Dear friends,

You can now search (and sort!) all the links I’ve ever sent you at https://erinmckean.com/things-learned-links/. I used what I’ve been calling a “cognitive exoskeleton” to make it: AI coding assistance. There’s absolutely no way I would have taken the time to write the script (<100 lines of Python and the ~500 lines of tests!) that takes the downloaded markdown files, extracts the links, and turns them into html without it. Using a coding agent (with the github.com/obra/superpowers skill suite) turns what would have taken precious deep-focus time (I can’t code effectively if I have to context-switch a lot, so even a dumb little project needs at least a two-hour focused block) into poking a chat window for a few minutes a day over the course of a week.

There’s quite a lot I dislike about AI (I can’t bear the smarmy AI voice, the ethical problems are real, why are the worst people in the world hyping it so much??) and I don’t use it for writing, ideating, or anything where I can’t test the output deterministically. I call it a “cognitive exoskeleton” because I want to keep the focus on what it does: it lets me lift more. It’s not a cognitive golem that I shape out of wet prompts and let roam around the streets unsupervised.

We make a distinction between “human-made” and “not-human-made” in so many things, but often the not-human-made things are more prestigious, as with adder stones (a type of stone with a naturally-occurring hole in it). Wikipedia starchily says that “Stones shaped by human intervention (i.e., direction of water or placement of the stone) are not considered adder stones which are formed naturally.”

Andre Geim is (so far) the only person to have won both Ig Nobel (for levitating a frog) and Nobel (for graphene) prizes (in that order).

This description of Samuel L. Mitchill makes him sound fun and a bit exhausting: “He was now engaged with the anatomy of the egg, and now deciphering a Babylonian brick; now involved in the nature of meteoric stones, now on the different species of brassica; now on the evaporization of fresh water, now on that of salt; now offering suggestions to Garnet, of New Jersey, the correspondent of Mark Akenside, on the angle of the windmill, and now concurring with Micheaux on the beauty of the black walnut as ornamental for parlor furniture.”

Noctuary is to night as diary is to day.

“Topophilia involves positive affective bonds between human beings and environments; topophobia refers to the dislike or fear of places, and includes all the negative emotional responses people have to spaces, places, and landscapes that they find distasteful or frightening.”

Amadís de Gaula was the favorite book of Don Quixote. (Someone on Reddit was trying to collect the favorite books of other fictional characters.)

I cannot do the story of Paquiquineo justice so please just trust me and go read it for yourself (it’s short). (Also: I would read the heck out of historical fiction based on his life.)

Stay well!

Your friend,

Erin