Stuff Jesse Likes

I love the effort that goes into their cut-away gags.

Relatedly, flags are not languages.

Animagraffs makes really great, detailed animations explaining various topics, and has a new video out deep diving into how a modern nuclear power plant works, and especially how the safety features work, and how many are totally passive, so even if grid power and backup power fail, the power plant will safely shut down on its own.

The book discusses melding science as a process for understanding the world with a Native American culture of respect and sense of reciprocal obligation towards nature. Kimmerer is a botanist and professor.

She discusses science as a process vs our collection of values and expectations we've attached to science, that it is utilitarian and primarily valuable in allowing us to control our environment and better ourselves. She discusses inherent bias in academia towards the accumulated knowledge of native American culture, for instance that sweetgrass is adapted to thrive under human harvesting.

In the face if climate change I found the call to mutual care for nature pretty compelling. In some sense human love and care of nature is self serving, nature is important to our well-being, we benefit spiritually as well as materially from biodiversity and thriving ecosystems.

But balanced ecosystems are not a law of nature, mass extinctions have happened before many times. Animals don't have the same sense of reciprocity towards nature that Native American cultures do, they are kept in balance by feedback loops and a constant arms race of adaptation. In time of plenty, populations grow until there is no longer plenty, and starvation is widespread in nature.

Despite that, I fully buy that we should be grateful for the balance and diversity of our world, and use our own gifts of knowledge and planning and agency to preserve what we can, for our and their sakes, because I think that's a better world to live in.

A big takeaway for me was an understanding of humans as a (potentially) beneficial part of nature, not just interlopers that bring harm. America before European colonization was not pristine nature, it was fully in use by humans, just in a way that wasn't extremely extractive. She isn't arguing for a world in which we fully sequester "nature" to keep it safe from humans.

Kimmerer only briefly touches on what I think is the strongest historical argument for that view - that native Americans regularly burned massive swaths of woods, to clear brush and attract deer, prevent out of control unplanned fires from accumulated fuel, or create farmland or prairie, not just for hunting. See Forgotten Fires by Omer C. Stewart. Many plant species require regular fire to grow. In that regard they were quite willing to radically reshape nature towards their ends, they just knew how to do it in a sustainable way.

Kimmerer talks some about how we (non-native Americans) need to approach becoming indigenous to this place, and accepting the obligations to nature that come with that. She talks about the power of their cultures' stories to teach us how to relate to nature, and that those of us outside of those cultures can learn from those stories while still needing to craft our own.

That's a super interesting "exercise for the reader" to me - I find intellectually valuing and wondering at nature easy, while I find forming an emotional or spiritual connection to nature stilted, like inventing a new religion and pretending to believe in it. Maybe I need to just spend more time outside, and it comes easier.

The book has many sections about her experiences, including many moments of just being a human body in the woods or swamps or streams. Which I liked! I didn't just need a philosophical and sociological argument, I think it strengthens her case that our relationship to nature should be personal and moral.

Reviewing what I thought she put forward as her thesis and where she spent her time, I don't think she actually made a strong case for what science brings to the table in this marriage, potentially because the merits of science are already so obvious and valued in our culture.

She does present a critique about our scientific institutions, and the barriers we put between gathering knowledge and making moral/value claims about the world, as well as snobbery towards traditional ecological knowledge.

I'd be very curious about what has changed in the twenty plus years since she published the book, in areas like interdisciplinary studies, and partially because of the book itself. I ironically was reading How To Do Nothing before, and The Overstory right after, both of which were very inspired by Braiding Sweetgrass.

She also doesn't spend much time on specific indigenous knowledge about nature that science should incorporate, compared to indigenous attitudes towards nature. For example she does discuss indigenous sweetgrass harvesting techniques her grad student studied. I would have liked to hear more.

Questions I had

What does this look like in my own life, as somebody with an excess of free time? I've started picking up trash around town a lot, which feels therapeutic and like a way to connect with and "be from" a place, but it's definitely spending time walking around roads and houses, focused on trash more than plant and animal life, and inspires in me anger at cigarette butt litterers more than awe and gratitude at nature.

I also spent the book wondering what to do with eight billion humans - as I understand it cities are the best way to stash the majority of human lives, we can't all own a little farm on fifteen acres. (Okay, my napkin math says we get 5.8 acres per person in the US, if you leave no land for anything but our farms.) But cities by their nature might make humans feel more separate from nature.

What does "nature" look like when access for most humans is carefully laid out hiking trails with a "don't step off the path" sign?

What would native american land practices have looked like in a world of 342 + 40 million people (us and canada), instead of (per wikipedia) a north american population of 2.5 to 7 million pre-colonization?

Mechanical clocks are wildly fascinating, and a tourbillon is one of the coolest additions: a rotating cage containing the escapement and balance wheel to average out any directional errors from the effects of gravity over time. (It is apparently debated how useful this actually is.)

If you need convincing that this is fascinating, you can skip to the gorgeous completed product at the end (or just watch that).

He goes on to make a stunning triple-axis tourbillon as well.

I love this guy who re-appears on youtube about once a year to update us about trying to mass produce and sell forks made out of solid blocks of salt.

Tom 7 (the 7th of his name) makes consistently amazing, very high effort, funny, math and computer science videos. Often for "SIGBOVIK", a yearly conference and journal by the "Association for Computational Heresy."

