Cedar Sanderson.

A commonplace book isn’t a book, to begin with. It is more akin to a butterfly collection, or perhaps pretty rocks, or fossil bits, or whatever catches your eye and you pick up, sticking it in your pocket to pull out and look at later, arranged in a system that pleases you. In this journal, you would write down parts of books. Quotes, passages, something that sparked a thought and caught your eye, pulled out of a much larger book and jotted down. The very act of capturing it would help you remember it later, and if you did this all through reading a book, then went back at the end of the book to review what you noted during your read-through, you might find that you had captured in a nutshell what the book meant to you.

This site contains my Commonplace Book; look under Pages on the left. I read through it about once a month, and enjoy my time doing so.

Read it.

One of my favourite ideas in philosophy is the Duhem-Quine thesis, one of those concepts “discovered” independently by two different people using two different approaches, which tells us that we can never eliminate all but one explanation for a single event. There will always be other potential reasons for what happened. Consider Emma Raducanu. Until the current Wimbledon, she had exited every Grand Slam she had entered after her triumph in New York no later than the Second Round. Is she an elite, Grand Slam-winning level tennis player on a run of bad form, or is she a 30-60 ranked player who once got lucky? Her results support both interpretations and give us no reason to pick one over the other. (I see that she is now out of Wimbledon, losing to a mere qualifier).

The upshot of this is that it is never wise to commit too heavily to any particular interpretation because there is a reasonable chance that it will be wrong.

Read it.

Compared to the other “visionary” writers working at the time – William Gibson, Neal Stephenson – Banks is underappreciated. This is because Gibson and Stephenson in certain ways anticipated the evolution of technology, and considered what the world would look like as transformed by “cyberspace.” Both were crucial in helping us to understand that the real technological revolution occurring in our society was not mechanical, but involved the collection, transmission and processing of information.
Banks, by contrast, imagined a future transformed by the evolution of culture first and foremost, and by technology only secondarily. His insights were, I would contend, more profound. But they are less well appreciated, because the dynamics of culture surround us so completely, and inform our understanding of the world so entirely, that we struggle to find a perspective from which we can observe the long-term trends.

If you haven’t read any of Banks’ Culture stories, do so. Highly recommended. Start with Consider Phlebas and proceed to Player of Games. If those two don’t get you hooked, you can stop. (And the angels will weep for you….)

MORE: A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Ian M. Banks

Read it.

Why can’t it be both?

Notice how these days doing something reasonable is called ‘reactionary’ by the Narrative Media.

How many parents would do this … if they could?

Read it.

“We were promised the curing of cancer and all we got are so-and-so improvements in five-year cancer survival rates” would be a fair thing to say about progress in biomedical sciences in the last few decades. And cancer is one of the disease areas where we have done pretty well, relatively speaking. If we look at Alzheimer’s, the situation is much worse: up until 2021, we had gone for 20 years with no new drugs – and even the approved ones have marginal effects.

The big question is: Why? A common explanation is that biology might simply be too hard for us to manipulate successfully. Humans have come up with very clever solutions to defeat all these ailments, but despite our ingenuity, we simply cannot match what has been shaped by millions of years of evolution. Another explanation is that this is, to use a very online term, simply a “skill issue.” It’s not that biology itself is too hard, we’re just not being smart enough about understanding and manipulating it.

Smithsonian.

Orderly boxes of cards once filled libraries large and small, and even the most humble of books boasted a catalog card of its own. But when the company that made the cards stopped printing them in 2015, the sun finally set on the card catalog, a book-finding system more than a century old.

…

Many of us who remember going to libraries and using the card catalog connect it with a sense of discovery. I have memories of flipping through the cards by subject and finding all the different books or other materials that had the kind of information I was looking for and those were always fun “eureka!” moments.

But it is not just about nostalgia. The card catalog was a revolutionary tool for organizing information. It was really the first search engine, so I think for younger generations it is an eye-opener to think about the written catalog and how far we have come in organizing data and making it findable.

I recall as a student going to the card catalog, looking up a book, and then just flipping through cards ahead and behind the one I had looked up to find others of the same nature. The Library of Congress web site has a ‘browse’ feature where one can look up a book and then ‘browse the self’ for books with the same (or close) classifications, which is an experience close to that of playing Myst.

