Action Figure Daniel

Category: Notes

  • “The Lion and the Fox” by Alexander Rose

    • By international law, declarations of blockades have to be effectively enforceable to be in effect
    • Luxury items were more profitable than arms purchases
    • “Cotton is King” made people feel confident that a blockade on the South would not persist
    • “Where the lion’s skin will not reach, it must be patched out with the fox’s”
      • (Where might cannot win, one must use cunning)

  • “Radical Acceptance” by Tara Brach

    • We all crave acceptance and feel guilty for doing so
    • We spend our whole lives to become worthy to reenter the “garden”
    • We project unworthiness outward, creating “enemies” so we can fight
    • We cannot accept something until we know what we are accepting
    • “Radical” is Latin for “getting to the root”
    • “What inside you most needs attention?”
    • Invite the terrors to tea, you will be surprised by the experience
    • Widen your attention with to see your fears
    • Take time to see the people; connect with them
    • Ask, “What is really asking for attention?”
    • We are first in relationships, then we are healed in relationships

  • “The Organized Mind” by Daniel J Levitin

    • Memory has a retrieval problem, not a storage problem
    • Our brains organize things but not prioritize them
    • Highly successful people have systems in place to relieve their mind of random distractions
    • The brain is always looks for difference
      • Attentional filtering excludes the common
    • Imagining something helps us hone our senses to find the thing
    • We can use order (for example, a physical boundary) to predetermine security and safeness
    • We have “rehearsal loops” to keep things that we need to remember, remembered
      • Writing things down releases that effort
    • Languages evolved to categorize things
    • Applying a category is more important than the category names
    • It is difficult to make decisions with a lack is information
    • Women’s cortisol levels jump when confronted with clutter
    • Improve organization to make the time you spend more meaningful
    • We can gather things to make ourselves more efficient later
    • There is a literal comfort in belonging
    • Online marriages tend to end in fewer divorces
    • We see individuals in the “in group” as being distinctive and people of the “out group” as being all the same
    • We notice correlations but not lack there of
    • The optimal number of pieces of information is 5, we generally do okay until 10
    • “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two never knows.”

  • “Nature’s Best Hope” by Douglas W Tallaway

    • “Animals live in nature and nature is somewhere else”
    • Nature should be saved where it is but not where people are
      • Wilson Robert MacArthur
      • The Diversity of Life
    • Half of the US’s biodiversity is East of the Mississippi
    • Art shifted from religion to nature as nature started disappearing
    • Current policies are maligned because they focus on saving small, isolated habitats instead of ecosystems
    • “Islands are where species go to die”
    • Size and isolation matter
    • Forest edges are more dangerous than internal sections
    • Isolation gives forests more edges and fewer interiors
    • Lawn maintenance uses as much fertilizer as the whole agricultural industry
    • 60% of western water usage is for lawn
    • We could not tolerate intruders because resources were so constrained
    • Tribalism was important to survival
    • Humans prefer short grass
    • Intergression is where the foreign plant breeds with a near native plant
    • Insects are very picky eaters
    • Specie diversity is important for ecosystems
    • Nestlings typically eat full meals 30-40 times a day
    • Meet the needs of the specialists and the generalists will follow
    • Think of turf as an area rug, not wall-to-wall carpet

  • “The Nature of Oaks” by Douglas W Tallaway

    • Oak trees support more life than any other tree
    • Oaks and jays complement each other well
    • Oak trees “mast” where they periodically surge in acorn production, then produce fewer the next year
    • Then tends to greatly reduce the predators
    • “What dislodges a caterpillar is surprise, not force”
    • Weevils are the broadest genus of animal in the world