2025-04-18
New around here
If you want to get my posts via email, now you can: jdilla.xyz/subscribe.
Things I learned
The air dinosaurs breathed had more oxygen in it than the air we breathe. Jurassic Park couldn’t have happened because the dinosaurs would asphyxiate. Via Lyman Stone.
The combined number of hidden Christians in China and India is estimated to be 120 million, large enough to be the fifth largest religion in the world. Via Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Worth your time
-
“A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum.” — Donald Knuth via Mark Larson.
-
From Stay Sassy:
I noticed that many parents of young children, despite having significantly more on their plates, seemed to get burnt out less. I even noticed this in myself, and didn’t have a real way to explain it – my first kid’s birth coincided with the busiest working period of my life (do not recommend), but I found that I had a more positive attitude towards work, for no reason that I could really explain. When I read this post, it all clicked – when you have young children Mission Doubt entirely disappears because you need to feed them.
I have also noticed that having a baby in the house is good for my creativity and relationship to my work. While I have less time for work, what I get out of that time is much, much higher quality.
-
What’s behind the SynBio Bust? by Sarah Constantin
-
Risk of Ruin Goods by Uri Bram
-
Molson Hart on how tariffs and manufacturing in the USA: part 1 and part 2
-
How restricting car traffic changed air pollution in Paris
-
The myth of the infrastructure phase. Applications and the infrastructure to power them are built in tandem.
-
There’s no speed limit.
Musings
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman
2025-04-14
An incredibly ambitious book by Diarmaid MacCulloch. He really does cover it all, from the Council of Nicaea to the intricacies of African Christianity in the post-colonial era.
I picked this one up mostly to get a better understanding of the 200 years after the birth of Christ and then stuck around for the rest because I’m a completionist. Despite growing up in the church, there’s a bunch of tradition outside of the gospels that I wish someone would put in one place. As an example, Thomas went to India! I continue to think that this would make a great podcast.
After listening to this book (I did the audiobook — no way I was ever going to get through this one in print), I think I have a better understanding of why: “tradition” is a friendly stand in for “sources outside the Bible” and discussion of these makes people uncomfortable. I’m not particularly sure why, but this is a theme of the book — what goes into the cannon of scripture gets people riled up!
Some other topics like this:
-
What is the nature of Jesus? Fully God? Fully man? How exactly can one be both?
-
What is the trinity? Is the trinity one or three?
-
What is the human role in salvation? To what degree are we choosing Christ or being chosen?
One of the benefits of the breadth of the book was seeing these topics reoccurring throughout times, places, and cultures. It made me feel better about the parts of my faith I simply don’t fully understand.
I was surprised at how much of the story I already knew. Between The Rest Is History, Literature and History, and Dominion, I have a pretty workable understanding of the story of the beginnings of Judaism and Christianity. I'm also surprised that less of this is taught in churches.
There parts of the history, say from between 500 and 1700 in Europe, where centering the history on what was happening within the church rather than what was happening with political leaders clarified the story for me. A reminder that the separation of religion and state is a modern one. It also helps explain why religious details that seem uninteresting in 2025 were all consuming. These were the organizing principles of society, in the way that gender, sexuality, and citizenship are today.
I gained a deeper appreciation for Eastern Christianity and Syrian Christianity in particular. I might be mangling some of the details here, but the book mentioned that one of the Syrian churches has chants that seem to be unchanged since the early 100s AD. Isn’t that an incredible lineage? Augustine also seems more important to me now.
My next book in this area is going to be on the early Christian sources. Suggestions are welcomed!
2025-03-28
Loving this deep dive on Hyman Rickover by ChinaTalkand Charles Yang. A couple quotes:
Rickover spent an inordinate amount of time focused on interviewing personnel — he made the final hiring decision for every naval officer who applied to serve on a nuclear submarine until he retired
Another Rickoverian approach was his famous “Quaker meetings”. When disputes arose between the Naval Reactors and the contractor, or when trust had become frayed over too many disagreements and miscommunications, Rickover would send his staff and the contractor staff to a retreat location for a weekend, a week, or however long as needed. They would meet with no parliamentary procedures or formal meeting agenda and simply talk out their issues until they could “deal with each others as individuals, not as spokesman for either organization” and come to a consensus on a path forward and build mutual trust.
Some other themes that stood out:
-
Parallel tracking wherever there is risk (technical risk, bureaucratic risk)
-
A focus on consensus building
-
Focused on finding talent
-
Demanding of that talent
-
High trust relationships
I’m repeatedly struck by how the leadership style of the generation of Americans that lived through the Second World War. It seems more pragmatic, demanding, and less hierarchical / political.