Microposts

I’ve been using the iOS betas for just over a week. The new Focus feature is as useful as I’d hoped. Being able to change notifications and home screens by context is great. Especially for switching off from work

A quiet run along the beach this morning. Certain to be much busier this afternoon 🏃‍♂️

A serene beach scene with a bright sun in the sky, calm ocean waters, and a distant line of trees.

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is a good second book in the Mars trilogy. So much great detail, you really get a strong sense of Mars as a place that is distinct from Earth 📚

The new Focus feature in iOS 15 looks promising. I already hide and show home screens based on context and this looks like it will help make this even more effective. Lots to unpack from WWDC

Sleep Evolved Before Brains. Hydras Are Living Proof. | Quanta Magazine

It appears that simple creatures — including, now, the brainless hydra — can sleep. And the intriguing implication of that finding is that sleep’s original role, buried billions of years back in life’s history, may have been very different from the standard human conception of it. If sleep does not require a brain, then it may be a profoundly broader phenomenon than we supposed.

Andrew Potter: My fellow Gen Xers don’t appreciate our great gift: we were ignored - The Line

In retrospect, it is obvious that the Gen X obsession with authenticity was anxiety caused by the growing rumblings of a culture in transition. The old technological ecosystem that fuelled the counterculture was gone, but the new web-enabled environment that made authenticity irrelevant hadn’t quite yet arrived. Gen X was the last generation to possess genuine subcultures that were able to remain somewhat unmolested by the digital meat grinder. 

Sounds right to me

Michael Geist is doing excellent work on Bill C-10:

There are at least three points emphasizing. First, no other country in the world uses broadcast regulation in this way, making Canada a true global outlier. Second, there is no evidence of a discoverability problem for user generated content. Third, the issue of excluding YouTube from the scope of the bill is open to considerable debate and was not even raised by CIMA in its written submission to the committee.

Debating Bill C-10 at the Canadian Heritage Committee, Part One: My Opening Statement

Why modern Buddhists should take reincarnation seriously | Aeon Essays:

Thinking about reincarnation today is, first of all, a reminder of the complexity of Buddhism, and the fact that individual practices can’t be neatly separated from broader institutional histories. Any change in our personal lives is inseparable from change in the world around us. Second, reincarnation offers a way of thinking about the present as connected to the deep past and to any potential futures as well. We needn’t think of the specifics of the reincarnation doctrine to realise that we’re all the inheritors of a past that we didn’t create and the bequeathers of a future we won’t live to see. Third, this temporal relation is also an ethical one, because it suggests that we’re the products of other lives and the creators of other futures, and thus share a global and temporal interdependence. And fourth, it follows that part of our task as humans is to be aware of what we might accidentally replicate from our past and thus unknowingly recreate in the future.

Assuming this is true, great news that Ontario’s summer camps for kids will be allowed to open again. My kids really need this (their parents would benefit too!)