Lego Tool Box

Memories from being taken to work with Dad as a kid. He has tool boxes with lots of kit in, spares, nuts and bolts. You never know what you might get and you get the job done with what you got.

I also had a box, of Lego. My tool box for ideas. I always had more fun adding lots of bits and bobs to it then creating things from my imagination, using whatever I could find in the big pile of bricks, making do with what there was. Not as fine looking as the actual toy from the box using all the parts correctly. But you know, you build that once then see what else you can do.

And now it seems that’s how I approach most things at work. I make do with what I got and get the job done to keep the shows on the road. I feel like I work with lots of imperfect systems but use the tool box of workarounds accrued from years of experience to get the job done. Meanwhile there always seems to be a new system rolled out to improve things (which invariably has more flaws!)

I wonder if this obsession with bringing in new systems instead of fixing things is related to consumer society – buy new and improved (don’t fix). And does it actually work? Lots of construction sites now seem to be pre-made bits stuck together on site. In the news seems like the modern buildings have trouble sticking together!

Could this be due to abstraction? – plans look fine on computer and should work if follow instructions perfectly. But on the ground maybe you need someone who sees what’s there, what the problem is and has enough in the tool box to get it done rather than send back ‘defective’ part and order a new one.  

Magic of Music

How my use of music has changed though the decades but it’s been the constant heartbeat of my life.

I feel dead without the beats.

Now it’s such a perplexingly musically rich environment, soundclould mixes I can’t keep up with (check out the playlists) and I keep buying tunes, yes - spending currency on it cause the artist need the thanks for they joy they bring me(!), at a rate that if it was vinyl I’d need so many storage units (just have the one!)

Still occasionally spin the vinyl, whack on a CD for nostalgia, but mainly albums. Do people listen to them now? Can one tune transport you back through the ages like an hour of the emotional roller-coaster of screamadelica?  Perhaps so, everything speeding up now but I like the go-slow sometimes.

But the constant need for a new beat has also never gone, so easy now to consume and the joy of a mix with fresh tunes is still exhilarating. I love my musical journeys, not knowing where they will take me and when I curate the music to the mood in my soul; I feel more alive, vivid, in the flow of the miracle of living. It’s pure magic. 

God: An Anatomy - by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Fascinating read, got so much more out of this than I expected. The book is divided into chapters by body parts but just uses that to launch into a rich history of the times the bible was written in. And of course the bible was written and revised over hundreds of years so there’s much to pack in.

But today the bible is presented as a coherent whole, like it’s just a book with chapters – right? Not a collection of books vastly different in composition. Letters, myths, instructions, visions by so many authors and editors all of whom had different agendas. Stavrakopoulou makes this all wonderfully accessible and transports you to the times of these writings. Her descriptions of ancient artifacts are so rich you get more than just looking at the pictures, it’s like having an expert guide for your time travels.

What this approach makes clear is the christian “God” we think of today evolved over time coming from the original myths and times when there were many gods who roamed the earth as well as the heavens and mingled with the people. I found it amazing the amount of direct quotes from the bible used as evidence throughout the book, it really is plain to see when someone explains it. It made me appreciate how rich the culture of the ancient Levant was even before the various parts of the bible began to be written, and how these christian parables came from the older myths.

It's given me a thirst to find out more about those older stories and I loved the way Stavrakopoulou kept the focus on the people of the time and their relationships with the deities, from kings and high priests to normal worshipers.

Her style was easy to read and of course there’s a fair amount of taboo subject matter about bodily functions etc which was always entertaining while staying informative but not veering into smuttiness.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent.

Awesome book – this was everything I wanted Sapiens to be (and even ended better than Homo Deus). Similar breath-taking scope from the early evolution of man to modern culture and beyond. This time approached from the angle of cognitive history (that was a new phrase to me too!) Basically it means looking at how we make sense of the world. Now I’ve long been fascinated about what makes human so different from other animals – and yes there’s the whole prefrontal cortex expansion covered here. But then he spends much time analysis language and from here onwards I found the book truly fascinating.

Not only is the topic of religion covered extensively but also how different cultures had different ways of making sense of the world. Whereas ‘Sapiens’ mainly lumped the whole of humankind together this book teased out how different ideas and world views competed. It made a plausible and convincing narrative as to how we got to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Interestingly it also demonstrated how important Christianity was for the scientific revolution! These developments have enabled the expansion of the ‘western’ worldview which we erroneously believe is better or right because of it’s dominance; but is it necessarily the right path?

The last few chapters of the book then charts recent events like climate change / rising population / resource depletion etc. to suggest otherwise. The main thrust is that it is time to move beyond the reductionist view of problem solving (still useful in many situations) and embrace the new systems view which appreciates the interconnection of life. (Relatively new but still with little uptake in the scientific community it would seem). The system view has lots in common with older / ‘eastern’ world views. I was somewhat disappointed there wasn’t an analysis of whether these other world views would come back into predominance or it their cultures had already been too westernised by globalisation (the latter I fear).

