I have been a believer in the magical properties of wool for more than a decade, after finally being observant enough to see what my friend had told me 3 years prior to that. But in the past year, I watched a bunch of Youtube videos about harvesting seaweed/algae to make biodegradable plastics. One video mentioned footwear, and based on what they showed, I went out and ordered my biodegradable shoes from what seems like the only truly biodegradable footwear company, Blueview. They came in about 3 weeks ago, and so far, so good! Here’s what makes me excited about the future, and why I’m happy to ditch wool shoes.
Month: September 2024
Okay, another post in the tour of skipped over noteworthy things I’ve been a part of. Previously, I wrote about writing programs in other human languages (among other things). Here, I’m talking about the talk Tim and I gave last year at Clojure/conj 2023, which is about transpiling a program from one programming language to another (among other things). Ha! No, it’s not the same at all. And our talk is actually the important lessons that we learned from our work, and we crafted our presentation content & style to be accessible. Hopefully, you will come away with at least one useful insight, even if you don’t know programming, or scroll further down this post for my written “director’s cut commentary”:
I’ve accidentally skipped writing here about things that I’ve done here and there. It’s easy to to not follow up after someone puts up a post or a video that is easy to point to, in the thought that the content speaks for itself. But in reality, there’s usually more to say. Often times, you just have to dig under the surface, ask questions, and look for connections. Anyhoo, here’s one such set of things that are related to each other (and related by design!).
My teammate Craig got me to watch the interview with Lily Gladstone back in November, which was really interesting. I think she is Blackfoot, and you learn about the Blackfoot Nation in addition to hearing about her and her journey.
Even though she ended up not winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2024 that she was nominated for, the ideas that she brought up about Blackfoot society was interesting. A lot of people might hear about the Hierarchy of Needs, a framework by Abraham Maslow, an American, to describe the needs of an individual, from the most basic level of survival to the highest level of being a “self-actualized” person.
What I didn’t know was that Maslow got his ideas after spending time with Blackfoot members, observing their culture. And as the research paper that Lily Gladstone mentions, Blackfoot society is fascinating and quite different. Where Maslow’s hierarchy ends, Blackfoot society’s “hierarchy” begins. Kids in Blackfoot culture already start off “self-actualized”, with the level of autonomy and respect they are given. And instead of the individual, Blackfoot culture’s highest level of attainment is when it can ensure its own survival into the future.
See:
That article discusses interesting topics of self-actualization vs. community actualization, community perpetuity, and examining the construct of a hierarchy (or pyramid) vs. a circle of interconnectedness.
Sequenced Thoughts from C/S 