vulnerable to special interest capture. “An industrial policy driven by bold public missions accompanied with deliberate communication strategies,” writes Vogel, “would be less vulnerable to capture and more amenable to effective implementation.”
Old video on nuclear propulsion
Roughly double the output of conventional rockets. Origins in the 1950s. A Nobel Laureate I was talking to in recent years said this might be his next venture…. Will update when I know!
Scientific American – AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments Beyond What Any Human Has Conceived
Makes a number of arguments re-tech slowdown being illusory in part. One argument is that whilst individual fields may slow down due to low hanging fruit being picked, others come along such as CRISPR (ie, progress is sigmoidal, with new fields popping up). They also point out the limitation of the Collison/Nielsen argument, with becoming less efficient not being the same as slowing down. (Note Alexey Guzey has a similar view that its becoming more inefficient, but not slowing down (in life sciences – https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/) Combining this with some reading of the ‘the power of creative destruction’. Also worth noting that secondary innovations mean we don’t perceive life changing innovations as being recent – secondary innovations being the tweaks/refinements needed to make a technology work, like long distance cabling for electricity.. Ie, any technology altering our lives will seem old.
I just did a retrospective analysis of 2014 NeurIPS …
Pilecki is someone I find particularly inspiring, and who I try to mention to people when the opportunity comes up. I’ll update this post over time, but thought I’d gather a few videos/pictures here to point people to who might want to learn more about him. When I was ill I found his example particularly inspiring. I’ll write a fuller blog later. If I could make even 0.1% of the difference he made, and have 0.1% of his courage, I would be very happy.
“I tried to live my life in such a fashion that in my last hour I would look back and feel not sad but happy. In this realisation I found strength within me, from knowing that the fight was worth it”. Witold Pilecki upon the announcement of his death sentence at a communist show trial.
A drawing I commissioned in 2013 of Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki
This short video explains some of what he did. Video I first watched in 2013. The music is ‘Polski Drogi’ (Polish roads).
“Report back the order is done”. This documents Pilecki’s voluntary arrest to go to Auschwitz, by an eye witness. The first minute or so has some polish in it without translation – the rest is in English. The beautiful music is ‘New Lands’ by Ian Post.
Books
Pilecki used to carry Thomas Kempis’ ‘The Imitation of Christ’ with him wherever he went including Auschwitz, and gave his copy to Eleanora, his wife, just prior to his execution, asking her to read from it every night to their children once he was gone.
Here is a shorter, earlier report written from within auschwitz and smuggled out:
From an interview with his child: “My father always taught me one thing: when you start doing something, do it well and to the end. If you think you’re not good enough, do not even start. It’s a wise word. Throughout my life I have tried to live by this principle.”
After much nagging from Matt, Katie, and I, Mummy and Daddy finally got some puppies in October last year! They are called Newton & Nimbus! 🙂 These are roughly chronological of their first 9 months.
Some images + videos. Near the bottom are them playing with bubbles which is particularly cute.
At the farm where we got them from 🙂
At the farm we got them from 🙂
In our gardenOn their first tripThey destroy everything in their pathAttention seeking with MummyMy first Skype call with them. They were not impressed by me and mostly slept.They sleep cuddled up 🙂
They enjoy destroying everythingCuddling my sister
They found toilet roll…
No comment…..
They meet a football for the first time…
Chewing a toy bone together
Learning to sit with MummyAnother day, another theft.
My first day with them. Playfighting! They bit my hand like a velociraptor.
Tug of war with me
He fell on the floor whilst doing tug of war with me…
Playfighting againThey love the fireplaceMatt giving them a clean after a walkNimbus is very handsomeNot sure what this face expression means but Nimbus does it a lotCuddling me whilst im on a zoom callAfter playing tug of warDad taking them for a walkSleeping 🙂 On a walk behind our houseNimbus with a football he destroyed at the Euro finalsNothing is safe from them…
[Update/Edit post-Sesshin 21st August – Two major comments. The first is that the schedule below is less strict than the schedule we followed. The 2nd is that my main mistake in this preparation was not to focus on being absolutely still during meditation. I moved and shuffled about, which is not allowed in a training schedule. I will write later on this.]
