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Andrew Wooldridge 🌱Carl sagan’s thought about books:
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to
stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have
invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A book is made from a tree. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Bluedepth@triptych @RadiDaddy That’s beautiful. Thank you.
xian@triptych love this but also believe other animals record communal information in the external environment
Aaron@hosford42 @triptych one of the most common is using urine or scat to mark locations — dogs for example can “read” a lot by smelling which creatures peed on something
TheMacMommy🦄@xian @hosford42 @triptych I have a poodle mix & she’s a prolific “pee reader.” When I take her for a walk in the neighborhood it’s like she’s reading her social media feed. I tell her, ok, let’s go check your “pee-mails” 😄
@TheMacMommy @hosford42 @triptych yes, perfect analogy!
hard to imagine how much stronger their sense of smell is than ours!
@xian @hosford42 @triptych I I had to have sinus surgery to remove my turbinates so I have a tiny inkling of what it’s like to be able to smell more than the average human. It stinks, mostly, but dogs like stinky things so they’re lucky!
@TheMacMommy /me googling `turbinates`
@xian have fun learning about turbinates! I’ve had a “septo turbinectomy” to correct a deviated septum and remove turbinates. Ask me how fun it’s been trying to survive an airborne viral pandemic without turbinates.
@TheMacMommy i can imagine— i inherited a deviated nasal septum from my father and his father. my doc told me even if I weren’t fat I’d still have apnea
@xian Ever thought of having it corrected? I’m glad I got mine done even if it did slip off center a little from my kids bouncing off me. It all came with consequences, but I’m glad to be able to breathe.
@TheMacMommy I think some family members had surgery that didn’t improve breathing? I do love my CPAP though
@xian @TheMacMommy It's crossed my mind a few times, too. Ehlers Danlos tends to cause sleep apnea, and also I have had sinus issues basically from birth, so I already knew of turbinates a bit.
@hosford42 @TheMacMommy I highly recommend a sleep study.
@xian @TheMacMommy Yeah I have an APAP already. But there's way more wrong with my sleep than just apnea.
@hosford42 hugs — I think sleep and hydration are the pillars of health
the roamer@xian @hosford42 @triptych What about bees and hives? Do you think it could be a library? Or spider webs?
@TheMacMommy SOME PIG!
@xian @TheMacMommy I have read that spider webs are used to store/transmit information in some ways, but not for other spiders.
Interesting link relevant to the broader conversation:
Indeed. Outings with my whippet are 10 minutes racing, surrounded by 60 minutes walking, of which 30.minutes are sniffing. When he does that I look at him enviously and try to envisage what he "sees" in those smells, I picture some blurry but information-rich watercolour painting with frayed boundaries between different bits of information.
Now I know that he is reading a book!
Indeed. Or a micro-blogging site. He is sniffing posts from a micro-blogging site. :-)
That network is dogdom.
We have wandered quite far from the beautiful & powerful Carl Sagan quote about books. Andrew, I hope you can forgive the deviation!
Murf@triptych brilliant
huesm@triptych
This is a great quote! What I find sad about this quote is I am questioning if it actually is a quote. I have reached that point where I can not take things at face value anymore, nor do I know how to verify it. Now I have to go watch all of Cosmos in search of where he said that. What a devious trick!!!/s
This is a great quote! What I find sad about this quote is I am questioning if it actually is a quote. I have reached that point where I can not take things at face value anymore, nor do I know how to verify it. Now I have to go watch all of Cosmos in search of where he said that. What a devious trick!!!/s
Thomas H Jones II
Rachel Greenham@hosford42 @huesm @triptych https://www.erbzine.com/mag13/1384.html I’m going to see if I can use this as a reference. Maybe it helps?
Colin H.I think part of why I feel compelled to write as much as I do comes from that need to externalize and leave a trace. Unfortunately, my writing is all in formats that die when platforms die.
Then again, as a nobody who's never even been an insignificant participant in something significant, it's not like anyone would have come searching for my papers to archive them after my death. So, when my online presences go poof, it's no loss by any objective measur.
BronMason For Kamala 2024This is most of us here. No celebrity and none of what we say preserved. We are significant to our significant others.
Ironically even if one of our profundities could be revived at some point they could be attributed to another as has been pointed out.
I come from a family of nobodies, but it was still interesting to read dead relatives' diaries and letters just to get a day to day view into the times they lived. Feels like much of that dies in our collective move from letters and journals to emails and blogs.
I do printouts of selected posts and put them together, so that my daughters (now 10) can look at them at some point in the future when I am long gone.
Laure@triptych nice story. He was a great scientist but imo books and writing were completely utilitarian ways to count, or art like writing down ancestral stories or cave art. Also every animal or plant can experience #epigenetics which is collective memory not to mention plants getting soil signals and communicating through rhizomes etc
LisPi@LaureM @triptych If you're wondering, this is what I'm referencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
JMaverickJacks1@triptych Your written thoughts and your audiovisual recordings are the closest things to time travel and immortality that you can personally create without divine intervention. So, please preserve them for future generations of your family.
Just another rakyat 🇲🇾@triptych “Writing is telepathy.” - Stephen King
Jürgen Hubert@triptych I read lots of books from the middle of the 19th century ago - digitally scanned, and readable on an e-ink tablet as if they were published yesterday.
Truly, we live in a marvelous time!
Naomi Heartbreak@triptych this is a very Eurocentric view. Other cultures have done just fine without a written language. There are many ways to retain and pass on knowledge.
Scott MatterMight have blown Carl’s mind to know about oral cultures, the widespread encoding and transmission of information, knowledge, and wisdom in story and song. Long before writing was invented.
Tempered Tea@triptych Well put - writing might very well be the greatest technological invention of humankind, second only to language itself
ArdentArchivist@triptych
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
Julio 🏳️🌈 🇨🇺 🇪🇸 🇺🇸@triptych This is a good reason why books should not be banned.
Andrew C.A. ElliottThat moves me more than I can say.
Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸@triptych @StillIRise1963 The meta of being able to hear Sagan’s voice, too, after all this time.
@pineywoozle ‘s #3WordNote@triptych Very lovely, just sent it to a friend who is putting a book together.
Colorblind Cowboy@triptych I was trying to answer the question this morning of why I read. This is what I was trying to say. Thank you, Carl.
Wow. A precise & poetic analysis of the magic of the book by Carl Sagan. The man knew how to say things. Thank you for sharing this beautiful quote.
Frank Cote@triptych wow! Nice quote!
Bonnie Sonder@triptych beautifully said!
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