December 2021 – Page 2 – Mechanical Sympathy

WOMBO.ART: How AI generated art offers insight into motorcycle marketing

Wombo’s a rocket ship!

I teach computer technology in my day job and I’ve watched the coming of artificial intelligence over the past decade with interest. AI and machine learning is getting better at managing real world data like visual information. Recently, a Canadian company named Wombo have created an abstract art creation tool that builds original images from some key words and a selected art style. This AI art generator offers some interesting insights, especially in a world where branding is everything (such as in motorcycling).

Wombo (https://www.wombo.art/) is easy to play with – just throw some key words in and pick a style and you get an original piece of abstract art. If you run the same information it comes out different each time too.

So, what to throw in first? Valentino Rossi, of course – he’s front and centre in many motorcyclist’s minds this fall.

The machine intelligence putting this together has scanned every image it could find of The Doctor. It creates its own contextual understanding from that massive dataset. It doesn’t understand who Valentino is (though it might have scanned articles about him for keywords and have used that too). These randomized but thematic pieces makes some interesting inferences. Firstly, Valentino means high-vis yellow… and Yamaha blue. This begs the question: “what were Yamaha thinking sending Valentino off to retire in teal and black?

Perhaps my favourite part of this piece is the obvious Doctor’s Dangle happening. The dangle was started by Valentino around 2005. It’s still a bit of a mystery how it makes you go faster, but I suspect it offers a bit of fine tuning on your balance under heavy breaking while also offering a bit more wind resistance to slow you down. Wombo’s algorithm won’t know any of that, but it knows to associate the dangle with the man who invented it. At least it did this time, every other time I tried a Rossi image it wasn’t there.

The Rossi implications got me thinking about how a machine intelligence sees a brand… and what interesting conclusions you might draw from it. Ducati got the first swing at it since they’re such an iconic brand:

The colours certainly shout Ducati, and while the motorcycle isn’t obvious, there is something about the lean that suggests two wheels. If someone who’d never heard of Ducati were shown this, I suspect they’d consider it a sporting brand rather than something else like a heritage focused company. I think they’d be happy with that.

I then threw Triumph into the mix:

Not sure what to make of that one! Triumph’s long history before its resurrection must make for interesting texture in the data. This looks very art deco and feels like 50s and 60s advertising might have inspired it. Once again, the idea that Triumph is tied to motorcycles is evident in the edges, especially the one middle right.

Just now I did two more “Triumph Motorcycle” renditions:

I still see bikes (but then I tend to see bikes). There is a sense of speed in how the designs depict the abstract objects. I can’t help but wonder if the colour choices aren’t from actual bikes.

Here’s one for MotoGP:

I can almost see Marc Marquez and Valentino Rossi in that. It certainly contains a feeling of competition and speed. Does the machine intelligence know who Marc and Valentino are? Is this an echo from Sepang in 2015? I wonder if that’d make anyone wince in MotoGP’s marketing office.

Wombo’s AI art generator is easy to get lost in. The images seem to speak in surprising ways. If you’ve got a minute, go play with it.

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The Baffling Dual Sport Helmet Part 2

I’ve already taken a run at the design of dual sport helmets, but I’ve since seen a couple of other things that make me wonder why people cling to the MX derived big-bill look. That giant visor seems intent on injuring you in an off, and I’m not willing to have my head pulled off just to look like an MX racer.

Online you quickly find a lot of conflicting advice about dual sport helmets along with some good insight:

“All the street comfort in the world won’t please you when you get to a dusty trail, you’re hot, and your lid is a cramped, dust-filled mess and you’re breathing hard and hot into your chin bar.”

Ventilation seems to be at the heart of the big-chin bar in dual sport helmets, but you pay a price in aerodynamics. The chin-bar I get, but I’m still baffled by the visor.

Arai recently came out with a new version of their street helmet and they go to great pains explaining how a smoother shell is less likely to catch on obstructions if you come off at speed. Of course, there are a hell of a lot more obstructions if you come off at speed off road, but that doesn’t seem to factor into dual sport helmet thinking.

Sure, visors keep the sun out of your eyes, but
a good pair of goggles does a better job, so why
risk safety for mediocre sun protection? You can
remove the visor and make your dual sport helmet
safe, though you won’t look like a motocross star.

What do massive visors do? They create a huge projection aimed in the direction you’re going that begs to pull your head off in a crash at anything over walking speeds.

