It takes me too long to get into San Francisco to see the seminars hosted by Stewart Brand, but I really enjoy Stewart’s succinct summaries. (Back in the Whole Earth days I was surprised that no one ever commented on the quality of Stewart’s pithy, concise, often witty reviews.) 

On the “Learning to Learn Fast” seminar by Timothy Ferriss last week:

“To acquire ‘the meta-skill of acquiring skills,’ Ferriss recommends approaching any subject with some contrarian analysis: ‘What if I try the opposite of best practices?’  Some conventional wisdom—‘children learn languages faster than adults’ (no they don’t)—can be discarded.  Some conventional techniques can be accelerated radically.  For instance, don’t study Italian in class for a year before your big Italy trip; just book your flight a week early and spend that week cramming the language where it’s spoken.  You can be fluent in any language with mastery of just 1,200 words.…”

Here are 100 of his pared-down summaries of the SALT seminars for three bucks on the Kindle:

https://www.amazon.com/Summaries-Condensed-Long-term-Thinking-ebook/dp/B005I57M4O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1316213727&sr=1-1

Great article in August 8 2011 New Yorker by Stephen Greenblatt on “On the Nature of Things,” an epic poem by Roman poet/philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (99BC – 55BC) with special relevance in this era of religious bigotry:

THE ANSWER MAN

An ancient poem was rediscovered—and the world swerved.

“…at its heart, ‘On the Nature of Things’ persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern understanding of the world. Every page reflected a core scientific vision—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet’s sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius, it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live—not in fear of the gods but in pursuit of pleasure, in avoidance of pain.…”

“To people haunted by images of the bleeding Christ, gripped by a terror of Hell, and obsessed with escaping the purgatorial fires of the afterlife, Lucretius offered a vision of divine indifference. There was no afterlife, no system of rewards and punishments meted out from on high.…”

https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_greenblatt Note: this is only an excerpt from the full article.

I just ordered the version of the poem translated by Martin Ferguson Smith, as recommended by Greenblatt (Hackett Classics Series). Lucretius nailed it over 2000 years ago.

Things are poppin around here now. We’re approaching the finish line with the tiny homes book. pieces falling into place. It’s been a long haul, and still 6 months to go (Feb 2012) until books are in stores. This sure ain’t no instant book. Every day here is exciting right now. From our little recycled wood studio in the middle of a vegetable garden we’re in touch with the world via our many Macs and the web. Yesterday for example:

I did about a dozen emails preparatory to going to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. It’s a huge event, been going on since the 1500s, the super bowl of the publishing world. I stay in a small hotel in the elegant spa town of Bad Homburg, about 20 miles north of Frankfurt,and usually use my 3-wheel K4 scooter to go the mile or so to the train station from the hotel; thinking of taking my new Bhangra long skateboard this year. So far I have appointments with publishers or agents from Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia, mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, and South Africa.

We’ve been having repeated problems with our DSL connection, and may have, knock on the pine desk here, solved it yesterday when we talked AT&T into replacing the fiber optic card down the road. We’re really crippled when off-line. Thanks to Steve, our tech guy…

I feel like a juggler each day. Sometimes it feels as if things are skidding out of control. Permissions requests (mostly to reproduce drawings from Stretching), reprinting books when inventories get low, marketing, watching sales, trying to get the $$ to update our stretching software for Lion, and the big one: trying to figure out how to use the web to maximize publicity and sales.

Someone once said, at a publishing conference, that no one was in this business for the money. It’s true, and my publishing brothers and sisters know this: we’re doing this because we love books. We’re readers! And communicators. For some 40 years, Shelter has been tiptoeing through the publishing game, trying to get the money from bookstores in time enough to pay printers. We’ve always seemed to squeak by. In the old days, Random House would advance us money, Lately we’ve been making it on our own, but we’re approaching a very lean period, with sales down and the tiny homes book taking forever. We’re betting the farm on this new book.

Read More …

There was an excellent article by Penelope Green in the NYTimes Home section yesterday

on a straw bale builder in the Catskills. Penelope writes:”Originally deployed by late 19th-century homesteaders in the Nebraska plains, straw-bale building techniques, though much refined, have essentially remained the same for the last century: hay bales are sliced into blocks, tucked into a frame and finished in plaster. (You can visit many of the early Nebraskan straw-balers, but not the first documented one, an unplastered one-room schoolhouse, because it was eaten by cows.)

Nobody paid much attention to this hardy Plains vernacular until the early 1970s, when Shelter, the building bible of budding counterculturalists, was first published. Included in its tour of zomes, yurts and treehouses was an essay on the “baled hay” houses of the Plains.”

She’s referring to the photo of a straw bale barn on page 70 of Shelter, BTW, Bill Steen, who co-authored the best seller The Straw Bale House in 1994 with his wife Athena and David A. Bainbridge, told me that this photo was what got him started with straw bale in the first place.

Click here for article: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/garden/in-the-catskills-building-stone-by-stone-bale-by-bale.html?hpw

Photo by Raeanne Giovanni-Inoue for The New York Times

“Saw Lloyd’s recent blog re the Whole Earth Catalog. I have every issue of all the catalogs, WEReviews, Co-Evolution Quarterlies etc.…They have all been read and handled, so not pristine, but not tattered either.…Any ideas, outside of e-Bay or Craigslist where I might find someone interested in purchasing the collection?”

-Jon Scoville: foosounds@aol.com