The Algorithmic Trap by David Perrell:
“If you want to find emerging and under-rated ideas, stop using algorithms … and improve the quality of what you consume.”
Luna got a camera for Christmas from Uncle Harley & Ainsley, so tonight she wanted to go and make photos of planes taking off.
You couldn’t understand how proud I am of her. Her little brain astounds me and impresses me every day!
In 2022 I want to be a lot more deliberate about my inputs. Garbage in, garbage out. I’m continuing to craft my newsletters and subscriptions, detailed on my inputs page. Plus I’m now documenting books I want to read, books I am reading, and books I have read.
Small atomic changes should put make sure I’m walking down the right track.
I’m not anti-tax, I’m just saying that we don’t know the long term effects of giving these politicians half our cash. How do we know they’re not going to make stupid decisions with it?
Breaking news: Novak Djokovic wins the Australia Closed grand door slammed tournament.
When Britt and I were dating we lived in different cities the whole time as I travelled for radio work (Port Macquarie, Mackay, Cairns, Sydney, Brisbane) so we spent heaps of time at night on the phone.
We’d go outside and ask each other if we could see the moon.
Ten years on we have a daughter named Luna.
And we named her sister Goldie so we could have our sun and our moon.
Finished reading: Volcanic Winter by Mark Rutherford 📚
Currently reading: Fortune-teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels In The Far East by Tiziano Terzani 📚
“Your goals are meant to honour you, not fix you”
“As soon as you decide to do without planes, you realise how they impose their limited way of looking at things on you. Oh, they diminish distances, which is handy enough, but they end up diminishing everything including your understanding of the world. You leave Rome at sunset, have dinner, sleep a while, and at dawn you are in India. But in reality each country has its own special character. We need time if we are to prepare ourselves for the encounter; we must make an effort if we are to enjoy the conquest. Everything has become so easy that we no longer take pleasure in anything. To understand is a joy but only if it comes with effort, and nowhere is this more than in the experience of other countries. Reading a guidebook while hopping from one airport to another is not the same as the slow, laborious absorption- as if by osmosis- of the humours of the earth to which ones remains bound when travelling by train.
Reached by plane, all places become alike- destinations separated from one another by nothing more than a few hours flight. Frontiers, created by nature and history and roots in the consciousness of the people who live within them, lose their meaning & cease to exist for those who travel to and from the air-conditioned bubbles of airports, where the border is a policeman in front of a computer screen where the first encounter with the new place is baggage carousel, where the emotion of leave taking is dissipated in the rush to get to the duty free shop- now the same everywhere”
— A Fortune Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani
Proposal: Let’s drop the metaverse, and go all in on the meatverse. Less virtual reality meetings, more steak.
Dear Me,
If, in future years, anyone asks you to give advice to your sixteen year old self… don’t.
Make your own unique messes, and then work your own way out of them.
See you,
Alan Rickman
Molly White: blockchains are decentralised but not really, immutable but not really.
I missed this New York Times piece on my hometown, Mackay in North Queensland, about how the mayor is almost single-handedly trying to turn the community around on climate change.
“Over the past year, Mr. Williamson, a fifth-generation Mackay local, has tried more outreach and education, meeting frequently with residents to discuss why the trees are needed, and whether a lighter mix of vegetation might be allowed for partial ocean views.”
If Mackay was going to be in the New York Times I always thought it would be because they ship about 100 million tonnes of coal out of the region every year.
Things we were very worried about in our youth that turned out to be non-issues:
- using algebra
- the Bermuda Triangle
- snakes on planes
- quicksand
- monsters under our bed
- remembering phone numbers
- what’s in Area 51
- becoming prime minister
2021, the year in typography, if you’re into that kinda nerdy thing like I am.
Om Malik on the lethal and constant feeling of self-importance we walk around with:
“With all the conversation of breaking free from big social platforms, owning your own digital identity, and being independent, I have been asking myself: how can all of us who have slowly become online performance artists ever be post-social?”
Since March 2020 I’ve thought a lot about what it means for us to think we’re so self-important and what that means for us living in a community with a virus like the spicy cough.
I’m sure it’s not only me, but the moment a sense of self-importance enters my soul I start feeling sick. This photo of a chicken with a mullet often helps me get over myself.
