MNTS #9
[Week 28/ Year 2023] Bloom, Murphy, Land, Eliason, Shipper, Sohl-Dickstein, Taurine, Koch, Kitchens, Kung fu, Shadows
Mainly, Notes To Self - my weekly attempt to compress everything noteworthy I read, watched, listened to, and discovered during the past week.
New Post
Book Notes: How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom - I’m about half through processing my highlights. More to come.
Reading
Finished How to Read and Why and attended the first Other Life book meeting this past Wednesday. Justin Murphy hosted about fifteen of us on a Zoom call. He did a very professional job facilitating the discussion, and I left the hour session feeling energized and wanting more.
Cybergothic by Nick Land - this is the text for the next Other Life book meeting on Saturday, July 29.
Proof You Can Do Hard Things by Nat Eliason - I agree.
The Optimal Level of Optimization by Dan Shipper and Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart’s law by Jascha Sohl-Dickstein - Overfitting and Goodhart’s law are useful concepts to understand and be aware of outside the context of machine learning.
Taurine may be a key to longer and healthier life, Science Daily - I supplement with Taurine daily to mitigate stress-related hairless, but this caught my eye for a different reason. The study finds that a deficiency of taurine drives aging and has been shown to improve health and increase lifespan in animals.
Listening
The Meat Mafia Podcast - Nat Eliason (absolutely tragic name for a podcast, but I digress)
I originally found Nat through his Made You Think Podcast back in 2018, where they discuss Nassim Taleb’s Anti-Fragile and Skin in the Game. Nat’s a smart, interesting guy, and we share many parallel interests. I’ve learned a ton from him over the years, so this was particularly interesting because the podcast episode was recorded a couple of weeks prior to the last piece he published, see above. I suspect this conversation and line of questioning was the spark for writing it. It was cool to get a behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of his thinking and writing. I’m a big fan of Nat’s work and always root for him to succeed in his current venture.
Link to my snipd notes here
Tim Ferris Show #680 - Richard Koch
There are a few interesting nuggets in this lengthy conversation if you can get past some of the cringey banter. I’m most curious to learn more about Bill Baine.
Link to my snipd notes here
Watching
As a general rule, we limit our streaming consumption to one episode per night, so we move through shows at a glacial pace. But it’s how we prefer it.
Just finished and thoroughly enjoyed Season 2 of For the Love of Kitchens
In the hopper:
Warrior Season 3 - kung fu/western. I’ve long been fascinated by Bruce Lee, and this show is based on some of his writing. We watched the first two seasons during the pandemic, and I was super bummed to find out the show hadn’t been picked up for a third season. In a happy turn of events, it’s back. You would love this if you grew up watching martial arts movies Blood Sport, Blade, 3 Ninjas, Matrix, etc. It’s a bit graphic and crude at times, but it’s HBO, so y’all should know what to expect in that regard.
What We Do in the Shadows Season 5 - the absurdity of this mockumentary can not be understated. I see-saw between “This show is a complete waste of time” and “This is a work of sheer comic brilliance.” The episodes are short, and the cast of characters they’ve assembled is incredible. I love the energy vampire trope; it’s made me more aware of people and activities that are exceptionally draining in my life.
Until next week.
Stay spirited, stay resilient.
Andrew