reads and links


However you choose to consume new information (books, audiobooks, videos, etc.), just keep doing it. Diversify the subject matter you consume. After about 30 years of ingesting topics including feminist theory, social psychology, evolutionary linguistics, comic books and graphic novels, some philosophy, culturally-diverse poetry, and literary fiction, I’m convinced that a broad field of knowledge will make you a unique and much needed individual in STEM, in a field of mostly neurotic types that specialize in very narrow fields of research. I like to think that each breath this Universe (I’m a Multiverse subscriber) takes reflects an interplay of natural systems that have harmonized over billions of years to produce the planet we now inhabit. We should really take better care of it. 

 

I don’t believe in pigeonholing oneself; I find it stifling. Others will tell you otherwise. I’m also convinced that the rules of natural systems have commonalities across disciplines (e.g. there are similar principles applied to linguistics and geology via the Uniformitarianism concept). Don’t read just to keep up with current literature in your field, read because you’ll be blown away by how interconnected natural systems actually are. 

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet,
balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations,
analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.”
– Robert Anson Heinlein