Read it.

I’m often asked what my favorite weird/obscure fact about New York City was. Ironically, as the founder of Untapped New York, this question frequently proves difficult because there are just so many amazing things about this city. So I went back into my memory archives, thinking what about New York City impelled me to create Untapped New York. The pneumatic tube mail system is top on that list.

I remember pneumatic tube systems in department stores in Indianapolis when I was a child. I’ve never lost my fascination with them. The still seem very … steampunk is about the best way to describe it.

Read it.

Making a graham cracker crust for your no-bake pies and cheesecakes is a bit old hat these days. Usher in this festive season with a crumb crust that’s far from ordinary, but familiar at the same time. This crust provides a unique texture, and it just might be the easiest crumb crust out there. You can make a press-in pie crust out of a single ingredient: Pop-Tarts.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Engineered mRNA has turned cells into tiny biofactories, producing medications to successfully treat an inflammatory skin condition and two types of cancer, according to a new study. The tech paves the way for therapies in which patients’ bodies make their own drugs.

Read it.

Now, if only we could get Certain People to realize that….

The full implication of the Founding Fathers’ decisions (note the plural) to break from their mother country has never fully sunk in with many Americans. This is especially true when we consider and critique the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Why? Because, paradoxically, the court often doesn’t do its job of striking down unconstitutional laws because it is too British.

Under the British system, courts don’t judge laws on their constitutionality. But across the pond, America’s system requires them to. When the Supreme Court says it can’t strike down a law because doing so would be “undemocratic” (a frequent justification), it’s actually saying, “No judicial review please, we’re British.” For example, last year, when the court reviewed a California law that threatened to raise the cost of pork throughout the country in violation of the Constitution’s commerce clause, it politely demurred because “[i]n a functioning democracy, policy choices like these usually belong to the people and their elected representatives.” Instead of making an excuse befitting a Jane Austen dinner party, the court would have been better off remembering why it was given the power to overrule a “democratic policy choice” after the American Revolution.

Read it.

Are we on the verge of an apocalyptic global war in which billions of people could die?  Very few people anticipated that World War I would erupt, but it happened anyway.  And very few people anticipated that World War II would erupt, but it happened anyway.  All throughout human history, there have been wars.  Ever since the very beginning, it has just been a matter of time before major powers collide.  Unfortunately, even though very alarming warning signals are flashing all around us, most of the population of the western world seems absolutely clueless about what is really going on out there.  Leaders all over the planet seem to have come down with a really bad case of “war fever”, and preparations for apocalyptic showdowns are being made. 

No pressure, but….

Read it.

This story has been making the rounds on the internet with a claim that you’ve probably been told during visits to castles, but, there’s no evidence for it whatsoever.

“I thought that there were still quite a few people who actually wanted and liked conservatism. But in fact, there are hardly any. The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.” — Peter Hitchens

Remember: Corporations do not pay taxes. Corporations merely collect taxes. Taxes are an expense to a corporation, which like any other expense is folded into the price that they charge their customers. Therefore, the people who actually pay the taxes are … the customers.

‘Taxing corporations’ allow governments to take even more money from their citizens in a way such that the stupid element of the population believes that the tax is being paid by someone else.

All cities run by Democrats. What a surprise.

Read it.

When secession serves the needs of political homogeneity and self-determination, it might actually serve the common good.

Read it.

Gardening is often pitched as a relaxing, therapeutic activity—and it is relaxing and therapeutic! But it’s also a sign of how advanced society has become that we can regard growing food as a charming hobby instead of an absolute necessity. On the one hand, that’s a clear sign of mankind’s mastery over the world. On the other, it’s left us remarkably dependent on a system of farming and delivery logistics that has been shown to be distressingly fragile.

Anyone who has ever successfully grown a tomato plant in their backyard has wondered if they could go “off-grid,” grow their own food, and be done with their local supermarket. The answer is yes, but that’s the wrong question. The question isn’t whether it’s possible—the question is how. It’s all about the logistics: How much space do you need to grow enough crops to feed you and your family?

“The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” 

— Thomas Jefferson in his 1813 letter to John Adams

Read it.

