After-Orts #18

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
     -- Amos Tversky, quoted in this altogether remarkable article: 
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-friends-who-changed-how-we-think-about-how-we-think


Magic . . . in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives — from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself — is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.
     — David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World 

 

- The Five Nations -

It is unknown exactly when the Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga, and Oneida nations formed the Iroquois Confederacy; an eclipse mentioned in oral traditions would place its establishment in either 1142 or 1451. The confederacy dominated the lower Great Lakes region until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, when it found itself torn between the American rebels and the British. Deadlocked, and reeling from the deaths of three Great Council chiefs in an epidemic, in early 1777 the confederacy ceremonially extinguished the fire that had been kept lit since its founding.
     https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/referendum/