Back in the day when goggles didn’t have the benefit of modern reactive lenses and toughness perhaps a giant bill was all you had to keep the sun out of your eyes, but this was, at best, a partial measure. It resulted in you experiencing huge swings in brightness from sun in your eyes to shade over and over again.

We’re well into the 21st Century now and lens technology has come a long way. You hardly need a giant beak to keep the sun from blinding you any more, and a reactive lens offers you the benefit of less eye strain between shadows and blinding sunlight.

I got a free pair of cool looking steam-punk goggles with a helmet this year and was virtually blind in them when trying to ride in the sun, they were a disaster. A careful shopping trip later I had a pair of goggles that allow me to ride in direct sunlight with zero distortion, no squint and excellent viewing in the shade as well, they even work well at night. When wearing these goggles a bill is only a dangerous projection, it serves no function.

I was watching the Dakar Rally this year when this happened:

You have to wonder what it felt like when his face bounced off the road and tore that visor half off. Arai’s logic with their new R75 makes a lot of sense after seeing that, yet everyone on a dual sport or adventure bike wants to look like Charlie & Ewan, and so big billed dual sport helmets keep happening.

I’d love to see a leading helmet company like Arai offer the same kind of minimal projection/safety and aerodynamic benefit they talk about in the R75 in a well ventilated, dual sport ready lid, but form seems to come before function in the image conscious world of adventure motorcycling.

Duckbills everywhere…

The Subtle Art Of Learning

The transmission of knowledge between people has always been predicated on personal relationships. We come pre-wired to learn, and the way we’ve always done this is through a mentoring process be it master and apprentice or teacher and student. This deep human experience goes well beyond cultural norms. No matter where you are in the world or in human history, the art of learning is founded on this relationship between people.

Schooling systems look to standardize education so they can more easily assess their management of it, it has little to do with effective learning. In an educational world of standardized marking, testing and curriculum building, the goal is to remove personal connections in favour of more easily quantifiable and less effective teaching tools.

On top of the system pressuring education from a data collection/ease of management perspective, we also find ourselves in a surge of technological advancement that seems determined to insert itself into every aspect of human behavior, including that most sacred of human endeavours: learning. This digitization of human relationships can offer a wider range of connection, but it also tends to flatten those connections. Online relationships lack the dimensions of personal relationships. Anyone who has met online acquaintances in person has experienced this sudden deepening of previously shallow online connection.

I’ve seen technology do magical things in teaching, and I’ve long be a proponent of pushing technologically assisted experimentation as far and as fast as it will go, but I’ve never thought to swap technology for the personalized process of teaching and learning, yet that is what I see many people suggesting.

Whether it’s a rabid excitement (usually managerial or worse, financial in scope) over MOOCs or the latest gadget that will ‘revolutionize’ how we do things, or simply the drive to make students the centre of all things and reduce teachers to facilitators, there seems a constant pressure to depersonalize and grossly simplify the relationships that are the ecosystem for the art of deep, human learning.

If you see learning as the transmission of information then all these gadgets and systemic processes must seem like magic bullets that will solve all problems, that belief is probably selling your books. With good management, letting students learn whatever strikes them as interesting, and enough money for toys, you’ll be able to educate everyone for almost nothing! Oh, the efficiency.

The problem with learning is that it tends to be very non-linear. A good teacher calls this a teachable moment – adapting to an unexpected circumstance in order to teach a memorable lesson. These lessons often appear to have nothing to do with the curriculum or even the subject you’re teaching. A good teacher will bend to the needs of the moment, giving the learning momentum, and keeping in mind the development of bigger ideas in a context lost on students.

A couple of years ago we made a Minecraft server in our computer engineering class. One of the students quietly spent his lunches over the semester building up enough dynamite in the game to equal the Hiroshima bomb – he’d learned about it in his history class. At the end of the semester he announced that he was going to set it off. Everyone was freaked out, they’d spent a lot of time building things on that server and were afraid the virtual world would be destroyed, or worse, the server would crash. He set it off, the class watched the server churn through the processing, and finally it rendered a massive crater. We spent some time in a computer engineering class quietly looking at historical websites of Hiroshima after that. We eventually got to examining what happened with the server trying to process the blast, but not at the cost of the obvious historical and human context in front of us.

