Greetings from the Porch,

Details are coming together nicely for our fall conference in Indianapolis. Make plans to join us if you're able, and if you know someone who'd appreciate spending a couple days with Porchers, please pass the word.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about techno-kings, micro-colleges, and groupthink.

• Hans Zeiger commends the benefits of long-term volunteering: "We dole out a lot of glory to the nonprofit CEO or the mayor, but often it is the patient, faithful volunteer—the parade route coordinator, the PTA parent, the historical society docent, or the church trustee—who keeps things going for a community."

• Adam Smith wrestles with words and the value of wrestling with words: "My real fear is not so much that the Internet makes us bad readers, but that it makes us bad writers."

• I turn to Wendell Berry (of course) to consider what happens to us if we turn writing over to machines and how those of us who care about words may be able to push back against machine-speak: "What will it take to sustain the remnants of a contemporary republic of letters on the margins of a public square blasted by machine-speak?"

• Luke Irwin reviews Ross McCullough's The Body of this Death and praises its form and insight: "Hope remains, and it is the hope of the incarnation, which the Archbishop describes as the 'technology of Catholicism.'"

• Christine Norvell asks about the different reasons we abandon books: "Maybe my reading taste buds are dull. Maybe I’m in a lazy slump. Do I need more books? More appealing choices? Am I even asking the right question?"

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about success this week.

I asked a colleague for some sources to help me better understand alchemy and the development of early modern science, and he recommended Lawrence Principe. I’ve been enjoying several of his books; he’s a lucid writer with a remarkable grasp of a wide range of historical and scientific sources. His ability to deftly distill complex intellectual developments is on full display in The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. At one point, he notes the early shift toward translating objects into their mathematical representations, a movement whose effects include binary code and now LLM architectures:

Methodologically, what Galileo ignored is as important as what he paid attention to. In describing motion, he never concerned himself with what is moving—a ball, an anvil, or a cow. In short, he ignored the qualities of bodies that Aristotelian physics emphasized. Galileo favoured instead their quantities, their mathematically abstractable properties. By stripping away an object’s characteristics of shape, colour, and composition, Galileo gave idealized mathematical descriptions of its behaviour. A cold brown ball of oat doesn’t fall any differently than a hot white cube of tin; Galileo reduces both objects to abstract, decontextualized entities able to be treated mathematically. . . . The technique of reducing the physical world into mathematical abstractions, and eventually into formulas and algorithms, championed by Galileo, played a key role in producing a new physics, and stands as a distinctive feature of the Scientific Revolution.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro