UGA Today, on John Lane’s year watching a pair of red-shouldered hawks:

After reading J.A. Baker’s 50-year-old British nature classic The Peregrine, John Lane, professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College, found himself an ocean away, stalking resident red-shouldered hawks in his neighborhood in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

The resulting almanac, Neighborhood Hawks, is refreshing:

3 July. Cool morning air. A hawk calls to the east. Keeyer, kee-yer, kee-yer, the vocalization is extraverted and edgy, a calling card, mixed (as they are mixed in) with the mechanical drone of a passing plane, the whistle of titmice at the feeding tube, cardinals canvasing, a nervous Carolina wren, and a nuthatch in the yaupon holly. Through it all, a hawk’s cry, rasping the sky like a file.

Derek Sivers on building his house gradually, rather than by planning ahead of time what a house needs:

How do you build a home without predicting? By living in an unfurnished, unfinished place, adding only what you’ve proven you need or want. […] I slept outside, so I know I need a roof, walls, and great insulation. […] I slept on the floor, so I know I need a mattress and blankets.

See also, The Timeless Way of Building.

Looks like Deep Hush now has official mascots. From my backyard.

Paul Sellers, organized evolutionary:

Looking back now, sixty years since, my tools and support equipment, sharpening stones, strops, dustpan and brush, and suchlike have followed the same patterns. There is no AI or device nudging things this way and that; order comes from the practice of working.

The art and craft of work is in all ways about working in and creating order. Without this intent, things quickly fall into chaos, and this then leads to our becoming inefficient, awkward, and usually less productive. Because of the created confusion, our minds become equally cluttered and confused too, I have worked with chaotic individuals, and it’s hard work.

Order is critical to our well-being.

Meghna Rao, interviewing the folks who run the Cybernetics Library:

David has a recurring joke about the library. It doesn’t only contain books about cybernetics — it actually behaves cybernetically […] systems that react to and change themselves according to feedback.

David Isaac Hecht:

It’s very hypertext — it has that vibe. […] The books’ organization reflects a lot of how people have used it. We’re always trying to build infrastructure that makes it accessible. We don’t try to force any pre-organized systems on anyone, we’re just gently curating.

Something important and personal about codifying connections among resources. If we don’t connect the dots, the dots are just noise.

We too can angle. Cast n Chill is time well spent.

Washington Irving, The Angler:

He had that inexhaustible good nature which is the most precious gift of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather. […]

The whole tenor of his life was quiet and inoffensive, being principally passed about the neighboring streams when the weather and season were favorable; and at other times he employed himself at home, preparing his fishing-tackle for the next campaign or manufacturing rods, nets, and flies for his patrons and pupils among the gentry.

Emily LaBarge, asked how her seventy-part book Dog Days found its shape, shared her notebooks of graph paper. In conversation with Sara Magenheimer:

On one side, pieces I thought of as literary experiments; on the other, pieces I thought of as narrative, color-coded. I start with a big web and then figure out which threads can hold enough space to be an actual section, which are narrative, which are themes, which are artworks that act as metaphors but also cultural criticism, which is research…

Processes writers use to make sense of “big webs” of notes seem like they could be helpful for managing noisy AI-generated documents. Hmm.

This is one of my favorite places.

Daisuke Matsubara on his practice, Sketch:

It’s a very personal and slow-paced project where I record environmental sounds from the places I happen to be on a given day, and then improvise piano over them to create compositions.

You can listen to one recording, Redstart reimagined, halfway into the article:

The piece was created during a camping trip with my family, early in the morning when the air was cold and incredibly clear. I remember my mind feeling unusually sharp and quiet at that moment, and I think that atmosphere naturally found its way into the music.

Beautiful, to listen and consider the piano response to this soundscape. What a gift, to bring natural moments forward in this form.

Jan Adkins on relative measurement:

Plain measurement of length is necessary, established, and limited. We can agree that it is not, however, the fine delineation of intricate joinery, dovetailing, or shipboard cabinetry (where the curving hull has nearly no right angles). In this work, one part is measured against another, not written as a dimension.

Digging a bit further into shipbuilding, I discovered The Joggle Stick:

Once you try the joggle stick, you’ll never use anything else for fitting complex shapes and curves.

I argue deeply for the importance of relative measurement in CSS, and it’s nice to know that expert craftspeople have similar methods for getting jobs done.

Hey there. I’m building a new part of Deep Hush for people like you and me. It won’t be ready until October, but if you leave your email I’ll share a preview.

Email address Send me info

The sign-up form doesn’t travel through feed readers. Open this post on the site to leave your address.

Zain Baweja on writing Gloss — a poem that plays with translations across Urdu and English, among other languages:

What does it mean to write in a hybrid of the two languages? Does it mean to plug English words into Urdu forms? Or to include a smattering of words and phrases from Urdu, thereby “chutneyifying” English?

I am increasingly dissatisfied with the postcolonial notion of “hybrid” identity, by which the poem is a composite of two things at once — native and foreign, colonized and colonizer, Urdu and English. It suggests that languages and poetic traditions are closed systems, each with their sovereign territories, which the writer merely mixes. […] I am trying to write poems in which linguistic flux is itself an entry point, and it becomes unclear what belongs to whom.

Making meaning like this, outside of encoded definitions, can be playful, joyful, revelatory. Sometimes it can seem like nonsense. As automated systems continue to bend the world toward ever more average, standardized, known experiences, it is important to defend and appreciate the purposeful unknown.

One more gem from yesterday’s Ryan Meehan piece, on the feeling of dread (followed by relief) as he shuffled through a packet of instruction materials covering musical proportions, flourishes, and motifs:

I am not a student of any substance in this music, I say to myself; I’m not even a musician. My trip here has been an imposition, a gesture of real arrogance. In deepening embarrassment, my eyes scan across the page to a phrase underlined in bold: “In practice, you don’t have to be too concerned with this.” Its placement seems like a pin to pop my ballooning panic, and with my relief comes a convulsion of laughter.

In practice, you don’t have to be too concerned with this. What a wonderful statement to accompany deep instructional information. Because that’s the whole trick, right? Supporting practice with study.

Ryan Meehan, studying northern Indian music at a raga school in Japan:

Through a doorway on the garden deck, we enter a sunlit living room brimming with musical instruments and speaker equipment, where a handful of students are already seated around our instructor Sara Miyamoto.

Before she teaches raga, Miyamoto walks her students through a set of preparatory exercises — eyes closed, attention brought first to the body, then to sound, then to one’s place inside it:

Miyamoto’s prompts (as translated into my ear by Hiro) are not unlike those of an especially attuned yoga class, only instead of the repetitions of bodily poses, we begin cycling through clusters of notes at the foundations of kirana singing. Her voice is crystalline, gliding between pitches with precision, polishing the rough edges I hear in my own. A lesson like this requires a curious mixture of discipline and relaxation: one maintains concentration and control over one’s own tone, while at the same time giving oneself over to the larger sonority of the group.

Worth studying, this relationship between intentional focus on oneself and the act of blending with, ceding oneself to, the company of others.

Robin Rendle on Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing:

Perhaps the strangest thing about this book is that it isn’t just writing advice, as I kept thinking about how these suggestions can be applied to design work, too. For example: when working on a big design project I never work on the whole thing all at once. At the beginning I’ll focus on the smallest part of it: the sidebar, the navigation, a single button or action or feature. I think of these as “sentences” or what I once called the smallest possible bit. Each change in the design modifies all the other changes. So I’ll constantly revise my prototypes as if I’m a brutal editor, demanding revision after revision, but because I’m working on a small piece of the puzzle it’s much less intimidating.

It is an art, to both practice this meditative focus on small pieces and wield an active understanding of the flow of the whole.

