Category: Reading

  • “Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery” by Lee Alan Dugatkin

    • Too many mice kills the society
    • With eel grass, starfish live lone lives, without it, they clump together
    •  Rats in human cities tended to self-regulate their populations
    • Fighting takes place on the way to the feeder, but not at the feeder itself
    • Hypothesis that small mammals have frequent aggressive interactions; as the interactions drop, the mammals move in the direction that is most likely to increase such interactions, thus spreading out
    • Generations of leisure impairs the ability to care for young
    • Morning songs may be how birds take a census
    • Dominant rats did not mind pan-sexual and homosexual rat advances on themselves
    • Culture helps manage the abundance of social interactions we have today
    • An “invisible college” allows for important topics to be discussed and foment so answers are ready when they are needed
      • (This is something the internet can help with but does not necessarily)
    • Rats with low social velocity have more randomized patterns that might be better adapted for changing environments
    • Connectivity decreases entropy but adds stress
  • “The Spinach King” by John Seabrook

    • “Truck” comes from “bartering or produce growing”
    • Marel is a prehistoric chemical that made the northeast growing really productive
    • East Coast farms were slow to adopt irrigation, hampering their productivity
    • Road building is naturally connected to farming because they need to get their farm goods to where the people are
    • National road building was originally under the Department of Agriculture
    • During WWII, people were encouraged to pick frozen foods to let canned goods support the war
    • There is a difference between having money and being rich
    • Farming + Contractor work = Year-round work
    • Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a therapy system that is an internal analysis
      • (Damaged people exude power to distract from the weakness inside)
  • “Stan and Gus” by Henry Wiencek

    • Churches turned to art to attract and retain parishioners
  • “Samsung Rising” by Geoffrey Cain

    • Korean national pride and Samsung are often synonymous
    • Samsung wanted to be taken as seriously as Apple
    • Focused on generalist in the early years
    • “I don’t tell them. They’re supposed to notice.” On note taking habits
    • Buying a newspaper allowed them to aggressively manage their public image
    • In the revolution, banks were pulled from corporations and leaders had to manufacture their way into good graces
    • Korea is open and still nationalist
    • If Samsung failed, much of Korea’s economy would also collapse
    • “Change everything but your wife and kids”
    • In the 90’s, Samsung started to look for a coherent design
    • Samsung started looking for products and designs that could be distinctive
    • At the height of the Asian Financial Crisis, Samsung started exporting phones to the US
    • “Running a big company is like running a cemetery. There are thousands of people beneath you and no one is listening.”
    • Samsung’s chairman executed a sketchy stock trade, after which there was intense legal scrutiny
    • Legal problems continue to plague the company
  • “Is a river alive?” by Robert MacFarlane

    • Ghost rivers run under cities, often through the sewers
    • Resource are not, they become
    • “Rivers remember their many homes”
    • Turtle gender is determined by the nest temperature