A Handful of Disjointed Thoughts
September 11, 2024
3-Item Status
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Listening: Up All Night by Beck (such a great music video)
Quick Notes
Pre-Trip: I was sick all last week, and this upcoming week I’ll be in Seattle, unable to do anything non-baby-nephew-related. Today’s newsletter is slightly truncated and has no formal essay because doing it this way helped me get it out the door amidst all the other work I’ve been scrambling to get done in the few days I’ve had available post-Covid, pre-trip :)
(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status and/or Quick Notes about what’s happening in your life.)
A Handful of Disjoined Thoughts
I recently came across the concept of “working with the garage door up” as a metaphor for one’s stance when doing creative work. I love this as a way of framing the relationship between maker and folks on the other end of what’s made (I don’t know if this will resonate the same way outside of American suburbia, but the idea is that if you work with the garage door open, people can see what you’re doing as you work, in all your messy glory, not just when you choose to present a polished, final product), and I think this might be useful to me in helping define what role (if any) social media plays in my future, as those platforms could (maybe) serve as a tool for amplifying that “garage door open” vibe and utility.
The past few months, I’ve made a commitment to reach out to people I have good conversations with (in any context) to see if they want to get a cup of coffee and have a followup chat. I don’t know why it took me so long to commit to this, but the success rate so far has been 100%, and it’s been really wonderful getting to know new people and expanding my local friend group more intentionally.
I caught and (thankfully) got over Covid this past week, and my symptoms were WAY worse than everyone else I know who caught this strain, hereabouts. It sounds like I maybe got a sinus infection alongside my Covid infection, and a friend (who knows about such things) advised that I might be prone to sinus infections because of my allergies—which if true would suck, but would also explain several other recent sicknesses that hit me out-of-nowhere and out-of-proportion to what seemed to be going around. I’ll be looking into the possibility either way, as it would be amazing to figure out some kind of prophylactic against similar painful experiences in the future, even if it would be a bummer to have yet one more medical issue to worry about.
On average, I find that folks who have some kind of dietary constraint (gluten-free, vegan, paleo, whatever) make (often) better, (almost always) more interesting food than folks who don’t have any kind of limitations (biologically imposed or otherwise). I suspect this is because these restrictions necessitate they pay closer attention and get more creative to sate cravings and meet nutritional goals. Definitely not a universal thing, but it’s remarkable how creativity-inducing such constraints can be.
AI is still not great at most things, but this song is a legit earworm (and hilarious), this one was made using a platform that allows you to make AI songs from scratch (it writes the song, sings it, and makes the music for you based on a prompt), and this whole channel (good video to start with) is a little disconcerting at times, but actually interesting and a good example of how available tools can be used by indie-makers to produce decent stuff out of proportion to their staff size of one.
Interesting Links
How the Alchemist of New England Became a Legendary Counterfeiter
The year was 1789 when an old man shoveled dirt onto two hefty barrels of silver, hidden away in a cave on the roaring banks of the Swift River in Massachusetts. He needed to bury his treasure, because he had procured it by means that were considered illegal and, at one point, mystical. This old man was Glazier Wheeler, once a blacksmith and engraver, but the town of Dana knew him as the “alchemist.”
What to Know About Real Robots Deployed in the Real World
The visual appearance of a robot makes a promise about what it can do and how smart it is. It needs to deliver or slightly overdeliver on that promise or it will not be accepted.
When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times.
Technologies for robots need 10+ years of steady improvement beyond lab demos of the target tasks to mature to low cost and to have their limitations characterized well enough that they can deliver 99.9 percent of the time. Every 10 more years gets another 9 in reliability.
More Than 4,000 Moth Species Flit Across Texas. One Scientist Photographed 550 in His Yard.
Eckerman is a herpetologist by trade; he says the best job he ever had was catching endangered water snakes in West Texas as an undergraduate research assistant. But he’s always collected insects, and a little over a decade ago, he began photographing them. When he realized he struggled to identify the moths in his pictures simply because there were so many varieties, he dedicated a summer to studying them. These days, he sets a light by his garage door and photographs whatever moths show up, as many as seventy species and thousands of individuals in a single night. He’s now counted 550 species at his own home.
(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)
Outro
If everything went according to plan, I’m in the air right now, flying from Milwaukee to Seattle (where I’ll be for the week).
I’m looking forward to seeing my family and hanging out with my baby nephew, and it’ll be nice, after all that, returning to a post-trip, post-sickness rhythm. My plans have all been pretty well disrupted by my girlfriend getting sick, then getting sick, myself, then scrambling to catch up on work, then leaving the state.
Some quiet normalcy—for at least a few weeks—will be amazing.
What have you been up to, of late? Drop me a message and tell me what’s been going on, and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)