Elsewhat

Listening to the audiobook for Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta, I came across this passage which discusses a sort of spirituality which resonated with me:

There are at least four parts to your spirit, from an Aboriginal point of view, and this shadow is only one of them. Your highest self may be what they call the “super ego” in psychology is your big spirit, and it goes back to sky camp when you die. …

Your shadow spirit is that part of you that wants things you don’t need and makes you think you’re better than other people and above the land, and it takes all the other parts of your spirit to hold it in check. If the rest of your spirit is not clear and in balance, it gets away from you, causing conflict and destruction. You gossip behind people’s backs, spread uncertainty, deliver judgements, or upset people, take more than you need, and accumulate goods without sharing. It makes you a competitor instead of a human being. But only when it’s out of balance. If it is checked by the other parts of you, it becomes a stable ego that drives you to act upon the world in perfect ways. You don’t know what you’re going to do, but you’re going to have to do it in a way you’re You need to believe in ghosts to balance spirit and live the right way in this world. You can use any metaphor you like. For example, ego, id, superego, persona. Frontal lobe, monkey brain, neocortex, and lizard brain. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnon. Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Malfoy. Monkey spirit, pig spirit, fish spirit and tripataka. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Whatever stories your cultural experience offers you, you can still perceive spirit through metaphor and bring it into balance to step into your designated role as a custodian of reality.

This idea of accessing spirituality through metaphor really resonated with me.

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, writes an intriguing piece about plant cognition in The New York Review of Books. She writes:

Several recent books contend that the latest discoveries in plant cognition are so significant they force us to rethink our view of life itself. Depending on how you look at things, this prospect is thrilling to contemplate or nothing less than tragic.

It goes on to describe some examples of complex plant behaviour:

Plants communicate with animals as well, sometimes honestly, sometimes not. Corn plants that are being nibbled by caterpillars release chemicals that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, killing them

Read the Article Here →

Bees are incredible. Just a bunch of ladies hanging around flowers all day and making candy. Did you know when they fly they beat their wings at over 230 beats per second?

Thomas Seeley has spent a lifetime studying bees, and though his book also gives a good overall sense of how amazing bees are, it centres itself on one tiny facet of their behaviour—how they choose where to live. When bees need a new place to live, they form a swarm—a big bundle of bees which gather on a tree branch, or building, or other temporarily safe spot with their queen in the middle.

What they do next is fascinating, they send out scouts to look for suitable places to live. when these bees find a spot, they return to the swarm and perform a waggle dance for their peers. The angle and duration of their dance, similar to those they do to tell their hive-mates where to find sources of food, expresses both where the potential new hive is and also how suitable it would be to live it. Bees have a number of criteria for their abode, including the size (15 litres or more), size of the main opening (15cm square or less), height above ground (10-15 feet off the ground is best) and direction (Southward-facing if possible).

As the scouts return and perform their waggle dances, a sort of debate takes place. Competing spots are advertised, visited, and if found suitable, other bees will waggle dance in advocacy for them. Over a few days, the swarm slowly reaches a consensus, and eventually sets off for their new home.

This is the sort of book that could only be written by someone who has made their life studying bees. The author seems to be positively overflowing with the sort of deep knowledge that you only get after a lifetime of studying, and loving, something very specific. The book feels like it can barely contain all the author has to say on the subject—as if the author could have gone on for hundreds more pages on the subject. Paul Stamet’s Mycelium Running about all matter of funguses seems like a worthy comparison.

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This book follows the history of what is commonly referred to as user experience (or UX) design. The book both chronicles the history of UX, and describes how we arrived at the current state of the design industry (warts and all).

I particularly liked this passage discussing how accessibility in design has lead directly to innovation:

You sit at the end of a long line of inventions that might never have existed but for people with disabilities: the keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email. In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. And in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters, because electronic messaging was the best way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work.

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Kevin Kelly‘s Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wished I’d Known Earlier, was a perfect quick rainy day cottage read. It’s a collection of advice which the author has gathered in their 70-plus years on earth. Some are pithy aphorisms, like ‘If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a pyramid scheme.’ Very true.

Though generally pithy and easy to digest, the chunks of advice sometimes come a little longer, like this (still brief) thought about creativity:

Seperate the processes of creating from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.

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When I saw the title of this book, written by fellow Montréaler Kevin Yuen Kit Lo of LOKI, I know I had to go to the book launch and read it. The description says it well: “Design Against Design argues for the urgent necessity of critical engagement and political resistance through graphic practice.”

The book is a clear reflection of its author—socially conscious, antiestablishment, anticapitalist, and with a punk aesthetic in its visuals and politics. It’s also deeply personal, and begins with a vivid account of childhood abuse, which may turn some people off. You know from the first chapter that it’s not a beach read.

