Sign in Subscribe
6 min read 45

UofWinds 424, Week 45: British Summer Time Walks, Towards a more Elvish vision of technology, Divine Comedy


Good morning. I took a few moments to tidy up the study before I sat down to write. This was necessary as my cat jumped on the table and this small violence caused my full coffee mug to spill over. There's not much outside light that has made its way into the room so to push away the darkness, I've lit some candles and turned on the LED "fairy lights" over the bookshelf and my Great Lakes wall quilt.

I've had this quilt for some years now, but this week I have looked upon it with new eyes now that I have (re?)learned that hydrologically speaking "Lake Huron and Lake Michigan are a single body of water, forming the world’s largest freshwater lake (by surface area)." I now see that my beloved quilt over-exaggerates the connection between Lake Superior and Georgian Bay.

I stumbled upon the above post while looking for a trustworthy line drawing of The Great Lakes. The author is a now retired Stanford Geography professor who has recently been publishing a series of posts explaining the fundamentals of Geography for his home-schooled grandchildren. I've been reading these posts and while there is a little bit of a sting each time I realize how much I had forgotten of the basics, it has been a joy to slowly re-learn geography as an adult.

British Summer Time Walks


Maps are not only for cartographers. This is the byline of the online journal, Livingmaps Review which "promotes critical cartography as a form of citizen social science, blurring the distinction between professional and amateur mapmakers. It supports and reports on initiatives in participative and community mapping."

It was from this journal that I learned of Blake Morris' British Summer Time Walks.

Since 2019, I have been inviting people to walk the sunrise with me in response to the time change. An hour forward in the spring, an hour back in the autumn. From fifteen minutes before sunrise until fifteen minutes after, starting wherever they are. A daily action, at different times, under the same sun.
Ten seasons in, it has become a ritual marking of time.

Last week, my son and husband watched an English Premier League game at 4pm our time, which you may not realize, was weirdly late. This anomaly is due to the fact that the UK shifts to Greenwich Mean Time differently than when North America shifts to Standard Time. It is during this out-of-sync set of days that Blake Morris encourages everyone on both sides of the ocean to walk both separately and together into the light. This year it was held during 26 October - 2 November 2025 (and I missed it).

Blake has not set out when the next walking season will be, but British Summer Time is set for Sunday, March 29 2026 to Sunday, October 25 2026 and Canada's Daylight Savings Time is set for Sunday, March 8 to Sunday, November 1st. Mark your calendars if you would like to try this with me.

Or, you know, you could just go for a walk at any time. "The point is to walk, not just think, talk, read or write about walking."

Towards a more Elvish vision of technology


Listen, I would not blame you if you balked at the word Elvish and moved on immediately as if nothing good could come from such a ridiculously serious fantasy trope. But hear me out: I think the choice of using Elvish as a worldview is a better choice than hand-picking a particular existing indigenous worldview from a reference book just to make an argument that there are other ways of knowing and interfacing with the world.

And there's another reason to spare a moment of attention to this essay from blogger George Strakhov: to see how he has made a telescopic format that presents three versions of this essay of increasing size.

The essay, Towards a more Elvish vision of technology is best read in its largest, most human resolution. In it, Strakhov makes the case that if we had extremely long life-spans (like elves), we would be more likely to plant and grow solutions to problems, if we even decided to intervene at all.

So, if for Humans “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, then for the Elves, “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature”[12] (for them the more advanced magic is the one that allows nature to be most uninhibited). This, however, is not biomimicry. The Elves do not imitate nature, they let nature do its magic and try to help it as best as they can. Allowing nature to solve a problem is extremely effective and efficient. The only downside is that it usually takes a lot of time - precisely the thing that the immortals have plenty of.
Give it enough time, and every problem will solve itself. This may not always be a practicable strategy for a mortal, but it doesn’t mean that we have to always go to the other extreme. Solving a problem instantly requires an infinite amount of energy, and an equally unthinkable number of side-effects. Fixating on solving the problem quickly and by our own action (rather than pointed inaction) results in our potential solution space being reduced to very few options.

I learned of this essay from 100 rabbits.

Divine Comedy


During the past few months, on more than one occasion, I have turned to family and friends and said, "I feel like we are living in a Simpsons episode."

I realize that some of these feelings have literally been generated by the designs of those in power who create a spectacle for each news cycle as a means to absorb attention, lest it be invested elsewhere. But I really do think that there's something else going on. Something deeper.

We will need comedy to survive this moment [036].

In his most recent newsletter, Austin Kleon wrote, "I started reading Julian Gough almost 20 years ago when I came across his wonderful essay on comedy vs. tragedy." And after reading it, I also want to pass along my recommendation. Unlike Gough, I personally don't have any strong feelings about university creative writing programs and I'm not blaming them for anything. But like Gough, I believe that it is within comedy where we can find ourselves at our most human.

A comparison between The Simpsons and a soap opera is instructive. A soap opera is trapped inside the rules of the format; all soaps resemble each other (like psychologically plausible realist novels). What the makers of The Simpsons did was take a soap opera and put a frame around it: "this is a cartoon about a soap opera." This freed them from the need to map its event-rate on to real life: they could map its event-rate on to cartoon life. A fast event-rate is inherently comic, so the tone is, of necessity, comic. But that is not to say it isn't serious. The Simpsons is profoundly serious. And profoundly comic. Like Aristophanes, debating the war between Athens and Sparta by writing about a sex strike by the women of Athens and beyond.

With its cartoon event-rate, a classic series of The Simpsons has more ideas over a broader cultural range than any novel written the same year. The speed, the density of information, the range of reference; the quantity, quality and rich humanity of the jokes—they make almost all contemporary novels seem slow, dour, monotonous and almost empty of ideas.

Gough also reminds us that comedy is dangerous.

And the reaction was fierce. Rabelais was jailed for his wild comedies. Voltaire, praised for his early tragedies, was jailed for his satires. Cervantes apparently started Don Quixote in a debtors' prison. All had to flee town on occasion for fear of worse. Printing had to be done abroad, in secret, and the books smuggled to their destinations. The early years of the novel look remarkably like a guerrilla war, as pro-Bible forces try to put down the insurgency of the novel across Europe. Both were fighting for the same piece of territory: the territory inside your head.

Now a man could invent his own myth and spread it across the world. And the reader, head bowed over the novel, could have a vision without religion: a full vision, transmitted through space and time by marks on paper, using the novelist's arts.

On that note, this week someone in my circles shared this article from the Public Domain Review called, Books Fatal to their Authors.

The unluckiest of Ditchfield’s unlucky subjects is the poet Pierre Petit. A gust of wind blew a few unpublished poems from Petit’s table to the street below, where they were immediately snatched up by a passing priest. The priest scanned the drafts and demanded the poet dead. It was done. The story puts the lie to Ditchfield’s title: tyrants, not books, kill authors.

Member discussion