I half expected the end to get very hippy but it wasn’t over the top in that aspect. However it was a somewhat bleak read when he aptly explains how locked in we are to the current cycle of growing GDP and consumerism which seems to have taken over the whole world. Again, similar to ‘sapiens’ but with better analysis, it was explained how multinational companies now have most of the worlds power. I found the future technology mooted pretty far-fetched (and I like to keep up with New Scientist - it sure is going to be an interesting few decades to see which come to fruition). In the end the overall analysis of the situation was optimistic despite the precarious situation we find ourselves in.

Book review: Water Knife - by Paolo Bacigalupi

I really enjoyed this page turning thriller although it also felt like a bit of a guilty pleasure because it rolls like a high-octane action movie. Nevertheless I thought it had real depth which made it more than just a bond-esque gore fest. It’s set in a time more near future than his previous novel (The Windup Girl), so it didn’t contain as much fantastical technological-development speculations which I enjoy but the closeness of this novels setting made up for that. Its set in Central America not far from now and water shortages have led to states playing politics with people’s lives – and dirty politics at that.

I found the characters were very rounded and I enjoyed how the use of their different narratives gives the crisis multiple perspectives. The pace of the book is impressively fast, by the middle I thought I was at some finale which then just kept giving with no let up till the end. But although it’s dark and violent I think it would be wrong to just dismiss it as some techno-gangsta future pulp – it’s grappling with the seriousness of the climate change future we’re sleep walking into along and the book goes some way to analysing the psychology of what makes people act in certain ways in extreme situations. The harrowing situations of those in the crisis needed to be very detail to understand their motivations and, in the end, I felt that balance was right to show who the characters were without going too over the top.

Overall a very enjoyable book, both thrilling and thought provoking.

The Path: A New Way to Think about Everything (Professor Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh)

I guess the silver lining to the somewhat gloomy cloud of reading this is that it made me realise I’m very aligned with the Buddhist world view. You’d have thought as this is a book about Eastern Philosophies it was because I was agreeing with what was written but strangely it was quite the opposite. The Buddhism they described was a woolly acceptance of everything. However only a small amount of research would show this is not the case but a misinterpretation which exists in hallmark cards and viral facebook posts. I thought that much of what was described in the book compliments Buddhist notions of mindfulness, for example Mencius’ comparing goodness to cultivating small sprouts which is akin to the teaching that we all have seeds of potential goodness which it is our duty to cultivate and water by mindfulness.

Added to the above frustration I found the style of writing difficult to get along with. To me it sounded like listening to an old uncle going on and on about the good old days and berating the youth for having it all wrong. The good old days are Chinese philosophies (which, in another uncle-ish way he claims many others have misunderstood but we are to trust his version just because they are right). The youth is modern society. The introduction sets out the theme running through the whole book – modern society thinks like Kant and looks on old Chinese philosophies as coming from a less developed time.

Now I don’t think everyone in the Modern West thinks like Kant – indeed the book later quotes psychologist William James saying ‘a man has many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him’ which they say is a ‘surprisingly Confucian sentiment’. It’s not surprising as many Western thinkers from different disciplines would agree with this, basically I felt this division was a false dichotomy between East and West.

Still persevere I did in the hope there were nuggets of wisdom somewhere in the pages of this book. Unfortunately I could fathom few and I often found the examples given vague or contradictory. I was then surprised that by concluding chapters which expounded more grandiose boasting about the authors views of East / West relations. An alternative history was sketched where all Western bureaucracies are thanks to China. Then the concluding comments continue with new-ageist claims that ‘we can create a new age where all sorts of global ideas come alive again. Given the personal and societal crises we face today, these ideas may be our best chance.’

I was left confused how this book could claim to readdress idealist reading of Eastern wisdom. It basically gave a whistle stop tour of one person’s opinions and claimed this was a cure-all. Surely this makes it another idealist reading of Eastern Philosophy rather than the antidote to it?

Sapiens Book Review

Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind (Yuval Noah Harari)

Wow – I thought this was an amazing read, so epic in scope (the whole history of human kind with some future musing at the end). Obviously you can’t cover all history in a single book (or not one I would finish) so he concentrates on four revolutions, cognitive, agricultural, scientific and industrial. 

It’s the first one that sets the tone of the rest of the book – our ability to create imagined worlds has really brought us to this place of technology, huge co-operation and over population (i.e. religion, money, nations, companies etc).

Yual has a knack for zooming in and out the perspective, giving delightful tiny anecdotes from history then the bigger picture of how these driving forces work. It’s thought provoking stuff which made me look at the modern world in a very different way. The anecdotes need to be light hearted as the bigger picture painted is bleak – basically we’re killing the planet as we know it.

Not that we’ve intentionally set out to do so – the narrative makes clear it’s a series of unintended consequences, a once the genie out of the bottle type of situation, so nostalgic remedies are unlikely to work. The end of the book really concentrates of what the next revolution might bring. The reflections on happiness seemed to me out of place compared to the tone of the rest of the book but again it made me wonder what type of measure of progress is meaningful to use.

Overall I was left with the impression that nothing stays the same for very long, more so these days. How / if we will cope with the existing problems and what the future holds will be fascinating.  

If you’re interested in Yuval Noah Harari's ideas here’s a link to his Ted talks:
https://www.ted.com/speakers/yuval_noah_harari