Bruce Fellman on observing a rare species of fly, year after year:

Four Augusts ago, standing in this very spot, I noticed the very same sound which drew me to a small fly that hovered expertly above the rhubarb stems before it landed for a photo op. […] Semi-miraculously, the thicklegs returned in 2022, 2023, and 2024 — same time, same place.

Recurring annual and seasonal practices, like Bruce’s return to the rhubarb patch, have a kind of comfort about them, don’t they? Not hurried, yet requiring some preparation and care to maintain the routine.

Natalie Nemes, on the Library of Congress’s Tangible Media Project:

Tangible media objects like optical disks, USBs, and of course floppy disks are […] subject to damage that could make their data unreadable. Optical disks can start to decay after approximately five years, floppy disks are subject to demagnetization, and flash drives can lose their electrical charge.

To read and reformat damaged media, she uses a Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device (FRED), including a special process for floppy disks:

[We] use a specially constructed machine we call the “Frankenstation” to read our 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppies. The Frankenstation is a floppy drive that contains trays for both floppy sizes. The floppy drives connect to a floppy controller — either a KryoFlux (for 3.5″ floppies) or an FC5025 (for 5.25″ floppies) — with a SCSI cable. Then, the floppy controller connects to a micro FRED (affectionally called Fernando) with a USB-B cable. Using software that can copy floppy disks sector by sector, we then create ISO files of the floppies’ contents. […] Finally, we use digital forensics software to extract file trees from those image files.

Homegrown rigs to support specific processes like this feel so human.

Sam Underwood on embracing transience:

Before this tour I worked in a workshop full of tools, with part finished instruments in every corner and a sense that many were being developed and used as long term projects. On the road I have a few basic hand tools and no capacity to store or transport substantial objects. Instruments are improvised, used in a Field Augmentation piece, then given away.

And the happiness of improvisation:

Over time I have realised that the moments that bring me the greatest joy are rarely the ones I intended to capture.

Emma Hogbin, letterpress printer, on single-origin ink:

Not every colour is available in every season, but across the year most are possible. In spring, nettles, docks and gorse petals yield green and yellow inks. In summer, Molinia grass produces a shocking green. In autumn, the berries of rowan, holly and hawthorn create reds, browns and oranges. Ivy berries, elderberries, blackcurrants and blackberries produce short-lived pinks, blues, purples and greens. Woody material, including windfallen willow and Sitka spruce bark, produces varying shades of warm brown.

We conceive of ecological change in myriad ways: the extent of the forest, the abundance of species, the level of pollution. Rarely do we think of it in terms of colour.

Emma is working on a special pigment from alder trees, taking her time because of their relative scarcity in the area:

My hope is to one day make ink from this alder: a bottle of colour that will capture this stretch of the moor. I store the dried fruit, which look like little pine cones, in a jam jar. Once it is full, I should be able to make a small vial of caramel liquid that can be shifted to black and grey by the addition of iron.

I anticipate it will take several years to collect enough.

Bryan Macomber, explaining how pull-back toy cars work:

Gears are all around us. Clocks, cars, bikes, even your printer has countless gears! For the purposes of this analysis, we’ll focus on two properties of gears: gears can be used to multiply torque and used to change speeds.

Why is torque important here? Winding the spring in this toy requires significant torque. But this is product for kids, so how can we make it easier for them? The answer is gears! Gears give the kids a mechanical advantage.

Detailed, animated, interactive illustrations (Bryan is a mechanical engineer and artist) make this and Bryan’s other explanations very clear. But maybe more impressive is the careful attention he gives to deciding what exactly to explain, step by step. Art is everywhere.

Jögge Sundqvist, from “Karvsnitt,” on practicing chip carving:

A good way to practice cutting patterns is to make a bunch of key fobs. The main purpose of a key fob is to indicate which lock the key is for.

Beautiful work. Exercises like this are perfect — approachable, relatively quick, and theoretically you end up with a useful artifact. When you want to get into something new, to learn, finding the right small scope is half the battle.