As I recently posted, I’m doing Dai Sesshin this year. I’m going to track my preparation to keep myself accountable. First, a summary of Sesshin I wrote in the previous blog, then i’ll post short daily updates on progress, as I’m worrying I simply won’t be up to it without doing more intense training and I hate giving up.
Earlier blog post: Zen meditation – Doing Dai Sesshin annually, starting this august (restrictions permitting)
I’ve long been fascinated by monks (‘Into Great Silence’ is one of my favourite films). I became very interested in zen buddhism in relation to my unusual visual disorder. I’ll blog on this soon.
I’ve visited a monastery but never spent significant time there – one of my dreams is to spend a few months in a monastery, and may do in the medium term. Over the past year I’ve been corresponding with Meido Moore, Roshi of Korinji Monastery in Wisconsin, one of the few Rinzai Zen training schools in the west. Sadly due to restrictions I’ve been unable to go to Wisconsin despite various trips being planned, but I’m hoping to become his student more formally.
I’ve got into a good habit of meditating 30 minutes a day. But for various reasons/motivations its a helpful challenge to do more. In a monastery, they work toward doing Sesshin, which is the most intense part of a zen monk’s schedule. Sesshin involves near continuous meditation for a week, with 5 hours of sleep a night. I figured if I am to go beyond ignorant babbling about this, I should commit to doing it myself. I recently got an invite to do this in August, and decided to go for it.
But I’m also daunted by it and worry I’ll make excuses. So to avoid wimping out, I’ve decided to commit publicly! It will probably be the hardest thing I’ve done but now I’m getting old I need to challenge myself to stay young!
There is an explanation of Sesshin here (wikipedia), and its also covered in this excellent documentary:
Meido has written two detailed and excellent introductions to Rinzai, available here.
7th July 2021 – Wednesday
I paid for the trip, so fingers crossed travel restrictions do not kick in. And I’ve setup this blog/accountability page. I’ve been doing an hour a day prep, but meditating almost all day, every day, will need more intense prep.
I leave for switzerland 7th July, which is slightly over 4 weeks away.
My target is to do 3 hours a day meditation, every day, until then, and record log here.
I’ll do this training schedule:
Wake at 4.55
5am: Meditate for an hour
6am: hour of exercise
Midday, or as close as possible with work meetings: 1 hour meditation.
6pm: or immediately on return from work: 1 hour meditate, 30 minutes exercise
I bought a Lacquer Oryoki Jihatsu set to use, and a white cloth and utensils. The guidance is strict on size and even cloth colour. Each zen monk has their own in the monastery.
Lacquered wooden bowl set with 4 or 5 bowls. This set is the traditional Rinzai Zen set, which is also used by many Soto Zen groups and the Shambhala sangha for oryoki practice.
Today: wrote the plan today so will start fully tomorrow, but a good hour of meditation. Meditated 5:30pm-6:30pm. First 30 minutes excellent, though puppies kept disturbing me as I had to child mind them for mum. Knees hurt a bit by the end – I’ve been sitting cross legged all day to practice for Sesshin. Ended up lying down for last 10 minutes.
8th July 2021
Poor start – woke too late, too much caffeine last night watching england game…. but will aim 2 hours today which would still be a personal best for this year!
Did 1 hour in the end, so a failure. Tomorrow we start again…
.
9th July 2021
1 hour of meditation
10th July 2021
1 hour of meditation.
I need to make meditation the first thing I do, or other things get in the way. However, I find on waking I am not in the right space for this. So, like in the Rinzai monastery, I will do some QiGong-style exercises to get my mind moving ahead of meditation.
11th July 2021
1 hour meditation, but also 1.5 hours of exercise before and this made meditation a lot easier. So an improvement.
12th July 2021
Failure – no meditation though did an hour of exercise.
13th July 2021
Did one hour of meditation on the train to Oxfordshire. Tomorrow I must do two hours……
14th July 2021 – 2 hours/day for first time
Morning: 1 hour of meditation in morning, divided in two. 30 minutes exercise. Afternoon: 1 hour of meditation, divided into two. I focussed a lot on abdominal breathing.
15th July 2021
1 hour meditation so far.
My eating bowls arrived 🙂 Lacquered wood, from GreatEasternSun on Etsy
Up at 5am, by virtue of pulling an all-nighter… off for a jog, then exercise + meditation….
Did only 30 mins meditation as I missed my usual evening meditation, but got to sleep at 7 to make up for lost sleep 🙂
20th July 2021 – Tuesday
Sleep reset worked 🙂 Woke at 5am, now off for a job, then meditation 🙂 Today I will do 2.5 hours come what may, hopefully 3….. There is a heat wave in the UK and we don’t have air conditioning in the UK….. I might use this as a bit of a living diary also. Right, the puppies are complaining they haven’t been let out (im at my parents) despite hearing me wake up and get water, so off I go….
This is Newton & Nimbus being woken up and having their breakfast….
They then spend the next 30 mins or so wandering around aimlessly wagging their tails seeking attention and being mischievous, every single time….
25th July 2021 – Sunday – a confessional
1 hour meditation today.
So, a confessional, I failed in my meditation training so far, and going to 3 blocks of 1 hour straight away was too much. Doing a single hour plus 4 half hours seems much more attainable.
But I realised that my inability to wake up early was a key problem in getting 3 hours a day in, so I focussed on solving that, and I did! For the first time ever I’ve succeeded in waking up between 5 and 6am every day of a week, minus one very late after a social event. So now for a redoubling of effort….. Getting up early means you get a solid chunk done, get ahead of the day, and succeed.
This past week I’ve reliably done an at least hour a day, but now I will push to 2 hours every day then in the final week 3 hours.
26th July 2021 – Monday
2 hours meditation!
31st July 2021 – Saturday – 2 hours
Last 4 days not great…. but did 1.5 hours so far today and will try to make it to 2 hours before sleep.
Did 2 hours 🙂
2nd August 2021 – Monday
1.5 hours. Says a lot that this is considered failure by me. I didn’t start until too late in the late. Will try to sneak in another 30 mins before bed… Sesshin doesn’t start for over a week, as there is an intro time etc, so I’ve still got time to hit my 3 hour target. Not sure how I will do 3 hours meditation on the day I spend 11 hours on a train (saving the climate innit).
3rd August 2021 – Tuesday
1 hour so far, aiming for 1.5 hours today. Note: today I actually looked at a western sesshin schedule and realised its not as strict as Japanese ones I’d been expecting, and 3*1 hour blocks was too ambitious to aim for. I’m much more on track than expected by hitting around Sesshin starts 1 week Friday….
To do list of things to buy and check off:
Organising travel:
Still to do
For Sesshin and Zen retreat please bring:
Hakama and gi or black pants and white shirt
Warm socks (if the floor is cold)
Jihatsu set (for formal meals) with cloth if you don’t have, pleasebring 3 small bowls (diameter 10cm to max 15cm) different sizes even better for putting them together
Chop sticks
Korinji Okkyo book, if you possess one
Appropriate outdoor clothing (rain jacket, solid shoes, hat, sunscreen) for samu (outdoor work practice)
Water bottle
Eventually sleeping bag (beds with mattress are available)
Pajamas
Toiletry and personal needs: please no strong smelling parfume or deodorant!
Shower towl
Flashlight
NO electronic devices (mobile, personal computer,…)
There will be an emergency phone number
Zafu: meditation pillows (zabuton: floor cushions are provided)
For Shugendo please bring: Tradition is to wear white during Mountain Training. Please bring white clothes suitable for hiking in all weather conditions (top layer should be white if possible).
Hiking gear (rain jacket, solid shoes, hat, sunscreen, hiking poles if needed)
Daypack with extra clothes
Water bottle
Small towel
Bathing suit or similar for takigyo (waterfall training)
Sandals or other footwear (for takigyo)
Eventually sleeping bag (beds with mattress are available)
Pajamas
Toiletry, and personal needs: please no strong smelling parfume or deodorant!
Flashlight
NO electronic devices (mobile, personal computer,…)
There will be an emergency number The Shugendo mountain training is also a very intensive form of spiritual training in and with nature. A lot of hiking, little sleep and getting by for many hours without food is challenging and therefore suitable for students in good physical health. You do not need to be in top athletic condition for this event, but you should be prepared to hike on uneven, rugged, and exhausting terrain.
This blog is to make public commitments to do 3 things – not of interest to others, but if I don’t post it I’ll let these things slip so this is a trial in making myself commit to stuff, of fixing ‘distant stars’ as I wrote here. Hopefully by committing publicly, these will get done!
