I think I first saw Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen reviewed by Tyler Cowen. After reading about it a few more time, I decided to read it primarily to improve my rudimentary understanding of Native American history.

During the upheaval that was the 2016 election, I wrote here about why seeking diverse sources of information was critical to providing a rich idea environment for optimal decisions. Bad information is like a pollution of the environment of mind, but with diversity and differential survival of ideas, we have the principle of natural selection working for us to provide a model of the world that best reflects reality and thus should allow us to act most appropriately in the world. So I try to read widely in subjects that I feel I don’t have a good grasp on.

Indigenous Continent is a scholarly work. Actually a refreshing change from the current trend for books to be edited into collections of anecdotes and stories that illustrate points. Here, it means that the book is often a catalog of groups, people, events with some historical context but little biographical or psychological background presented other than in passing.

But it’s a book of grand historical sweep with a point of view firmly from that of the indigenous people of the Americas and how the arrival of Europeans occured to them. And the thesis of the book, that the continent remained largely indegenous through the mid 1800’s, until after the Civil War puts my understanding of American history into a new perspective. I knew about the death by epidemic from reading Jerad Diamonds’ Guns, Germs, and Steel when it as well as other sources. I had read about the forced relocations of eastern tribes during my travels through the US.

Two points struck me while reading the book. One was how adaptable these indigenous cultures were as their situations and locations changed. There was a strength to the culture in being cooperative societies without centralization and authority based on a nomadic cuture that could continue to function as situations changed drastically.

But then I was continuously struck by how dependent on European technology the indigenous survivors were. Guns, metal utensils, farm implements and other means of survival meant trade and reliance on the Europeans. The relationship was always so unequal that the outcome seems to have been determined from the start. Survival ended up being dependent on either capitualtion or hiding. The book ends on a positive note as our Indigenous Americans have survived and are experiencing something of a renaissance in todays multicultural America.

When I heard about The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, I knew I had to read it. A book about AI and octopus intellegence grounded in neuroscience definitely hits a bunch of my interests. I’ve been fascinated by the octopus brain for a long time, both because my daughter growing up had a stuffed octopus that she loved and we saw them in the National Aquarium here in Baltimore.

Several years ago I read Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith which made the case that the octopus, with its convergent evolution of eye and brain, was a real example of an alien non-vertebrate intelligence. I understand my puppy’s behavior by analogy. Not so the octopus. I wasn’t surprised to see Other Minds acknowledged by Nayler at the end of the book.

The describes the meeting of man, a cognitively advanced colony of octopodes and an AI self conscious android. the AI description is a nice creation, building on current neural network concepts, but does have a bit of mind transfer magic through connectome mapping. Oh well, I always surrender my predjudice at the door as the price of admission. Plenty of SciFi is build on the plausibly impossible and mind transfer seems plausible but is impossible.

Also, some nice reflections on complex systems and ecology. Nayler also cites How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn as an prime inspiration from the book. So that’s now on my list to read. I had thought about it after finishing Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy last year which is a meditation on being present that owes much to the idea of deep ecology and the emergent reality of environment.

A well written first novel that’s heavy on the philosophy and neuroscience and not deep in character building or plot. For me, a compelling read.

From The Experimental History experiment – by Adam Mastroianni:

Last March, when I had barely begun blogging, I happened to meet a big shot author who writes pop science books, and I told him about my dreams for this blog. “Maybe this could be what I do,” I told him, hopefully.

“It’ll never work,” he said. “People want to read about what they are interested in, not what you are interested in. I’m successful because I write stuff that will sell. I don’t actually like the stuff I write about.”

I’ve been writing here going on 25 years now. I write what I need to since this is my journal. But I’ve long been aware that my posts on photography equipment and notetaking process get the most reads via search engines. Not lots of referals from other blogs these days, just some of my old friends here. But of course, this is just my way of thinking out loud.

Finished my first book of 2023, London Rules by Mick Herron. It’s the 5th book in the Slow Horses series which has been made into a series streaming at AppleTV+.

I watched the first season and was taken by the story as well as the way Gary Oldman’s brought the character of Jackson Lamb to life. As I’ve often done when given a choice between book and show, I stopped watching the show and read the source material so that I could enjoy the reading experience without having to substitute the show’s cast and choices for my own construction of the story. I think it was Game of Thrones that served as my first introduction to the problem. After watching the first season on HBO, I read through the books, only erasing with difficulty some of the actors from my mental images of the characters.

The first 4 books were a nice diversion during 2022 from my usual reading habits which haven’t included spy thrillers too often. On the other hand, after my accident, I read 6 or 7 of the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connely, all library Kindle downloads. This too was inspired the show Bosch on Amazon Prime. Now there I had already watched several seasons, well binged several seasons, and so Titus Welliver will always be my mental image of Harry Bosch.

I’ve written summaries of my Hobonichi use in some previous years: 2017, 2019, and 2020. This Japanese daily journal is a popular Instagram and Reddit subject as it’s part of the larger craft journaling scene, like the Bullet Journal.

This year my Hobonichi has served its customary purpose as the tool to plan my day every morning. I always buy the Japanese version of the planner as the layout just suits my use a bit better than the English version, even though this means that the daily quotes on each page remain mysteries to me. Each morning, I block out the day’s calls, errand times, times to fit in the daily training ride and make some notes on what really needs to get done that day.

For me it’s a planning exercise. It’s rare that I refer back to the Hobonichi after the planning is done. My work calls are driven by the Microsoft Outlook calendar and when the slots open up for the ride, errand or appointment, I’m ready for it. The next morning, I’ll glance back at the previous day for a quick assessment as to whether there’s some impact on the coming day.

I also use the monthly calendars for long term planning- particularly holidays, business trips and cycling events. Even though it’s all duplicated on the phone/iPad/PC calendars, I’ve long relied on doing the planning and thinking on paper- just because I can’t see the big picture on a computer calendar for whatever reason.

The biggest change this year has been adding more special purpose notebooks to capture reading notes. This was kind of a breakthrough for me this year, finding an efficient way to take notes on reading. As I mentioned, this was based on a reread of Ryan Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method. I now read a text straight through, then go back, skimming for the purpose of rapid logging the main points I want to record.

Since it’s now been 3 months, I think I can say I’ve added a daily Bullet Journal habit to the morming Hobonichi ritual. So at times during the day, I make some progress notes in the Bullet Journal. If I’m taking notes on a book, those go into the the same notebook.

Unfortunately, while analog note taking has been a success this year, on the digital side I’ve still not really developed a good methodology for my current needs. I’m using DEVONthink as a hub more consistently to store documents, but the input really just isn’t there- seems like too much work. So my aspirations to funnel notes into DEVONthink and then out into this website have just not panned out as hoped. I know that the key is to keep friction down and the efforts casual. I’m drawn to thinking with pen on paper, so the formalization of typing it in is the friction that holds the process back. Small steps, always just the next action and no more.