Locator: 49980ARCHIVES.
Wow, wow, wow.
About a month ago or thereabouts, I started again with a vigorous, eclectic reading program. It is amazing. The first thing I did, was quit watching CNBC. The second thing I did was go off the grid. I kept up with things that interested me by chatting with Google Gemini and ChatGPT but pretty much ignored my most important source of news: x.
I never understood CRISPR but I'll sort that out this week.
I never understood the geography of southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia, but I sorted that out this weekend.
I've always been fascinated by the history of "Old Testament" Israel and have pieced it together this past year by paying attention to "lessons" at church. Today, I found an incredible book on the history of "Old Testament" Israel. That book will become reference book for the rest of my life. The most important thing when learning / teaching history, is to get the scaffolding down.
For me, this is an example of scaffolding:
- 2000 BC: Stone Age to Bronze Age
- 1200 BC: Trojan War; pivot from Bronze Age to Iron Age
- 1000 BC: tenth century -- Israel's Golden Age; "tribal age" for Athens / Sparta
- 500 BC: fifth century -- Athens' (Greece's) Golden Age; moving to a democratic state;
- 0 - 33 AD: life of Jesus Christ
- 1604 - 1606: Shakespeare's greatest work
- 1899 - 1906: Joseph Conrad's greatest work
- 1918: Spanish Flu
- 1945 - 1946: end of WWII
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The Book Page
The three books I picked up today:
- The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, Walter Isaacson, c. 2021. Notes here.
- in scientific research the real key is "asking the right question"; and,
- a lot of luck.
- A History of Israel, Third Edition, John Bright, c. 1959, 1972, 1981.
- Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Matt Ridley, c. 2000.