Zen meditation – Doing Dai Sesshin annually, starting this august (restrictions permitting)
I’ve long been fascinated by monks (‘Into Great Silence’ is one of my favourite films). I became very interested in zen buddhism in relation to my unusual visual disorder. I’ll blog on this soon.
I’ve visited a monastery but never spent significant time there – one of my dreams is to spend a few months in a monastery, and may do in the medium term. Over the past year I’ve been corresponding with Meido Moore, Roshi of Korinji Monastery in Wisconsin, one of the few Rinzai Zen training schools in the west. Sadly due to restrictions I’ve been unable to go to Wisconsin despite various trips being planned, but I’m hoping to become his student more formally.
I’ve got into a good habit of meditating 30 minutes a day. But for various reasons/motivations its a helpful challenge to do more. In a monastery, they work toward doing Sesshin, which is the most intense part of a zen monk’s schedule. Sesshin involves near continuous meditation for a week, with 5 hours of sleep a night. I figured if I am to go beyond ignorant babbling about this, I should commit to doing it myself. I recently got an invite to do this in August, and decided to go for it.
But I’m also daunted by it and worry I’ll make excuses. So to avoid wimping out, I’ve decided to commit publicly! It will probably be the hardest thing I’ve done but now I’m getting old I need to challenge myself to stay young!
There is an explanation of Sesshin here (wikipedia), and its also covered in this excellent documentary:
Meido has written two detailed and excellent introductions to Rinzai, available here.
Dancing – posting a video of me dancing by December 31st 2021
Much of my work in neuroscience centred around movement, but it was only through my illness that I became very interested in the mind:body connection, and the role of movement in health. I’ll write elsewhere about the role dance played in learning to see in 3D. But I want to learn some more recreational dances, the kind done to music, so I will be posting a dance by the end of this year, which will doubtless be cringeworthy and embarrassing but its good to make a start…..
NB: There is an interesting chapter in Move! by Caroline Williams about how dancing affects the mind, and vice versa. Its an interesting book to inspire you to move more, I’ll post some notes later as part of a broader post on movement.
Drawing – posting a collection of drawings by June 27th 2022
I was inspired by ‘Learning from Leonardo’, a wonderful book by Fritjof Capra, to think about how drawing helps you think about problems. I’ve also always loved drawings, more so than other kinds of art, but I’ve been terrible at drawing despite some attempts in my teens to learn.
I wrote in ‘A Semi-monocular I’: “But double vision did not help me become a brilliant painter. In fact, I’m terrible at drawing: trying to visualize things on the page is very difficult, as the two eyes constantly jostle, meaning there is no fixed point of focus to imagine from. This outweighs any artistic advantages I could gain from seeing a flat world.”
I found recently that if I combine drawing with some of the meditations I’ve used to learn to see in 3D, its a wonderful way to train myself to see detail, as the close coupling of action and sensation provides a strong feedback signal. As double vision disappears, I’m finally finding I can draw. But I need to dedicate some time to it. I also need to learn to draw for a project I’ve been working on, currently paused.
I’ve bought various books on drawing to use, I’ll work my way through them and fingers crossed! Books include: ‘Drawing on the right side of the brain’, ‘Drawing Course’ by Gerald Ackerman, ‘Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters’, ‘Beginning Drawing Atelier: An Instructional Sketchbook’, ‘Lessons in Classical Drawing: Essential Techniques from Inside the Atelier’, and ‘Classical Drawing Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice’.
My main focusses will be on anatomical drawing, particularly of the musculature and neural networks, for reasons I’ll post later.
I’ll flesh these out into blog posts at a later date, giving more of the background. I might make a few others also such as publishing a poetry collection, cooking, and swimming, but for now this seems enough for a few months!
I get various comments about my ‘eccentric’ habit of using nice journals for writing. I like to handwrite most things, as it helps me focus and I really dislike using screens (something I’ll write on later, some notes at the bottom). I also find writing helps me remember things – my brain remembers where I wrote particular notes, which seems to create a kind of mental indexing system. Screens are not just digital pages!
