Musings about life on two wheels

Tl;Dr: Chapter 3 argues against the idea that social inequality is our ancestral heritage It’s easy (and naive these authors argue) to imagine life in the distant past as either In this chapter, the David’s argue that those conceptions are not supported by current evidence, are likely due to evidential bias from older sources and…

Tl;Dr: the idea that private property lead to social inequality came from Native Americans I gotta say – this chapter blew my mind. I (and perhaps you) thought that Jean-Jacques Rosseau wrote Discourse on the Inequality of Man more or less on his own. Turns out it was written as an entry in a national…

Tl;Dr: Rosseau didn’t think up ‘private property is the source of inequality’ on his own. Native American Intellectuals came up with it. So the Dawn of Everything is a really big book. Not really so huge in terms of number of pages, but definitely in terms of breadth of ideas and number of rabbit holes.…

Tl;Dr: making precise miter cuts in wood takes skill that is not obvious when coming from the virtual world. Mostly because nothing is square I like making physical things (ok, mostly food). But a lot of what I’ve made in the world is digital. When I tell my friends I’m doing wood working, those that…

Tl;Dr: Edwin P. Abbott Jr, furloughed park ranger. And the love child of Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons When I was in Junior Highschool my band instructor always had awesome halloween costumes – one memorable year he went as a Rock Lobster. He was great. He inspired me to make fun costumes, which I did…

Tl;Dr: I got to visit the Burke with a staff member – awesome. My friend P. works at the Burke Museum at the UW, and gave me a tour. I’ve never been in, it was great. The Burke was founded in 1887 (?) by some of the Denny kids, so it’s one of the oldest…

TL;Dr: More old buildings, Day 4: To Bluff! Bluff is a little hippy community about 30 min south of Blanding. It’s… Less Bland. Good coffee & espresso, nice art & rugs, a felting workshop, and another Petroglyph wall. This one had quite a bit of graffiti on it hard to know what you were looking…

Tl;Dr: Veritasium on YouTube is really good, e.g. Nobel, 6 degrees and genetic engineering are awesome & apropos Veritasium is a YouTube channel focusing on science and math, and it does an amazing job. Both in making things comprehensible and relevant. Some recent examples: The story of Alfred Nobel – he invented high explosives, then…

TL;Dr: Desert Solitaire is not what I expected – I really like it. I was expecting a cranky old man. And there is some of that. But there’s a lot more thoughtful, beautiful writing than I was expecting. The section on Uranium mining was interesting, then riveting. The descriptions of cow herding seemed very realistic.