Design Against Design was great, evoking some other great socially-conscious design writers like Victor Papanek and Mike Monteiro. It’s not meant to go down easy.

Order the Book Here →

I’ve often wondered about the origin of the term ‘Caucasian’. My assumption was that there was some logical reason to link all white people to this relatively small area in Eurasia. It turns out to be much more nonsensical, racist, and creepy.

While reading through Jason Roberts‘ truly excellent Every Living Thing, which explores the history of classifying living things into groups, he couldn’t help but touch upon the arbitrary nature of the term ‘Caucasian’. Here Roberts talks about the ridiculous origins of the term, which first appeared in On the Natural Variety of Mankind, by the German Johann Friedrich Blumenbach:

Blumenbach, however, did not hesitate to declare racial superiority. He was a collector of skulls, and in his opinion the prettiest specimen (in terms of pleasing proportions) in his collection was that of a female from the Caucasus, a mountain range between the Black and Caspian seas. Guided purely by personal aesthetics, Blumenbach wrote, “I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian,” explaining, “I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus… because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men…”

Continues Roberts: “Blumenbach effectively combusted modern racism into existence.” I strongly recommend this book (Roberts’ not Blumenbach’s).

I’m currently looking into high schools for my son, and start times are playing a larger role than expected. Many are too early for us to be able to get there on time without waking at an unreasonable hour. According to sleep researcher Dr. Matthew Walker, early school start times are increasingly common, as he writes in his book Why We Sleep:

A century ago, schools in the US started at nine a.m. As a result, 95 percent of all children woke up without an alarm clock. Now, the inverse is true, caused by the incessant marching back of school start times—which are in direct conflict with children’s evolutionarily preprogrammed need to be asleep during these precious, REM-sleep-rich morning hours.

Many schools start at 8:00am, or sometimes even earlier. Some of these otherwise great schools have dropped far down our list because of their unreasonable start times.

Levels of ADHD have been rising steadily around the world. This might seem unrelated, but according to Walker, sleep deprivation symptoms are often indistinguishable from those of ADHD.

If you make a composite of these [ADHD] symptoms (unable to maintain focus and attention, deficient learning, behaviorally difficult, with mental health instability), and then strip away the label of ADHD, these symptoms are strongly overlapping with those caused by a lack of sleep. Take an under-slept child to a doctor and describe these symptoms without mentioning the lack of sleep, which is not uncommon, and what would you imagine the doctor is diagnosing the child with, and medicating them for? Not deficient sleep, but ADHD.

More research is needed, as correlation does not mean causation, but the possibility that some of the rise in ADHD can be attributed to early school times is intriguing. As someone who is both bad at sleep, and diagnosed with ADHD, these passages are making me think hard about my own experiences in childhood with ADHD medication, which I absolutely hated and stopped after a couple of days.

As someone who is quite solidly anti-social media (this blog is the closest I come to taking part in social media), this episode of the Your Undivided Attention podcast is a sobering listen. It’s an interview with writer Jonathan Haidt, where they particularly focus on the mental health crisis among Gen Z, the first generation who have grown up completely in the social media era. Notably, Zoomers have much higher rates of anxiety and depression.

It starts with a sobering detailing of a slow educational crisis starting with Ben Z (generally considered to be kids born from the mid/late 90’s into the early 2010’s):

…humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years because that’s what mammals do. All mammals play. They have to play to wire up their brains. But that play-based childhood began to fade out in the 1980s in the United States and it was gone by 2010, and that’s because right around 2010 is when the phone based childhood sweeps in…

…scores in math and reading and those were all fairly steady, and then all of a sudden, after 2012, they drop. So that’s international. Around the world, our young people are… not learning as much as they would have a few years before.

Find The Episode Here →

Friend of Elsewhat Jason Roberts has a new book, out yesterday, called Every Living Thing. His last book, A Sense of the World was beautiful and amazingly well researched, making this an instant buy (from your local independent book store, not Amazon).

The book follows the paths of two scientists endeavouring to come up with a taxonomy system to classify, well, every living thing. From the New York Time’s review:

Roberts’s exploration centers on the competing work of Linnaeus and another scientific pioneer, the French mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Of the two, Linnaeus is far better known today. Of course, Roberts notes, the Frenchman did not pursue fame as ardently as did his Swedish rival. Linnaeus cultivated admiration to a near-religious degree; he liked to describe even obscure students like Rolander as “apostles.” Buffon, in his time even more famous as a brilliant mathematician, scholar and theorist, preferred debate over adulation, dismissing public praise as “a vain and deceitful phantom.”

Their different approaches to stardom may partly explain why we remember one better than we do the other. But perhaps their most important difference — one that forms the central question of Roberts’s book — can be found in their sharply opposing ideas on how to best impose order on the planet’s tangle of species.

Read the New York Times’ Review →