As I use them for notes I go back to them some years after, and for this having good paper is worthwhile. It took a long time to find a really nice journal, but eventually I found Manufactus, which uses thick cotton paper. The only downside is pencil doesn’t stick on it so well. Given their size, I find they don’t work out much more expensive than using lots of smaller notebooks, so I think its worthwhile if you like using pen and paper.
Some of my friends have asked me to source them for them, so I thought I’d put up a blog to point people to them. I first found them in a shop in DC but later found you could get them direct from the shop in Italy – Manufactus. The staff are very helpful and generous and you can get all sorts of variations not available online if you email them. Note, the shipping can be expensive if you just buy a single book but if you batch them together in orders its very reasonable. US people will need to pay taxes on them. If UK friends want some, let me know and I can do them in another batch order!
Here are links to two I particularly like, and some photos to get an idea of size etc.
Thought I’d gather some of the lighter side of what I read. Installment 1! Not all time on the internet is wasted….
The vibrant coloration of this iridescent ammonite fossil is unique to ammonites from Alberta, Canada. Its iridescence is the result of being exposed to high temps & pressures over millions of years, becoming fossilized & turning into a mineral known as aragonite. #CephalopodWeekpic.twitter.com/dNlxpZJDXN
— American Museum of Natural History (@AMNH) June 24, 2021
This would be our night sky if the Andromeda galaxy were a bit brighter
This is a secondary school in Africa – Malawi and it's made from wood and straw bales, designed by Nuru Karim and co. It is such a beautiful example of African architecture at its best design. pic.twitter.com/BSeQ2WPCkv
— Africa Archives ™ (@Africa_Archives) May 23, 2021
The amazing camouflage of the great grey owl. Over the course of its evolution, any gene that happened to make the owl a little less visible had a greater chance of being passed on. The gradual accumulation of such genes led to the near-perfect camouflage we see today. pic.twitter.com/a1xFEpp30k
Wearing my monocular occlusion patch. The person kneeling is my mother.Me with dad and little brother. My most charming facial expression.
2000s
School debating 2007My favourite place to read, 2007My sixth form in snowSnow fights at school, 2009At the Royal Albert Hall to see Elton John solo2009, Elton JohnA puppy we found2009 On holiday in Greece2009On holiday, 201010 minutes after I found out I had an offer from Oxford University. On a beach in Antigua.On a 4 day hike for the Duke of Edinburgh award
Oxford days – 2010-2013
Visiting Exeter College, Oxford, the summer before joining (2010)2010 – The Oxford Fellows Garden of my collegeAt matriculation on joining Oxford, 2010Aung San Suu Kyi visited our collegeA brain scan I had done for medical purposesStudying for Oxford Exams, 2011With my brother and father, 2011With my brother, 2011With family, 2011Florence, 2011Preparing for an Oxford ball, 2012At a ball with close friend Joe Birch
At a lecture Kasparov gave in 2013, I interviewed him the next day (i’m front row on the right side)
Cycling in BordeauxHaving dinner with Sydney BrennerGraduation with the medics
1st part of PhD years 2014-2017
Ordering drinks at a bar in Oxford, 2014With a good friend from Oxford days, 2014I was incredibly fortunate to be one of 7 current/recent graduates and undergraduates to be included in the Oxford Honorary degree ceremony, EncaeniaThe Encaenia Ceremony processionMe top leftReceiving our round of applause from the heads of the universityAt the Encaenia Ceremony, 2014Walking through Magdalen College, 2014At Exeter College’s 700th Anniversary BallThe 700th Anniversary Dinner. I am on the middle table, 5 seats upAnother ball photoWith Eric Betzig’s Nobel Prize, 2015Janeliame at janeliaChild minding a colleague’s child. Syuta just scribbled in my notebook and is proud of the damage.At Bailey’s leaving party, 2016.Turl Street, Oxford, 2016Magdalen College Chapel, OxfordThe Turf, Oxford, 2016Broad street, OxfordCambridge, 2016. Kings CollegeNewton’s Study is the right hand side, Trinity College CambridgeMy brother did an undergraduate rotation at JaneliaAt the Christmas party, 2015, dressed according to the cowboy themeWith Erina & Osceola. Erina was critical to ThalamoSeqOutside the White House situation room, 2016Front door of the white house In an intensive care bed, 2017My favourite photo – me in ICUFlorence, 2017Pizza in ItalyPartying in Florence2017, Looking after a hamster