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect—sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of them detects the attractive, relatively low levels of salt that make potato chips taste delicious. The other one registers high levels of salt—enough to make overly salted food offensive and deter overconsumption.

Read it.

English- speakers now tend to associate words drawn from Germanic roots with the ordinary and everyday, not the theoretical and academic, however technical their original usage might have been. Trying to use them as scientific vocabulary sounds folksy and quaint, so earthlore was never likely to catch on. Perhaps the most familiar form of lore, folklore, was coined in 1846 deliberately to evoke these associations: the word’s inventor wanted what he called a ‘good Saxon compound’ to describe the oral traditions of ‘the People’. Ironically, that’s not what lore would have implied to an Anglo-Saxon at all. The lore/ology distinction follows this well-established pattern: lore suggests oral, not written; anecdotal, not source-based; intuitive, not scientific. Where two bodies of knowledge about the same topic co-exist, the distinction can be a useful one. Think for instance of the difference between meteorology and weather-lore, the scientific study of weather versus knowledge about the subject gathered through experience and passed down through tradition. Information in the category of weather-lore might not meet scientific standards for verifiability, but may still have a cultural value that makes it worth transmitting.

Read it.

Another indicator that the worm is turning.

U.S. Department of Energy issued a final rule effective November 30, 2020, that will once again permit American households to purchase dishwashers that actually clean dishes, as they had done for most of the machine’s 130 year history.

The October 30 final rule does not force anyone to change their currently installed dishwasher. And new machines will not be available for this year’s Thanksgiving meal, as future rulemaking is contemplated and manufacturers must produce the new class of machine. But the Department of Energy is giving consumers the choice to buy dishwashers that clean again while using less energy and less water.

Some might think it crazy that the federal government regulates dishwashers?

Read it.

They just don’t get it….

Read it.

Not long ago, people could only dream of the foods we have today. Tasty, cheap, and ready to eat. They last forever, look great, and come in endless varieties. Ultra-processed foods are a dream come true.

I make it a general policy not to buy products that contain ingredients I can’t pronounce.

“In fact, this is the pattern we see in foreign policy. They never think about what comes next or they just assume what they want will happen as if by magic. The West’s handling of the Ukraine war has been a case study in this form of one-dimensional chess. They dream up a narrative, make the first move and then assume the rest follows. When it fails, they dream up a new narrative. This may be what we are seeing here with Biden. They just assume he steps aside.”

— ZMan

We have all observed this sort of process on the part of progressives: “I will do what I want to do and it will have the exact effect I desire it to have, no more and no less.” And it never works and they’re always So Surprised.

The Economist.

Twelve European countries plan to phase fossil fuels out of the heating of buildings, and air-source heat pumps have emerged as the best alternative. These extract ambient heat from the outside air, even when it is below freezing, and concentrate it to warm inside spaces. Heat pumps are far more efficient than boilers, in terms of the amount of energy used per unit of heat generated. Lately, however, they have become a symbol of the obstacles that await as countries try to decarbonise. Until recently, green policies had seldom required private citizens to roll up their sleeves and make big, disruptive changes to their lives. Now they are starting to, and many people do not like it.

Read it.

Does this sound familiar? You can’t focus. You’re bored one minute, overwhelmed the next, and stressed either way. You make mistakes you shouldn’t and then dwell on them for hours. When you try to be productive, you can’t go five minutes without checking your texts, dreading some future engagement, or walking into another room to check on … something. (What was it again?)

Neuroscientist Amishi Jha opens her book, Peak Mind, with this vignette to illustrate an important truth: You’re not alone. Most people can’t go three minutes at work without being interrupted by a chatty colleague, and students cite the allure of social media and other digital distractions as a major disruptor to their studies.

“I’ve seen certain universal patterns in the way all of our brains function — both how powerfully they can focus, and how extraordinarily vulnerable they are to distraction — no matter who you are or what you do,” Jha writes.

New York Times.

Videos on TikTok with the #foodtok hashtag have been viewed more than 64 billion times. But cooking videos are not only an unavoidable part of being online — they’ve also infiltrated physical spaces. TikTok-esque cooking videos air on large vertical screens on New York City subways and on iPad-size displays in the back of cabs, in the lobby of the Department of Motor Vehicles and the waiting room at the doctor’s office. They are everywhere.

