Finished reading: Empty Space by M. John Harrison 📚

The third and final installment of M. John Harrison’s Light series. As before, I was left wondering, between the baroque prose and the twisting parallel plots, what on Earth I had just read. But figuring it out is nine tenths of the fun!

Currently reading: The Formula by Albert-László Barabási 📚 which starts off as self-help dreck, but soon switches gears and reassures me that I haven’t made a horrible mistake buying it. The formula for success is mostly randomness, but it’s worth dwelling on the parts that aren’t pure chance.

Finished reading: Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand 📚

Funny that a book about our entire planet would present the best case for localism outside of Nassim Taleb’s work — I must try to replicate his situational awareness survey in a separate post (select questions: Where is North? What are the 5 most common native birds where you live? Which ones are migratory? How far down do you need to drill to get to water? etc.) The case for why nuclear energy may be preferable to renewables is also strong.

It does, however, endorse some decidedly un-talebian techniques like transgenic crops and glyphosate pesticides. As with any speculative nonfiction, x% will be trash, and as time passes more and more will be revealed as such.

Currently reading: Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand 📚

Slowly realizing that the aversion to nuclear power may be the biggest folly of the baby boom generation. And there are so many to choose from!

For your Saturday reading — I dare not say enjoyment as there are, alas, few joys in the story — a monograph on Serbia covering 14 centuries of dense history in mere 30 pages, written by Lily Lynch, the one American who knows more about the Balkans than the Balkanites themselves.

Belatedly reading a wonderful post from David Smith on that strange feeling you get right after completing a big project, not-really-tired and not-really-empty. It was guaranteed for me after every big exam back in medical school, nowadays comes on not more than once per year. I could identify it even back then but didn’t know what to call it, and stretched — thank you, J. R. R. Tolkien for coming up with it — is a good descriptor.

How many more gems are hidden in The Lord of the Rings, I wonder. After 20+ years, it is due for a re-read.

Finished reading: Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton 📚

Not much has changed in how people think about religion since Chesterton wrote this more than a century ago. Alas, the way people write about it has gotten much worse.

It was while watching the third loop of a video of Jack Callaghan, a 28-year-old man from Newcastle, running a steamer back and forth over his bedsheets that I realised I agreed with one of the commenters: yes, this also brought me “peace and joy”.

So begins a (paywalled, sorry) FT article on people earning a good bit of money from posting housekeeping tips to social media: #cleantok, #cleanfluencers, apparently. It reminded me of Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts, my favorite book to pick up and read at random, and for the same reason all these people are watching a guy clean out a microwave with half a lemon and some water: peace and joy.

The article goes on to describe some spring clean routines for homes of various sizes, including — it is the Financial Times, after all — some they euphemistically call big and stately. This spring we will be moving house, not cleaning it, but I’ll keep browsing through Home Comforts for peace, joy, and some semblance of a plan for spring cleanings to come.

Finished reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend 📚

A well-made case for why capital-s-Science is not the answer to all of the world’s many ills, and why it should be separated more from politics and policy, and less so from church. Pair it with Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Currently reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend 📚, and I will post about it soon as it is at least a thought-provoking if not a great book, but I came across this biography of Imre Lakatos who was Feyerabends frenemy and to whom he dedicated the very book I’m reading, and I have to say it is one of the most entertaining encyclopedia entries ⊕ Being a nerd kid in the 1990s without broadband internet, that is a lot of encyclopedia entries! I have laid my eyes on.

About their collaboration in particular:

It is quite clear that Lakatos and Feyerabend were engaged in a self-conscious campaign of mutual boosterism, leading up to a planned epic encounter between a fallibilistic rationalism, as represented by Lakatos, and epistemological anarchism, as represented by Feyerabend. As Feyerabend put it “I was to attack the rationalist position, Imre was to restate and defend it, making mincemeat of me in the process”

Fun!