In my second year of teaching I was doing Macbeth with some grade 11s. I happened to mention that my parents were in the middle of a divorce, which prompted an impromptu round table by the distressingly high number of kids in the class who were either going through something similar or already had. Learning about how to deal with being a child of a divorce by more experienced people (who happened to be my students) demonstrates the two way nature of that teacher/student relationship.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be some structure to our school system, and I’m not saying that technology and addressing student directed learning isn’t important. What I am saying is that learning is a complex process that develops most effectively through meaningful human relationships. The more dimensionally complex that relationship is, the better the learning. It is often non-linear, and at its best, it is predicated on a level of trust between teacher and student that allows for exploration and development in unexpected directions. The artistic nature of learning must drive (North American) education managers around the bend.

Human learning, this effective use of relationships we’ve evolved to teach and learn from each other, is best served by setting high standards for teachers and then giving them discretion in teaching. Micromanagement is a sure way to kill the teachable moment. Standardized testing offers simple lies to a complex truth. Ontario has also found new and interesting ways to damage this relationship in the last year. It’s remarkably easy to interfere with and poison the learning relationship.

Technology isn’t a solution, it’s, at its best, an aid, and one that should be used to support rather than replace proven pedagogy. When combined with the hard capitalist bent of most educational technology companies (themselves happy partners with US driven for profit charter schools), effective learning takes a back seat to profit margins, market gain, fictionalized standardized testing scores and quarterly statements. Technology offers some interesting opportunities in education, but it should never be at the cost of learning.

Systemic micro-management only serves accountants. If you’re managing education you need to consider how best to improve the quality of your teachers on a macro scale, and that quality isn’t based on their student’s standardized test scores.

If you recall your moments of deepest learning you’ll recognize how subtle and profound the circumstances around your eureka moments are. A good teacher is more like a gardener than a source of information, creating the circumstances that lead everyone involved in the learning process to greater realizations. We recall the teachers who create and share these fecund moments fondly because we recognize, on a fundamental level, how they are helping us realize our own potential in a uniquely personal and human way.

Some other philosophy of learning entries:

Elearning & the student/teacher relationship: personal contact in an increasingly edtech isolated world
What is learning?: what we are pre-wired to do
Speaking with dead voices: how your best teachers taught you to teach

Academic Dishonesty: listening to Sunday Edition

I’m sitting here listening to CBC’s Sunday Edition doing an interview with an ethics adviser for a California university. Her description of cheating isn’t one of deceit and intent, it’s one of accidental opportunism. She argues that students often don’t even realize they are cheating.

In another section of the interview a university student says that it isn’t the student’s fault, they are victims of the ease of technology. These two ideas are closely linked; accidental cheating and technological access to information. In both cases, ethical choice is removed from the ‘victim’. This is a pretty weak ethical argument. Because something is easy and readily available, it should be done? If you see a person put an ipad on a park bench and then get distracted for a few minutes, do you walk off with it? According the this victim mentality you would have no choice. The fact that all of your friends have stolen ipads from the park only makes it more acceptable.

When I think about my own university experience, it didn’t even occur to me to cheat, because of my sheer awesomeness. My arrogance ensured that I would never even consider putting in someone else’s work for my own, but then I was there to develop my own thinking. I’d walked away from a lucrative career in order to push my limits. Most of the kids I was in university with (typically 4-5 years younger than I was, many of whom dropped out) were there because they couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. You didn’t get a clear sense of who the real learning disciples were until third or forth year.

Later in the same episode, they mention that the vast majority of students in university now are there because they want a higher standard of income, they’re there for the payoff at the end. If university is really all about the money, then perhaps their victim mentality is simply the best way to morally justify taking everything you can while doing as little as possible. University should, perhaps, follow SNL’s angle from so long ago and simply accept what it is becoming.

Motorcycling For Sport On a Budget

LOGISTICS

The trickiest part about trying to arrange your motorcycling to provide you with a sporting outlet are the logistics. You can’t ride a track/trials/dirt bike to where you’re going to ride it in a sporting fashion, so you need transportation options that’ll get you and your gear to where you intend to use it.

The obvious choice (if you’re looking for a budget choice) is to look at cargo vans – or so I thought. Thanks to COVID, the market for these (like many other things) has gone bonkers as every unemployed rocket scientist in the world rushes out to grab a used van to deliver for Amazon.