And not just Tik Tok–cooking videos are thick on the ground on YouTube, and for people who are interested in cooking (and, in some cases, to lazy to, you know, actually cook, like me) they are an endless source of fascination.

Read it.

Conservative commentator and filmmaker Robby Starbuck conducted an intensive three-week investigation into Tractor Supply, revealing and sharing on X how the US retailer, known for selling farm goods to rural Americans (mainly freedom-loving Republicans), has been donating to woke radical leftist causes that do not resonate with its customer base. The retailer, in response, abruptly scrapped its climate targets and diversity, equity, and inclusion fantasies late Thursday, preventing itself from getting ‘Bud Light’d’ by its customer base.

The Atlantic.

These days, every trip to the grocery store makes me second-guess myself. Lined up next to the bottles of basics such as canola, vegetable, and corn oil are relatively exotic—and expensive—options: grapeseed oil, pumpkin-seed oil, walnut oil. Some are labeled with technical-sounding terms such as “high-oleic,” “cold-pressed,” and “expeller-pressed.” There’s “hexane-free” coconut oil and “naturally refined” avocado oil—if you can make any sense of what these labels mean. Picking an olive oil alone is like trying to plan a European vacation: Greece, Italy, or Spain? Or how about a Mediterranean blend?

Read it.

Legislation, mostly. A lot of it winds up on fashion runways. And don’t get me started on Hollywood….

Read it.

From the way the barbs were wrapped around and woven through the horizontal strands, the ranchers could tell at a glance if the land and animals enclosed within belonged to them — I call them “signature barbs” — sort of like a premodern QR code.

When people started settling the Great Plains, there was nothing out here but millions of buffalo and some scattered Indians. There were no land divisions, no fences, no houses, no roads, no towns…. Moreover, since the land was so inhospitable, most people were intent on going further westward — even to the coast.

The first barbed wire was invented in 1867 by Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio, which is 32 miles from my home in Osnaburg, Ohio. That changed everything. Wooden fences were vastly more expensive (there were very few trees out here then), difficult to install, and hard to maintain — plus they weren’t as effective as barbed wire. So the barbed wire fences started to impose some order on the Great Plains.

Read it.

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, better known as Project 2025, is the effort of a broad coalition of more than 100 conservative organizations working together to ensure a successful new presidential administration begins Jan. 20.

Project 2025, spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation, seeks to restore democracy, to loosen it from the grip of the political elites in Washington, D.C.

But the fiercest attackers of Project 2025 are lining up to protect the deep state. In recent months, the project has faced outlandish, hyperbolic attacks.

UPDATE: TRUMP ALLIES’ 920 PAGE PLAN TO GIVE TRUMP MORE POWER OVER YOUR DAILY LIFE, GUT DEMOCRATIC CHECKS AND BALANCES, AND CONSOLIDATE POWER IN THE OVAL OFFICE.

Read it.

“Once you really know how to diagram a sentence really know it, you know practically all you have to know about English grammar”, Gertrude Stein once claimed. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. . . . I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.” While one student’s lexical excitement is surely another’s slow death by gerund, Stein cuts to the heart of the grammatical pull. Is grammar prescriptive and conventional, something one learns to impose on language through trial and error? Or do sentences, in a sense, diagram themselves, revealing an innate logic and latent structure in language and the mind? More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.

I remember diagramming sentences in elementary school – I could probably still do it if I had to (although I would need to stifle the impulse to put it in Backus-Naur format).

Commonweal.

Maybe parking really does explain the world.

Read it.

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, for example, use the same word hunden, meaning “the dog,” to communicate that the dog is in the house or that someone found the dog or gave food to the dog. In Icelandic, on the other hand, three different word forms would be used in these situations, corresponding to the nominative, accusative, and dative case respectively: hundurinn, hundinn, and hundinum.

Icelandic is essentially Old Norse–Icelanders can read sagas from around 1000 AD with no difficulty–thus illustrating the surprising fact that languages on the fringes of a linguistic area tend to retain archaic features. The French spoken in Quebec is closer to the French of the 17th century than modern French, as the English spoken in Appalachia is closer to the English of the 17th century than modern British English.