Accidental Focus
Format: Status
Read The Overstory by Richard Powers ★★★★☆ 📚
Several different stories & ideas around the importance of trees to the world weave together. Some resonated with me more than others.
Many of the ideas are better known now than when the book was published.
The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story
This is a good story, it might change part of your mind, unfortunately like everything else it is more complicated.
#SilentSunday
Likes I support the mad king by .
@manton‘s take on the #WordPress drama, is as expected very wise.
Listened to: Better Diets for all
And yet, the vast majority of people do not eat within dietary guidelines. If anything, diets — and with them health — are getting worse in many places. What’s the problem? Maybe, it is that the people who devise the policies are too far away from the lives of the people they’re trying to help.
This explanation for why people allow their children to eat poorly resonated. It could also apply to other parenting behaviour, eg. mobile phone use. I’ve sometimes wondered at the food & sweets parents provide. The podcast nails why it is not so simple.
Chat GPT’s geography is a bit off.
Somewhat inspired by @eclectech. I was looking at frost with my class one child noticed the likeness to people so I had to add eyes.
Listened: Meeting Point by Louis MacNeice – A Friend to Imtiaz Dharker.
I was sitting at a table with a boy I just met and he casually said: ‘Time was away and somewhere else. The waiter did not come, the clock forgot them.’ And it just stopped me dead because I wasn’t especially interested in this boy, but for a few seconds I fell in love with him because he said those lines.
Poems as Friends is a lovely idea.
Read The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood ★★★☆☆ 📚
My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition—broken mirrors and so forth—hope’s not based on any kind of logic, it’s just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.’
Sometimes uncomfortably gripping. A touch of The Secret History.