Here are some current online choices:

My favourite is the fuggly Transit Connect that isn’t even big enough to hold a single bike and is almost a decade old with over two-hundred thousand kilometres on it for ~~$10,500~~, $8,500. Eight and half grand for a heavily used POS. Both my current on-road bikes, an ’03 Triumph Tiger and an ’10 Kawasaki Concours together cost me less than that, and they’re both a joy to look at and operate, though carrying a dirt bike on them isn’t likely.

If I want to get my Guy Martin on, New Transits start at thirty-five grand and can easily option up to over fifty. The bigger Ram Promasters start at thirty-seven grand and can option to over twice that. The wee Promaster City starts at thirty-four grand and can be optioned well into the forties. Vans only really do the cargo thing and make any other usage tedious, and they’re expensive!

The used car lot down Highway 6 has a 2015 Jeep Wrangler with 90k kms on it that they’re asking $35k for it. It isn’t cheap but it seems in good nick and comes with the tow package. We rented a Wrangler last year and I was impressed with its ability to carry weight and it’s utility – it was also surprisingly fun to drive… and in the summer it’d get the doors and roof off and be able to do the Zoolander thing too.

A trailer goes for about a grand, this one comes with a ramp and he’s asking $1300. With a bit of bartering I could sort out a tow capable Wrangler with a useful trailer for under forty grand. The Jeep isn’t new, but it’s only 6 years old and with a big v6 in it, 90k isn’t too much of a stressful life – it actually works out to only fifteen thousand kilometres a year.

What’s galling is that you’re thirty-five grand into a years old almost 100k kms vehicle but the new ones run fifty-three grand – I guess you’ve got to have a lot of cash on hand to buy anything these days.

What’d be really nice is a state-ot-the-art Wrangler 4xe. They tow, use very little gasoline and when things get sorted out with in-car fusion generators, I’d be able to take the gas engine out and go fully electric with it. In the meantime, it’d carry all my bike clobber, would be a bulletproof winter vehicle and when the sun arrives I can pop the doors and roof off and enjoy it in an entirely different way; they really are Swiss Army knives!

SPORTS RIDING OPTIONS: Trials

Once I’ve got the moto-logistics worked out I could then focus on some sporting motorbiking. This ain’t cheap either, but some sport motorcycling is cheaper than others. Trials riding is probably at the cheaper end of things with used bikes starting at about two grand and new, high-end performance models going up to about nine grand, though you can get a new, modern, Chinese made machine for under five grand.

I’m partial to older machines as I don’t have to deal with dealer servicing and can do the work myself. This mid-80s Yamaha TY350 comes with lots of spares and is in ready-to-go shape for about $2600. Since I’m not looking to take on Dougie Lampkin, this’d more than get me started in trials.

The Amateur Trials Riding Association of Ontario offers regular weekend events throughout the summer and fall and would make for a great target to aim for. I’d be a rookie, but I’m not in it to win it, I’m in it to improve my moto-craft and trials offer a unique focus on balance and control in that regard.

I’m disinclined to exercise for the sake of it, though I’ve never had trouble exercising in order to compete in sports, it’s just hard to find any when you’re a fifty-two year old guy in Southwestern Ontario. Having trials events to prepare for would be just the thing to get me into motion.

There is also the Southwestern Ontario Classic Trials group, who also offer a number of events and categories and seem very newbie friendly. That old Yamaha would fit right in with classic trials and would let me do my own spannering.

Our backyard has everything you’d need to practice trials, though tire tracks all over the lawn might not endear me to my better half. Even with all that in mind, trials riding would be the cheapest moto-sport to get going in.

SPORT RIDING OPTIONS: enduro/off-road riding

What’s nice about the dirt-bike thing is that I could do it with my son, Max. He got handy with dirt biking last summer at SMART Adventures so if we got into trail riding we could do it together.

Used dirt-bikes start at about $2500 and creep up quickly. Most seem quite abused but appear to hold their value regardless. For about six grand I could get us into two 21st Century machines that should be pretty dependable on the trails, the problem is there aren’t any around here. We’d have to drive for hours to get to the few that are left in Central Ontario.

The Ontario Federation of Trail Riders would be a good place to start in terms of working out trails and connecting with others interested in the sport. Off Road Ontario offers access to enduro and motocross racing, but I’m not really into the yee-haw MX thing, though long distance enduro gets my attention (every January I’m glued to the Dakar Rally). I also watch a lot of British television and I’ve seen a number of endurance off-road events on there that are appealing, so I wouldn’t wave off enduro without looking into it a bit more.

