Christopher Wink

Finding the Mother Tree

Trees communicate in ways we don’t entirely understand. They form a forest society.

That’s the big them from the 2021 book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest Book by Suzanne Simard. She spent a career in this work, and was long sidelined as on the fringes of research. But credibility has come her way.

Older trees appear to know which other trees are their direct descendants, to which they send more nutrients too, though they share with all. Her work is all around “Mychorzzal fungal network”

It got deeper than I needed to get on the topic but others might appreciate it. As she writes “This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.”

What would it mean to build AI like octopuses, fungi or forests?

Framing intelligence as either the extractive corporate technological determinism kind or the pure human uniqueness kind is too limiting an understanding of intelligence. The world has far more kinds.

Artist and technologist James Bridle published in 2022 a compelling book called Ways of Being that reviewed research, themes and experiments in expanding our understanding of what technology can be. I recommend the book for others interested in a wider lens on AI and other advancements.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The Hot Hand is real (with the research to prove it)

People in a rhythm get better at whatever skill they’re using.

This intuitive idea was assumed enough that the catchy phrase “the hot hand” traveled from sports to countless other disciplines. Then research seemed to overturn its reality. Decades later, the research proved our instincts out.

That journey and research on streaks makes the bulk of the 2020 book The Hot Hand by sports journalist Ben Cohen. It may not have needed to be a full-length book, but I enjoyed it and appreciated the research he referenced, though much of it was familiar.

More broadly, the author argues our sense of randomness is all wrong. For example, if truly random, a playlist should alternate artists, a roulette wheel can’t have a streak and an immigration judge expects to have an even split of cases accepted and rejected. This confuses the law of small numbers and the law of big ones. It’s also why we are so prone to fall for the hot hand fallacy — and the related gamblers fallacy.

For future reference I share my notes from his book below.

Bootstrapped: the mythology of the American Dream

American mythology on the self-made man is more harmful than helpful.

So argues Alissa Quart in her new book Bootstrapped, which published back in March. I appreciate any thoughtful criticism of American capitalism, a system I’ve spent my career reporting on. This book seemed reflexively partisan to me at times — Republicans bad, Democrats good — which weakened the punch. But there’s lots to like in here. I recommend it

I’ve shared my notes below for future reference.

Ron Desantis: Courage to be Free

What can a campaign book say that a candidate can’t on a campaign trail?

I read them when I want to hear from a serious candidate with whom I am not especially aligned. Daily campaign reporting follows minor crisis. I like to understand how these candidates want to be packaged.

That’s why I read Florida governor Ron Desantis’s new book Courage to be Free. It isn’t especially well-written (no ghost writer?), and there’s plenty of trite talking points (lots of Fauci bashing). But there are a few worthwhile criticisms.

Below I share my notes for future reference (and plenty of questions he leaves unaswered).

Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

You don’t actually know where you’re going, so how could you ever feel behind? One approach: learn widely, and you may be surprised.

That’s a takeaway from sports journalist David Epstein’s 2019 book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.”

No surprise the book was comforting to many, gathering research into a pop science argument that we ought not specialize too early. It’s a nice gathering of academic work, though many of the examples looked more like a collection of remarkable people (of course Nobel laureates are also often artists). Still, I appreciated the take.

For parents: Let kids struggle in their learning (stop the hints). True and lasting learning looks like struggle. How to learn? Spacing out the learning, taking practice tests and using “making connections” questions — they all helped longterm but impaired short term.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

NRG Philadelphia media flag football tournament: Champions!

Hey that was fun: A goofy annual tradition raised $36k for regional charities last month. It was my second year, and this year we won the championship of the NRG Charity Philadelphia media flag football game.

Some pics and video below.

The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature

We should enjoy math like we do music: as patterns and poetry with logic to understand our world and ourselves.

“Mathematics is a way to coerce the chaos into sense.” So writes mathematician Sarah Hart in her 2023 book Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature.

Her book is a charming collection of how mathematics is used and appears in great writing — and bad writing too. The book has three sections: numbers as structure; numbers as metaphor and phrases and numbers as character. I enjoyed it, and recommend it for writers, readers and those interested in how the world works.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

A History of the World in Eight Plagues

The fall of Neanderthal and the rise of homo sapiens; the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity; the fall of Ghenghis Khan and the rise of Ming dynasty; the Age of Exploration and the splinter of the Catholic Church, the rise of capitalism, the fate of the American Revolution and where slavery took root and did not.

We only see history as a story about people, but tiny microbes are far more important. That’s the take by academic Jonathan Kennedy‘s 2023 book Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. (After On Savage Shores, this is the second book in a row I’ve read by authors from southwest England).

For most of human history we didn’t know the microscopic level so we didn’t understand the role it played. Fewer than 1,300 of our ancestors may have lived at one time a million years ago, in part because of climate and disease, according to research released this summer. The effects of the microscopic world are bigger than we’ve yet realized.

This book picks up from an influential 1976 book called Plagues and People. It’s insightful and challenging and presents a new way to see the world. I recommend it. Below I share my notes from the book for future research.