Notices by Zane Selvans (zaneselvans@social.coop), page 3

@ntnsndr Reading Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" and Richard B. Alley's "The Two Mile Time Machine" at the same time made me think a lot about uncertainty and how we do a terrible job as a civilization at integrating it into our collective understanding of the world, even if pockets of society do understand it in important contexts.

@ntnsndr “If we have indeed lit the fuse on West Antarctica, it’s very hard to imagine putting the fuse out. But there’s a bunch more fuses, and there’s a bunch more matches, and we have a decision now: Do we light those?”

@ntnsndr In a related uncertainty vein, Donald MacKenzie's "An Engine, Not a Camera" was a great story about the brittle chaos that ensues when we mistake a social construction for a fact about the world and then suddenly realize that's what we've done. And the feedback loop between shared models of the social world and how the social world ends up working.

@ntnsndr The Library Socialism podcast can get a bit repetitive, but I think the underlying ideas are mostly good, and they're trying to spread them. https://srslywrong.com/shows/

@ntnsndr Nils Gilman's "The Official Future is Dead" essay was good about the weird liminal state we're (still!) in:

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/10/30/official-future-dead-long-live-official-future/

I found Picketty's Capital & Ideology shockingly optimistic and constructive. It's a lot of history, but trying to create a positive vision of a future that has some kinds of continuity with that past.

@ntnsndr I am bitter and scarred and anticipate living out the rest of my days in exile.

Just 13 short years after inviting #BoulderCouncil candidates over to the Masala Co-op for tea and cakes to discuss repealing occupancy limits that discriminate against unrelated people, and 28 years after Cedar Barstow got busted for living in an intentional community in her own home and was sentenced to community service, which she used to help found the Boulder Housing Coalition.

https://www.colorado.gov/governor/news/more-housing-now-colorado-eliminates-unfair-occupancy-limits-under-new-law-signed-governor

#CoLeg #Housing

@ntnsndr It's odd to me that the side which is weirdly zealous about gender being thought of in a very particular way is the one throwing around "gender ideology" as a label.

@ntnsndr The turnaround time on this thing is killer. Like if we want to go for Phase II I think we should start on the application as soon as we get Phase I!

@ntnsndr Hopefully we get this NSF POSE grant. 🤞 A substantial part of it is about governance systems for PUDL / open source energy data & modeling work. Maybe we can put the book to use!

Just came across @ntnsndr's discussion of Governable Spaces on the Frontiers of Commoning pod. Are there any other good interviews / discussions about it out there?

https://www.bollier.org/blog/nathan-schneider-building-democratic-governance-internet

Lol of course the book is available for download under a #CreativeCommons license:

https://luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.181/

@ntnsndr Omg it's made of stars.

My (MacOS) disk got full. I removed more than 300GB of stuff, and my disk remains full. WTAF? Are we no longer allowed to delete files?

@Iragersh Alas, this is not the problem. The trash is empty and I am using rm -rf to remove large caches of data.

@ntnsndr You got the RINOs and the DINOs.

@ntnsndr I have a big soft spot for Edward R. Murrow's "Wires, and Lights in a Box"

@derek @helenczerski Cool! I will give it a look.

I think I read too many economics & policy #books in 2023 and I feel like it rotted my brain a little bit. So... I'm looking for #Science and #NaturalHistory reading recommendations for next year. Maybe especially outside of biology since a few of the books on the list so far are:

* Your Inner Fish (Neil Shubin)
* Kindred: Neaderthal Life, Love, Death, & Art (Rebecca Wragg Sykes)
* I Contain Multitudes (Ed Yong)
* A Planet of Viruses (Carl Zimmer)

One thing that #Piketty pointed out in Capital and Ideology that seems obvious in retrospect but that I'd never considered is just how much wealth there is that our civilization has accumulated, but that shows up on nobody's balance sheet.

How much would a copy of today's Wikipedia have been "worth" 2000 years ago? Or even 200 years ago? How much are Maxwell's equations worth? Or germ theory? Or quantum mechanics? Or understanding evolution? Or the fast Fourier transform? 🧵 1/n