SPORT RIDING OPTIONS: track racing

There are motorcycle track days around Ontario from May to October. The Vintage Road Racing Association seems like the best way in for someone not interested in becoming the next Marc Marquez but who is looking for some time on a bike working at the extreme ends of two-wheeled dynamics without having to worry about traffic. The VRRA also offers a racing school to get people up to speed (so to speak). I can’t say that having a racing licence wouldn’t be a cool thing to have.

The challenge with racing on pavement is that everything gets more expensive, from membership and training fees to the cost of equipment and bikes, and of course what it costs to fix them when you chuck them down the road. Road racing offers a degree of speed and has obvious connections to road riding that are appealing, it’s only the costs that make it seem like a step too far.

Sport motorcycling is tricky to get into. You need the equipment to transport yourself and your bike and gear to where you’re competing and then you also need the specialist motorbike itself, but there are options that can make it possible on not to extreme of a budget. I’m hoping to find a way into this over the next few years.

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Sprockets, Chains & Walls of Rain

I thought I could make it down to Guelph to order my sprockets and chain and back before the rain hit. The weather radar said there wouldn’t be rain for over an hour. I left at 2:30 and grabbed some gas in Fergus before heading down Highway 6. It sprinkled lightly as I went, but it was just enough to take the edge of some truly oppressive humidity.

I got the sprocket and chains sorted out at Two Wheel Motorsport. The chain drives on motorcycles are one of the first places people play with their geometry. If you go to look up sprockets and chains for a 2007 Ninja 650r you’re buried alive in neon chains and sprockets designed to look like shuriken. By messing with the length of chain and number of teeth in the sprocket you can essentially gear up your bike, giving it faster acceleration (though it would also be revving over 5000rpm at highway speeds).

For my first go-around with motorcycle sprockets and chains I went with quality and longevity. The steel sprockets I got were Afam sprockets designed and built in Europe, they are very high spec pieces. I stayed away from anything that’s neon. If you’re curious, a 2007 Kawasaki Ninja 650r takes a 15 tooth front sprocket and a 46 tooth rear sprocket (that isn’t always obvious as people rush to over gear their bikes so they go 0-60 faster). I also got an X link chain, which offers a number of advantages over an O link chain, though they are more expensive. The high quality sprockets (front and back) and a high tensile strength chain cost me about $300 taxes in. They should be in by the end of the week.

Something wicked this way comes!

After wandering around looking at new bikes in the showroom for a few minutes I jumped back on the Ninja and headed back north. As I turned on to Elora Road the sky got menacing, then it turned positively apocalyptic.

I’ve ridden through rain a fair bit, especially last summer when I was commuting on the bike. This one looked turbulent though. I stopped to zip everything up and take that picture and then I drove into a wall of water.

One of the nice parts of being on a bike is how connected you are to the world. As I rode toward the darkness I knew this was going to be more than a sprinkle. The clouds were scalloped and black/green and the temperature dropped ten degrees as I rode under them. Then the smell of ozone filled my helmet. I could see across the valley ahead that cars had their headlights on and the wipers were going furiously, behind them the standing wall of rain advanced steadily.

Hosed but home.

As the first big drops hit me I hunkered down on the tank behind the windscreen. The wind picked up and I had to lean into it to hold my line, and then I rode into the water wall. I like riding in the rain. The bike is surprisingly well planted and if you want your visor to clear just turn your head and watch the rain roll sideways across it. Of course, I like it better when I’m in rain gear, which I wasn’t this time. In about 10 seconds at 80kms/hr in torrential rain I was soaked to the bone, but I was only 10 minutes from home so I could get wet. Cars were pulling over, the end was nigh. Trees were bent sideways and it was night-time dark. I made it the 10 minutes up the highway and turned on to back streets. I was in my driveway a minute later.

After getting the bike inside and towelling it off I peeled off soaked clothes. It was the first time I wasn’t hot and sweaty all day. I love riding in the rain.

A Psychological/Metaphysical One-Two Punch

I’m still working my way through The Science of Well Being, an online psychology course done by Doctor Laurie Santos out of Yale. This week she got into some neuroscience around how our minds work. I originally experienced this during my philosophy degree thirty years ago when I was introduced to Bertand Russell’s Analysis of the Mind, which laid bare the mythology we erect around our thinking. By the end of Russell’s book I no longer believed in a consistent sense of self because such a thing is a social construct; we don’t inhabit our own being in anything like a consistent, always-on way. Most of our lives are run out of habitual reflex with little conscious direction. We only experience moments of conscious direction before falling back into habit, some more than others.

