April was my first full month with a baby. I put up a pretty good fight for my creative/intellectual life, and I think at least half won it. The real casualty was faffing and social media time (which I’m not much sorry for) and post quality and organization (which I am). Some of the book reviews and posts I meant to finish by this time aren’t finished, and so some of the links in this post are dead. Some might remain dead forever. Some might get moved to next month’s post. I’ve chosen to upload this wart-ridden roundup post as is.
More thoughts on literacy
Literacy is really high variance compared to orality (most people process and emit speech fluently, but there’s a wide gap between the most and least literate 10% of people) – because text is so new. Tthere must have been an era where orality was similarly high-variance, right? A time when there were people in your clan who could only say simple sentences, coexisting with people who could talk circles around you.
Nowadays we associate “can only say simple sentences” with intellectual disability, but they would have been totally functional in other ways. They would have been the orality equivalent of this guy (John Corcoran) who taught at a school for 17y while hiding that he couldn’t really read:
He is severely dyslexic and read at a second-grade level until the age of 48.[1] Despite this, he graduated from high school and college, and worked as a high school teacher and real estate developer without being discovered. … On his personal website, Corcoran describes some of the tricks he used to manage this.
The students wrote their names on a seating chart and then pronounced them for me. To avoid reading the list, I asked them the next day to call out their names, claiming I wanted them to get to know one another.
Maybe they didn’t talk much, or got confused/overwhelmed when you talk at them too much – but were solid hunters, weavers, community members, etc.
I seem to keep thinking about this – last month I was wondering Is the current era anomalous in filtering for literacy?. A good sign I should pick up a book on what we know about the development of literacy, how it spread through the population, what we know about its early rates of uptake.
Since the world currently contains populations that were mostly illiterate until the past century or two, we probably know a lot about it – although I suppose it’s greatly confounded by various social upheavals associated with colonialism and the general chaos of the 20th century.
The postpartum care worker
The most striking thing that happened this month was the 19 days a hired postpartum care worker following Korean traditions stayed at my house to take care of the baby and cook for us. Within days I was drooling to fire her but could not due to being injured enough by childbirth I couldn’t sit down, or cheaply transition between standing and lying down. I wrote up a draft – sanhujori – but have not hit publish on it yet. I feel weird about it.
Some of the drama that felt interesting and literary at the time just feels like r/AITA dreck. The things she did that I found most objectionable are not the things a general audience would find most objectionable and vice versa, but I’m tempted to highlight the inflammatory ones I don’t much object to to ‘prove’ that she was difficult and that my initially intense negative feelings were justified. And while I found her a nightmare employee in some ways, she also seemed desperate for the employment. Gratitude, rage, resentment, compassion commingled in me.
We parted on weird, abrupt terms – the day before her flight out she said she wanted to leave immediately to take a bath in a city an hour’s drive away. She didn’t want to shower in our house due to shyness about men being on the same floor as the bathroom.
This sounds weird and corny and insincere, but: I felt such intense goodwill for her that I was not able to express, and I’m ashamed for not demonstrating it to her. The parts that instead I most showed to her were faux subservience (due to, uh, Confucian dynamics) and frustration. To write and post a detailed account that was honest would illuminate those parts of me for external judgment, too, and I don’t know if I’m willing to do that.
Fell off health logging
Prior to the baby, I started and ended my day by logging my meds and activities in a large Google spreadsheet I’ve kept for seven years. In the past month, that routine fell apart. It used to be load-bearing for that routine to start my day with a leisurely ~30 minutes of sitting down and waking up, which I no longer do.
I’m hoping to get that routine back soon. If I figure out some way cleverer than “just force myself to take those 30 minutes again”, I’ll tell you how next month.
T shirt designs
Most of my creative energy this month went to designing T shirts for Manifest. I decided to take a step back and figure out: what makes a good T-shirt design, anyway? I started writing a design principle posts: t-shirts 101.
Designing a 3 day art class
I’m not sure if this is going to happen, but I might be teaching a 3 day art class in June, for a total of 20 hours. The specific thing I want to teach is “how to make something that looks good when you are bad” I think this is a reasonable focus because the audience is largely programmers who at are a conference for something else, and I am someone who stopped actively developing technical skills in painting a while ago in favor of “just making things that looked beautiful to me”. (I’m not good enough to have stopped, but I was no longer interested in the kind of project that demanded I be technically excellent.)
On incomplete projects
I have started to think of incomplete projects as resources.
Children, mine and in general
Assorted short posts about my baby
Here.