Thea Applebaum Licht on Maine’s fire tower maps:

In the summer of 1956, the Beat writer Jack Kerouac ascended the North Cascade Mountains, climbing up through the glacial crests of Washington State to Desolation Peak, where he would assume a summer post as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service. […] The images featured here are versions of what Kerouac calls his “panoramic”: circular maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness like land-bound lighthouses.

Go look at those fire tower maps. What beautiful artifacts! And what useful tools they must have been — purpose-built for use from a specific perspective.

Henrik and Johanna Karlsson, How not to forget what matters:

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. […] The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

Looking forward to my Readwise routine this week.

Pam Houston on developing a practice of noticing:

The honest answer is I don’t spend a lot of time evaluating [small things that catch my attention] because I think that’s counterproductive to the process. The process is really about collection and having them at my disposal if I need them later.

And then using those “glimmers” when she writes:

How it usually works is that I just start writing something and I don’t worry about it. I don’t worry about whether it’s an essay or a story. I’m usually just playing a shell game with glimmers, and then they sort of fall into connection to each other.

Brad Reiser, 79, on a small jig he uses for every chair project:

I call this my “stick stop.” The slots hold one end of the stick. On short sticks, the other end is usually held in your off hand. Long sticks work best pressed against your abdomen.

He sits on a tall stool to shape his sticks, and the jig steadies them.

Years ago, I worked alongside an old man in the basement of an old house, on furniture. I would take it apart, and he would put it back together. You had to watch out for pipes in the ceiling or you’d hit your head, but the old man was short so he didn’t need to worry. He would joke all day, until the afternoon when he realized he was behind on his tasks, and then work quietly and furiously until closing time.

I remember the sound, a kind of a quork, that the pliers would make as I pried staples out of hard wood. Ripping chairs and sofas apart, you had to be careful not to damage the finer elements of a piece. It was important to decide where to get leverage with the pliers. The old man had various tricks for doing this well, which he often claimed he had patented (one of his recurring jokes).

I remember the feeling of the metal tacks in my mouth. The old man taught me how to pour a bunch in like sunflower seeds, and bring out one at a time with my tongue. This is when I started helping him put the furniture back together. We would use tacks to hold webbing in place, the supportive fabric inside some chairs and sofas. It was nice to finish the webbing on a sofa and then take a nap on it. The business shut down each day for a nap. The old man would sometimes sleep across three dining room chairs.

Craft is human, and real, and you can feel it every day if you pay attention.

Back in a bit.

Patrick Rhone on being a spotter:

Part of my Circus Rigging duties include “spotting”, which in many cases means simply making sure that if a performer does fall, they do so safely and land on a mat.

A spotter pays careful attention so someone else can do the hard thing. They watch one person, in one moment, and do nothing until and unless needed.

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows:

Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested.

Context is critical for craft. This passage is just brilliant, emphasizing how limited amounts of light and time create a deep impression.

Tatiana Apráez on Barniz de Pasto, a Latin American decorative lacquer technique she uses to design jewelry:

Each of my pieces emerges during a process of contemplation, challenge and desire, but it’s also […] intended to be a creative process that can endure.

Apráez emphasizes maintaining the expertise involved in traditional practices, connecting “ancestral inheritance with the future we want as a creative community”:

This goal requires extensive research to consolidate traditional knowledge, sometimes combining it with new technologies or rediscovering lost knowledge. It hasn’t just been a process of doing things, it’s meant adapting to uphold our beliefs, doing everything with greater rigour and excellence.

Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything:

Traditional systems (like wood-plank keeled boats) have an advantage over innovative systems (like the then-novel plywood trimarans) in that the whole process of maintaining traditional things is well explored and widely understood. Old systems break in familiar ways. New systems break in unexpected ways.

When things break, it’s important to know how to fix them so you can take care of other people.

