Thursday Things: Read Along Edition
7 December 2023. Vol 5 No 49. By Dan McGirt. #226
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
An old book store from the city of Bilbao. Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash
ANNOUNCEMENT: Thursday Things Read Along!
Attention, Happy Subscribers! Watch your inbox tomorrow for the first edition of Read Along, the new Books section of Thursday Things!
I’ll explain in more depth what Read Along is all about tomorrow. But the quick version is this — when I launched Thursday Things in 2019, one of the things I wanted to cover in this newsletter was books.
It’s right there on the ThTh About page: “Thursday Things is a weekly grab bag of amusing, strange, absurd, uplifting, and inspirational items I find online or in my offline reading or real life experiences. The sort of things I might otherwise post on social media.”
While I have touched on specific books from time to time, 99% of the content here is about articles and websites I find while roaming around the Internet. In thinking about how to make Thursday Things better in 2024, I decided to add a regular Books section where I can specifically discuss what I’m reading offline.
So please join me in the Read Along, a new companion section of Thursday Things focused on books I’m reading, have read, or may read in the future!
I’m adding the Read Along via Substack’s “Sections” feature.1 At the Thursday Things Home page you’ll now see at the top a “Read Along” tab. You’ll find all the Read Along editions there.
If you’re a Happy Subscriber to Thursday Things, the Read Along is now included in your subscription. That means when I post a new Read Along edition you’ll get an email copy in you inbox, just like you now get the weekly edition of Thursday Things. The Read Along is part of Thursday Things — but since it won’t go out on Thursdays I gave it a Thursdayless name of its own
If you’re thinking “That all sounds great, but one email a week from you is enough!” — don’t worry! If you don’t want the Read Along email notification, you can go to your Account Settings at https://thursdaythings.substack.com/account and opt out of receiving emails about new posts in the Read Along section. You have full control.
You can also read the Read Along by clicking the Read Along tab at any time.
Again, more details tomorrow, including the books I’m reading now. I hope you’ll enjoy the Read Along!
The logo may need work, but this will do for now.
What dreams may come
A few years ago I read a book about lucid dreaming and watched a few videos about techniques for achieving lucid dreams and I worked on that for several months — setting the intention to have lucid dreams as I fell asleep, writing down what I could recall about every dream as soon as I woke up, asking myself several times a day if I am dreaming or awake so that my subconscious mind might do that in a dream. There are lots of tips that I followed.
I guess I should pause here and explain what lucid dreaming is. I’ll let the article do what: Lucid dreaming is a state of being aware that you are dreaming during your sleep cycle and the ability to control or manipulate the dream narrative. As many as 70% of people experience the phenomenon at least once in their lifetime.
Basically, when you’re lucid dreaming, because you are aware that you’re in a dream you have some ability to script and direct the dream. Some people just naturally have lucid dreams. The rest of us have to work at it. After a few months I managed to have a lucid dream which I’ll maybe tell you about some other time.
But perhaps soon the experience of lucid dreaming will be more readily accessible to more people: 'Halo' Device Coming in 2025 Is Designed to Induce Lucid Dreams
A new venture-backed startup is capitalizing on the productivity that can be channeled while lucid dreaming, Fortune reports…
Prophetic, founded earlier this year, is tapping into a new unconscious market with an innovative headpiece called the "Halo".
Allowing customers to tap into lucid dreaming could pave the way for productivity at nighttime — for example, engineers could code in their sleep, per Fortune.
People spend approximately one-third of their lives sleeping. Prophetic wants to subvert the lack of activity that happens during sleep by inducing a lucid dream state.
Okay, sure. I guess if you’re pitching this to Silicon Valley VCs, then you tell them your lucid dream device will enable coders to code in their sleep. Gotta get funded somehow!
But I can assure you that if this thing works I won’t be dreaming about writing code.
The Halo is worn like a crown and aims to give users control over their dreams. Per Prophetic's website, the device uses a combination of ultrasound and machine learning models created using EEG & fMRI data to detect when users are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams.
As long as the Halo doesn’t insert advertising in my dreams, I’m interested.
Digital Aztecs
If you’ve been meaning to read more 16th century codices written in Spanish and Nahuatl documenting the daily life and customs of the Mexica (Aztec) people during the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, have I got news for you!
Stunning Codex Documenting Aztec Culture Now Fully Digitized
After centuries of remaining largely inaccessible to the public, a rare manuscript featuring 2,500 pages of detailed illustrations and text documenting the history and culture of 16th-century Mexico is now available online. The Digital Florentine Codex, a seven-year project by Los Angeles’s Getty Research Institute, features new transcriptions and translations, updated summaries, searchable texts and images, and more.
Modeled after medieval European encyclopedias, the Florentine Codex is a three-volume, 12-book collection written in Spanish and Nahuatl documenting the daily life and customs of the Mexica (Aztec) people, as well as other information including astronomy, flora, and fauna, during the time of Spanish conquest. It was originally created by Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish Franciscan friar who began logging information about the Indigenous communities in central Mexico with whom he worked closely. Although Sahagún is frequently credited as the primary author, the 12-book manuscript was created with the help of numerous elders, grammarians, artists, and scribes from the Nahua community. As a result, the codex maintains an important Indigenous perspective that is often missing from other historical accounts of the time.
An important historical document, to be sure.
In 1577, the codex was sent to Spain, where it then somehow traveled to Italy to fall under the ownership of Cardinal Ferdinando I de’ Medici, who brought the work to Florence. The codex was stored away in one of the Medici family libraries and remained forgotten for several centuries. In 2012, a scanned edition of the work was made digitally available through the World Digital Library, and in 2015, it was incorporated into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
Even if you’re not so interested in the history, it’s definitely worth clicking over to the article and the Digital Codex itself to see the illustrations.
Butterfly and jaguar fish (papalomichi and ocelomichin) in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex. Image: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence via Hyperallergic.com
There are a few other Azetec and Mayan codices floating about. But the vast majority of the writings from those cultures will never be digitized, mainly because the Spanish burned them all. Thanks a lot, Bishop Diego De Landa, you book-burning grouch.2
Thank you for reading!
Please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. Again, please look for the Read Along in your inbox tomorrow. Otherwise — see you next Thursday!
“As your publication expands to include more posts, topics, and contributors, Sections are a tool to create different mailing lists associated with distinct topics.
“Each section will appear in a tab at the top of your publication’s homepage. Additionally, your subscribers can opt into or out of receiving emails for each section on their account page at https://yourdomain.substack.com/account.”
The four Mayan Codices, including the Codex on display at the Getty, are the only known remaining books that survived Spanish Franciscan Bishop Diego De Landa’s order to burn and destroy all Maya manuscripts and cult images during the Spanish Inquisition of Yucatán in July of 1562.
From Mayan Codex, Americas’ Oldest Surviving Book, Goes on View in LA
Yay, very much looking forward to the Read Along section! Love hearing about which books other authors are reading.