What I've consumed/produced lately

dusting this thing off for 2023

As part of that “New Years resolution” thing, I’ve made a commitment to myself to write and publish some sort of essay and read a book for every week of 2023.  Then I immediately went on vacation for the first week of the year and completely lost momentum.  So it goes in the somewhat ridiculous world of New Year’s resolutions.   

I’m still working on my first book of the year, Mining the Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets by John S. Lewis and hope to report on why I read that and what I learned after I finish the book, hopefully later this week.   

In the meantime, I just published this brief essay on the Hero’s Journey on LinkedIn.  After moving from a corporate career in engineering and management into psychotherapy, I’ve evolved that over the last several years into coaching engineers, entrepreneurs, and men (generally speaking) on their hero’s journey.   This first essay begins to take a look at what that’s all about.

And here’s a few shorter pieces (not books… articles? essays? blogs? whateveryoucallits?) I’ve read recently that I found interesting.

Kevin Kelly: The Case for Optimism  title says it all.

Five Mildly Anti-Buddhist Essays - by Sasha Chapin  I don’t see this as “anti-” so much as a more balanced counter-take to the white-washed pop-Buddhism so prevalent in the West..

Consciousness didn’t evolve. It creates evolution  For starters, I’m not even sure if we have a hard definition of “consciousness.”  I know I don’t.  But beyond that, there’s a debate about where it’s found and when it emerged.   Panpsychists believe that everything, literally everything has consciousness.   Others think that consciousness emerged when life reached a certain level of complexity.   I personally appreciate this new view of consciousness as fundamental, and that it’s what’s driving the ship, so to speak.

Physicists discover completely new type of quantum entanglement  Quantum entanglement -  “Pairs of particles can become so entwined with each other that one can no longer be described without the other, no matter how far apart they may be. Weirder still, changing one will instantly trigger a change in its partner, even if it was on the other side of the universe.” emphasis mine.  I struggled mightily to wrap my head around physics as an undergrad.  I was so intimidated by Physics II - Electricity and Magnetism, that I postponed the class until my final semester at Mines and skated by to graduate with the only D I’ve ever earned on a report card in my entire academic “career.”  That said, I’ve long been intrigued by the strange world of quantum physics and it’s implications in the mystery of… well, everything.   I go on a bit about the mysteries of quantum physics, but for now, let’s just summarize the new breakthrough.  From the article: “Usually, observations of quantum entanglement are made between pairs of photons or electrons that are identical in nature. But now, for the first time, the BNL team has detected pairs of dissimilar particles undergoing quantum entanglement.”  The longstanding assertion from quantum entanglement was that particles that made contact with each other continued to be in communication, no matter the distance between them.  Folks have made a lot of wild assertions about quantum physics that may or may not be factually true, but this makes some of the wilder assertions about quantum communication a little more true than they used to be.