Curiosity Pill #28
On sponsorship, long term growth, smell, cosmos and libraries
Why do the rich and the powerful sponsor literature festivals, prizes, and art in today’s world?
Because no matter the class we all need a glimmer of hope, a scrap of truth, a beautiful moment, an intricate story. A journey to Indian literary festivals and public spaces including public bathrooms or the lack thereof. “Art is a lifeboat, a raft we cobble together from scraps left on the shore after a shipwreck. We work with these materials – loss, hope, bewilderment, loneliness, caricature, dependence, vengeance, fleeting moments of joy, and terror. The rich and the powerful know that for any society to remain stable and sane, a little truth must survive. Destroy it, squeeze it too hard, and you get a society that is unable to breathe. Such a world turns on itself, starts to feed on itself.”
Growth Without Goals
An alternative look on long term thinking without the bundling of goals. Why focus on the future? Why frustrate while the goal is not reached, and rejoice for a very short time when it is? Why not explore, focus on the every day, on the now?” We accumulate accomplishments and call it success. Success means something very different to me, and I think being a great father will be about effectively communicating this different definition of success to my kids. Success is about building a set of daily practices, it is about growth without goals. Continuous, habitual practice(s) trumps achievement-based success...Now I just want to explore. That may mean blog posts, research papers, new investing strategies, letters, podcasts, long periods of nothing, or maybe another book. Who knows? Exploration is continuous, there is no end point. Focusing on exploration is very rewarding all the time. It may produce things that look like end points, like achievements, but those things are just byproducts.”
https://investorfieldguide.com/growth-without-goals/
Sniffing Out the Vast World of Smell
A review of “Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells,” by Harold McGee about the most underrated sense we possess. “The book travels from the noxious sulfuric gases of outer space to the resinous terpenoids that grace eucalyptus, cannabis, and tobacco leaves, and the civetone, ambergris, and musk that give Chanel No. 5 its je ne sais quoi. As McGee breaks down each scent, explaining their unique chemical compounds and the metabolisms and reactions that brings them into being, he also delivers a brief molecular history of the planet. For McGee, these unseen forces are a chance to widen our senses, and to expand our awareness of our sensory lives.”
https://undark.org/2020/11/27/book-review-nose-dive/
Easy to Defend, Hard to Believe
A review of Cosmology’s Century: An Inside History of Our Modern Understanding of the Universe by P.J. Pebbles, a Nobel winning physicist.”Peebles had an important role in many stages of this history. The cosmic microwave background was famously discovered in the 1960s by Bell Labs engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who couldn’t figure out how to eliminate low-frequency noise from their experiments in radio communications. Theorists had predicted such a universal background signal from the Big Bang, and Peebles, working as a graduate student under Robert Dicke at Princeton, was co-author on the theory paper that accompanied the experimental report by Penzias and Wilson, claiming the observations as a victory for the Big Bang cosmology. Later, in the early 1980s, Peebles would go on to introduce cold dark matter as a way to explain the small spatial variations in the CMB, with a paper that presaged the ΛCDM model’s experimental victories about two decades later.”
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/11/easy-to-defend-hard-to-believe.html
The future of the library
Seth Godin on the past, present and future of the library and the evolving role of the librarian as a curiosity incentiviser. ”The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.”
https://seths.blog/2011/05/the-future-of-the-library/
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Video Pill
Game Jams to World Records Jupiter Hadley Interview
Weekend Wednesday
Villains in Wrestling: Making People Hate You
Podcast Pill
The History of Football, Podcast:You're dead to me
Where did football come from? Was it really invented in China or is the truth a little closer to home? And what’s the truth behind the history of the women’s game? Greg Jenner is joined by comedian Tom Parry and historian Prof Jean Williams to learn the history of the beautiful game.
https://player.fm/series/youre-dead-to-me-2543370/the-history-of-football-radio-edit
Phenomenology, Podcast: Philosopher's Zone
What if even the most ordinary experience could reward close and detailed analysis, revealing fascinating insights into the structures of consciousness and the world? This is the question asked by phenomenology, which investigates the experience of experience, and this week’s guest has written a new book exploring phenomenology from the ground up.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/phenomenology/12948400
Design Pill
Cover art for the single 'TOY’ by Blumoo studios
Poetic Pill
Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot
“…At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. …“
http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/1-norton.htm
Underground Pill
Teeze, Feux, Adi - Elevate
“I’m a flabbergasted bastard from the lands of farness
They just can't believe the songs that I made in darkness
In fairness I'm just shooting bullets straight into armours
It's hiphop and psychs that create a all nirvanas
Their sounds and flows yeah I'd say they pretty harmless
But it's their wrong doings coming right from their karmas
I don't care about success or being the best
But I know damn right I'm different to the rest“
Dictionary Pill
osmocosm = the totality of scents in the world around us
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