Some of his videos that I think will be interesting to you even if you're not into programming:

How I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM

Over the course of 16 years, he runs along every single street in Pittsburgh, starting or ending each run at his home, requiring increasingly long runs to collect them all, and using GPS and google maps to track and confirm every segment of every street has been covered.

I figured I'd combine a bunch of links I'd recommended to friends on discord in the past:

3d printing a film camera The results are pretty stunning and he's a great video editor. Lot of cool details about how film cameras work.

4 axis 3d printer with non planar slicer It turns out a big part of 3d printing arbitrary shapes without lots of supports that need removing afterwards is the algorithm for converting the shape into individual flat "slices" that 1. won't collapse and 2. are physically reachable by the printer nozzle.

Lego Island: Great documentary with real interviews from many of the devs, with a lot of info about the very early days of 3d games on pc.

The sounds of the ice shelves breaking are amazing.

When is easter? I like when things turn out to have very complicated histories. This dives into the calculation on how the date for Easter is determined each year.

Backyard Ultramarathons Keep running 4.167 miles every hour until, everybody else gives up (potentially for 24+ hours). (wikipedia)

The Crafsman makes hundreds of plastic figures Guy with a soothing folksy voice uses injection molding to mass produce a little figurine. The paired video of another youtuber CNC'ing the mold is also fascinating.

I have a columnar programmable split keyboard with thumb clusters and swappable mechanical keyswitches and keycaps that I love:

Split is great:

• Placing them shoulder width apart is much more ergonomic for your shoulders, letting you sit up straight with your shoulders back.
• Angling them separately allows a natural straight wrist position, especially for people with big hands like me.
• Tenting them (angling them up towards the center) allows your wristbones to rotate less.
• You can put a coffee mug or a mouse in between them.

Columnar is great:

• Instead of staggering the keys (a relic of typewriters, which needed room for the levers beneath the keys), placing them in columns allows your fingers to travel straight up and down within rows.
• The keyboard designer can then lower or raise each column based on the length of each finger (mostly lowering the pinky keys, mine could go even further).

Programmable is great:

• You can add layers (basically like extra shift keys that change what each key does) to place keys closer to the home row, avoiding finger travel and contorting your hands as much.
• If you want to, you can swap out QWERTY for a more efficient layout, or create custom layers and macros for your programs (think shortcuts in editing software).
• You can also have combinations of keys trigger custom behavior, though I mostly avoid this.

Thumb clusters are great:

• Your thumbs are some of your best fingers, why should they take turns only pressing a giant space bar?

Swappable keyswitches and keycaps are great:

• Mechanical keyswitches just feel really satisfying and provide physical feedback so you know when the switch has activated.
• You can choose from quiet smoother ones to tactile clicky ones to loud thocky ones.
  • I started with Cherry MX silent red keyswitches and switched to tactile blues. Semira was very understanding with the noise.
• I started with flat keycaps that came with my keyboard, which allow moving them all around arbitrarily, but switched to sculpted keycaps that lovingly cradle my fingertips.
  • Since each row in sculpted keycaps have a different angle, they only work if you keep each letter in the default row supported by the seller, or by buying blank keycaps or adding stickers.

I've been using YNAB, "You Need a Budget", since 2014. It's a digital implementation of the "envelope" budgeting method. Originally, you would cash out your paycheck, and then divide it up into envelopes labeled "rent", "groceries", etc. That way you knew you had money set aside for rent, and if you want to go out to eat but don't have money in the "eating out" envelope, you have to make an explicit decision to take money from a different envelope.

You're expected to change plans and adjust your envelopes, it just forces you to be mindful about where you want your money going. This works super well compared to traditional budgets, where you set goals and then later chastise yourself for not sticking to them.

But cash is fiddly and not compatible with our modern era, so YNAB provides digital buckets or categories to replicate this idea. It can sync with most banks and credits cards to import your transactions, just requiring you to confirm or adjust which category each transaction is spending from, but I don't really trust giving software access to my bank accounts (more banks should support read-only api tokens) and just manually type in my transactions three or four times a month.

It started as a one time purchase and transitioned to a subscription model a long while ago. I still think using it will absolutely save you far more than the 9 bucks a month (paid yearly), but you could probably replicate it in google sheets if you're handy with spreadsheets. I'm pretty bought in and like having 12 years of data in my charts and tables, all in one place.

I got a ton of value out of it when I started really focusing on saving a decade ago, but still find it helpful to keep an eye on how often I eat out or buy snacks, and make sure I'm not spending too much on electric scooters, squat racks or steamdecks (recommendation posts pending).

Ezra Klein had a great section in a recent interview on writing about how reading actually works:

I wrote a piece about this a couple years back. It was called "Against the Matrix Theory of the Mind."

I think I used to conceptualize knowledge the way you see it in "The Matrix" where it's like I wanted the port in the back of my mind that the little needle would go into and then I had read John Rawls' Political Liberalism.

I thought that what you were doing [reading] was like downloading information into your brain. And now I think that what you're doing is spending time grappling with the text, making connections. It will only happen through that process of grappling.

And so the idea that you could speedrun that, the idea that it could just be summarized for you, part of what is happening when you spend seven hours reading a book is you spend seven hours with your mind on this topic. The idea that O3 can summarize it for you, in addition there's all this stuff you just will not have read, is that you didn't have the engagement. It doesn't impress itself upon you. It doesn't change you.

What knowledge is supposed to do is change you.

I first heard Ezra Klein discuss this framing on one of his own podcast episodes a while ago, and it crystalized the issue for me about some concerns about how I spend my time, and how I approach optimizing learning.