Don Norman, from The Design of Everyday Things:

Engineers and businesspeople are trained to solve problems. Designers are trained to discover the real problems. A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.

These days, we are encouraged much more loudly and forcefully to make than to listen, observe, reflect.

Let’s take a walk.

Jim Nielsen, Speed is Not Conducive to Wisdom:

Wise people I’ve met seem unhurried. I don’t think it’s because they’re slow thinkers or actors. I think it’s because they’ve learned that important things take the time they take, no amount of urgency changes that.

Truth. There’s also a meaningful distinction to consider, between speed and initiative. A person can be unhurried, but still approach important tasks with urgency and agency.

Ben Brignell on knowing when to stop designing:

In music, knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing what to play. The pause gives structure to the sound. Without it, everything becomes noise. […] These principles for knowing when to stop are not about slowing down for the sake of it. They’re about recognising when a decision has already been made.

Design, music. In any deliberate and artful practice, it helps to pause.

Our tools, too, create noise. Recognizing when to set one down and pick up another is a matter of wisdom.

Takashi Homma, on the books he keeps:

I don’t like things that feel too authoritative or prestigious, like they were made by an important person. Overseas, they call these coffee-table books. In the end, they just become interior decorations that sit on a fancy living-room table.

AI-generated artifacts – outlines, diagrams – often feel like coffee-table books. Like their goal is to seem substantial rather than to be genuinely useful.

(Takashi keeps the thin books.)

Ted Chiang from 2024, on writing with generative tools:

We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

We are now in this era. Being given noisy documents is quite difficult, because using language models to condense or analyze them is not always reliable, and reviewing manually is arduous. Although, maybe only difficult for people who care enough not to pass the problem onward like a hot potato.

Pico Iyer, The Everyday Miracles of Rinko Kawauchi:

The first time I visited Teshima, I wondered why I had to walk around the hillside, taking a long, roundabout course before entering the empty cave. Now I realize that the walk is a form of preparation, a way of slowing down and emptying yourself out so as to receive most fully all that awaits you.

Absorbing information, too, is more meaningful after a bit of preparation.

Matt Webb on reading The Wind in the Willows out loud:

It’s not the lengthy sentences that makes this prose work for me. It’s the rhythm. And I don’t really get that from reading it dead on the page.

Matt takes a cue from Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: the basic elements of language are physical — the noise words make, the rhythm of their relationships. So he reads out loud, again and again, to get a feel for the text.

This practice helps when processing all kinds of text. It separates what makes sense from what feels confusing, awkward, or unnatural.

Steven van Gemert on nothing:

The problem is that the world is chaotic. You cannot organize everything. Therefore, before you begin working, create a small space of the purest order there is: nothing. This is commonly called a “work surface.”

You use a work surface to temporarily place things while you’re working on them. If something is on your work surface, it needs action. When the work is done, you put items in storage, like a closet or folder.

Managing noisy AI outputs is much easier when you bring small chunks, like sections of an outline, onto a work surface.

David Epstein on monotasking:

In a frantically paced world, the literal and figurative space to think long thoughts requires curation and constraint.

Research shows that multitasking hurts. I get the same feeling when colleagues share AI-generated outlines, diagrams, and prototypes that are dense with information-noise, like I need to multitask just to process the thing.

Guy Jenkins on craft:

There is a joint in woodworking called the dovetail. It requires no glue. No screws. Just two pieces of wood cut with such precision that they lock together through geometry alone - tight, strong, beautiful. A master joiner can cut one by hand in minutes. An apprentice might spend a whole afternoon and still produce something that rocks.

The dovetail cannot be faked. You either cut it true or you don’t.

I think about the dovetail a lot when I watch AI generate interfaces. […] There’s little geometry underneath. No locked joints. Just the appearance of craft without the knowledge that produced it. […] It gives me an appreciation for precision, for tooling and for patience.

Using AI skillfully involves recognizing what it lacks, which means spending significant time studying and critiquing its outputs.