How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell My rating: 2 of 5 stars You can sum up this book in a tweet: Put down the phone; turn off the computer. Pay attention to the physical (nature, people, and in her case - birds) all around you, right there in your own backyard. Accomplishing this requires a significant application of discipline, a point that she mentions but spends too little time exploring. I felt there were too many tangents that strayed away from the point: resisting the attention economy. View all my reviews
In the face of catastrophic flooding, this movement urges ‘constructive destruction’ https://t.co/NayGyv86U0 #climatechange pic.twitter.com/SRvabbeZHs — Treehugger.com (@Treehugger) July 22, 2021 ( Go to the Treehugger article ) I saw this tweet and was quite intrigued. I’ve been reading a lot about trees lately. I think we need more of them. More trees will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and provide shade – both good things. When I grew up in Chicago our street had massive elm trees. The whole street was canopied with them. Then the Dutch elm disease came around the 1960s and we lost all of our trees. The city replanted trees, but they were tiny. That was when I realized how much cooler it was in the shade! My current town has a lot of parking lots that are under-utilized. In the 30 years I’ve been here I’ve rarely, maybe never, seen the inner parking lots full. That leads me to think the outer parking lots (circled in the pictures below) could be torn up and planted with trees.
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I really enjoyed this book. We tend to glorify the big names: Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg -- but this book includes the people that worked with them and that sometimes provided more value! I liked the parts stressing how the computer should augment human abilities rather than replace humans. I joined the bandwagon in the early 80s and thought the computer would unleash a creative storm, and ultimately make us smarter. I was only partly right. The book was written in 2014, so it's a bit dated in one respect. He thought social media would connect people, create community. He was right to an extent of course, but I think he didn't foresee how much our data would be used to market to us, to manipulate us, and in a political / cultural sense -- separate us. I find it unfortunate that the original idea of computing and the internet (discussed nicely in