Santos describes this in neuro-scientific terms in The Science of Well Being as a kind of default neurological network that lights up in our brains when we’re not consciously doing something. The parts of the mind that activate during these non-conscious moments are the same parts that light up when we’re thinking about the past and/or future. Amazingly, we typically spend almost half our time in this state of reverie, out of touch with the world around us.

She goes on to describe this evolutionary process that appears to be unique to our species as a cognitive achievement, but one that comes at a great emotional cost. Research into this process has demonstrated again and again that living out of the moment makes us sad; a uniquely human melancholy that we all pay for if we want to be able to think beyond cause and effect, which has obvious benefits, though we still seem exceptionally bad at it.

Santos then explains how mediation and mindfulness can decrease the impact of that default reverie thinking process that makes us so unhappy while also providing all sorts of benefits like improved academic performance and mood. Mindfulness brain exercises proved more effective than nutrition or even sleep in improving cognitive performance, which raises some interesting questions around how we’ve arranged school to be almost intentionally non-meditative.

People who haven’t had a lot of experience with mindfulness and meditation often fall into the belief that mediation is just wallowing in that default thinking reverie, but it isn’t that at all. This was emphasized for me in a strange media-mix-up last week. My son Max and I have been working our way through The Midnight Gospel on Netflix, a surrealistically animated series of podcast interviews by animator Pendleton Ward and comedian Duncan Trussell.

If you’re willing to do the mental gymnastics necessary, The Midnight Gospel will introduce you to a truly meta piece of 21st Century media. The main character, voiced by Trussell, is a “space caster” who uses a universe simulator (he sticks his head into a giant vagina to activate it) to pop in to various realities where he interviews people. The interviews are the podcasts re-jigged to fit this new format.

We’ve watched episodes on everything from Buddhism and karmic rebirth to Aleister Crowley style occultism to an explanation of the bizarre nature of North American death rituals in the 20th Century, so other than a complex subject being unpacked by smart people, you don’t really know what’s coming at you next. This all happens while Yellow Submarine level psychedelic animation sometimes describes and sometimes does everything it can to distract you from what’s being said. We got to the season finale of The Midnight Gospel not knowing what’s coming (because it makes it clear that you can’t), but looking forward to it.

The Silver Mouse is a breathtakingly personal finale where the animation suddenly clicks into gear with the story telling in the interview and amplifies it to such a degree that it left us speechless.

Duncan made this interview with his mother, Deneen Fendig, just before she passed of terminal cancer in 2013, and it describes her coming to peace with her mortality through meditation. Duncan had always struggled with the idea of mediation, and Deneen’s honest, unpretentious guided meditation practice not only worked for him in the interview, but it also resonated with me on many levels.

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The animation begins with Duncan as a young man and his mother as an older woman, but through the course of the episode she grows old and dies, only be reborn by Duncan himself so they can continue their conversation. As she grows up, Duncan grows into an old man and dies himself; it’s a beautiful representation of the circle of life, carefully crafted and delivered. For a man who lost his mother in difficult circumstances at around the same time Duncan lost his mum, it rocked me. I’m in tears now as I write this. I wish I could have had this conversation with my mum before she passed, but mental illness took her away from me long before she died.

Deneen’s wisdom in finding her way to a meditative awareness of not only her own being, but also to a sense of how it hangs in the firmament of the universe was told humbly, honestly and without pretense. That she found a tangible way of escaping the non-present ruminating mind wandering we all tend to fall back into was also inspiring. She doesn’t hang a lot of superstitious nonsense around the radical sense of self awareness that she uncovers in herself. Many people seem to cling to belief when facing the end that comes for us all, but not Deneen. Her bravery is inspiring and underscored for me the fact that we don’t have to believe in miracles and other historical fictions to realize our place in the universe and find peace in the face of death.

Between the psychology and science of The Science of Well Being course and the magical realism and stark emotional honesty of The Midnight Gospel, it has been a rich week of media empowered reflection that puts everything else that’s going on in perspective. To top it all off, Max and I got to watch a spectacular, once in a lifetime lightning storm blow over us the other day. My life feels unexpectedly rich at the moment.