I should listen to more music
In 2014, I listened to one particular set of songs on repeat while reading Infinite Jest. Three years later I was doing a completely different activity when Spotify ran long enough that it ran into that set of songs again.
I found my thoughts drifted very naturally from the current activity to Infinite Jest:
…subject ⇒ generalized philosophy tangent ⇒ Godel ⇒ David Foster Wallace’s study of the incompleteness theorems ⇒ Hal Incandenza as a tennis player as written by DFW the tennis player ⇒ that fucking hilarious war game scene ⇒ that amazing scene where Joelle… ⇒ huh, I never did figure out that ambiguity with…, etc.
I didn’t just jump the book, my brain took a short path with intermediate nodes that had legit connections. And it seemed natural, I didn’t even notice the music until I noticed how I’d just remembered and thought about a bunch of unrelated book scenes in sequence and wondered why that was happening.
Similarly, I want to crystallize memories of this phase of my first child with audio cues. By default I don’t listen to a lot of music, so I’ve been going out of my way to do so, and keep the playlist stable.
Contraception decreases child abuse long term
My logic is laid out here.
The interiority of underfed children
I also wondered if it’s harder to love underfed children as a full person with their own mind if you grow up shutting your mind off against the pain they’re in from hunger, and if this contributes to the default treatment of children in human societies.
Media
A tentative observation: I thought my reading would decrease once I had a baby, but I think it’s increased due to audiobook consumption while doing chores or breastfeeding.
I did not finish the books this month I intend to finish (Bonds that Make Us Free, Norse Mythology, Zelazny’s Amber quintet). The two I do not intend to finish are Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, both comparative mythology books I picked in because I thought they might be useful when outlining a faux myth short storiy in the style of old Hindu or Greek myths. They were not!
What I was hoping both books would be: a compilation of dozens of old myths from around the world, plus commentary on their underlying structure. It isn’t not that but the myths are broken up (harder to analyze what each segment is doing) and the commentary seems… bad? “Your most charismatic lit professor who doesn’t make that much sense when you go over your lecture notes at home takes a little cocaine and free associates into a voice recorder.”
Frazer’s The Golden Bough also contains icky credulity towards anthropologists who strongly smell of just fabricating details about premodern cultures’ religious rites.
I might try the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index next.
Links
Robots and dairy cows
https://spectrum.ieee.org/lely-dairy-robots
Within their herd, cows have a well-established hierarchy, and the robots need to work within this hierarchy to do their jobs. For example, a cow won’t move out of the way if it thinks that another cow is lower in the hierarchy than it is, and it will treat a robot the same way. The engineers had to figure out how the Discovery Collector could drive back and forth to vacuum up manure without getting blocked by cows. “In our early tests, we’d use sensors to have the robot stop to avoid running into any of the cows,” explains Jacobs. “But that meant that the robot became the weakest one in the hierarchy, and it would just end up crying in the corner because the cows wouldn’t move for it. So now, it doesn’t stop.”
Shrikes!
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/25/occasional-paper-the-suplex-bird/
So let’s go to the obvious bit first: shrikes are sometimes known as “butcher birds”. This is because of their strange and rather gruesome habit of impaling their prey on thorns or sharp branch-ends.
Shrikes of all species and both genders do this, because it’s a way to store food safely. (It’s basically the same strategy that a leopard uses when it stashes a dead antelope ten meters up in a tree.) However, in several species the male shrikes take it further and will decorate a particular bush or tree with dozens of little corpses — mice, large insects, small birds — as a display to impress and attract females.
The shrike’s strong, hooked beak isn’t designed to kill with a blow. It’s designed to stun with a blow, and then to clamp down strongly on the prey’s neck while the shrike shakes it. The shrike’s thick neck? Is because the shrike has massively powerful neck muscles. The shaking can deliver sudden accelerations of up to six gravities in a fraction of a second, which is roughly like having a 50 pound weight quite suddenly dropped on your neck from a yard up. It’s the shaking, not the peck, that severs the prey’s spinal cord. The shrike suplexes its prey to death.
Curing recipe brain
An intervention I direly need – in the next year or so I hope to greatly ramp up how much I cook.
https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/cookbooks-to-cure-recipe-brain
But if you’re trying to learn to cook, in general, and recipes are your main tool for doing that, then you might end up kind of recipe-brained. You might end up thinking about cooking, in general, as a series of discrete projects that each take about an hour (& at least half an hour longer than the recipe tells you to expect), which either produce a single meal, or (possibly worse) leave you with leftovers of exactly the same meal, only worse.
Recipe brain will either prevent you from cooking regularly, or, if you’re more disciplined than me, it will make you miserable while you cook regularly.