šŸ‘‹šŸ»  Hello!

Thanks for visiting! You'll find a bunch of musings I've been writing around these parts since the early 2000's. Lately, I've been reviewing a lot of books. But I also write about code. But really, you're just here to see pictures of Benson.

My top music of 2023

Chuck Ragan of Hot Water Music (taken by me)

Itā€™s time for the yearly (semi-yearly?) update of my favorite bands according to Last.FM. It is kind of all over the place this year!

1. Chuck Ragan
2. The Glitch Mob
3. Creedence Clearwater Revival
4. Vansire
5. The Lawrence Arms
6. AFI
7. The Interrupters
8. Deer Tick
9. Two Gallants
10. The Rolling Stones

Book Review: The Explosive Child

This was one of the first books Iā€™ve read that so specifically addressed the unique difficulties weā€™ve been encountering with one of our kids, and the insight it provided was eye-opening and validating.

Dr. Greeneā€™s descriptions of some scenarios people encounter at home were strikingly accurate. It kind of shook me up with how absolutely on the mark some of these descriptions and scenarios were. For me, the scenarios depicted werenā€™t just abstract concepts but felt like real-life situations that played out in our home.

It had some interesting ideas and strategies for navigating situations that might cause these explosions that I canā€™t wait to try. Namely, a concept called ā€œcollaborative problem solvingā€, which involves validating your childā€™s feelings and concerns and then working with them to come up with a solution.

The book is refreshingly honest about the complexity of these challenges, acknowledging that thereā€™s no magic solution or quick fix. Even though there is no silver bullet, it definitely gives me hope that the light at the end of the tunnel isnā€™t an oncoming train.

I found ā€œThe Explosive Childā€ to be an insightful and valuable resource.

TIL about the TIL GitHub collection

I believe Reddit pioneered the ā€œTILā€ meme (TIL, short for ā€œToday I Learnedā€¦ā€).

Over on HackerNews, someone posted an interesting discussion related to a collection of ā€œToday I Learnedā€ notes on GitHub, featuring all sorts of interesting coding tidbits. It goes back over 8 years!

Itā€™s such a brilliant idea and I think Iā€™d like to adopt something similar myself: if I learned something new and interesting, I should post about it.

Book Review: The Last Island by Adam Goodheart

A few days ago, I stumbled upon a Reddit post about someone taking a photo as they flew over North Sentinel Island. I canā€™t recall hearing about this particular island at all, so I popped into the comments to see what the big deal was.

As it turns out, this island has one of the last remaining un-contacted tribes on Earth. Oh! Now this is interesting. Itā€™s especially relevant, because a recently released book dives into the history of this island.

The Last Island, by Adam Goodheart, documents the authorā€™s journey to the Andaman Islands in the late 90ā€™s and his attempt to see the island with his own eyes.

Itā€™s a very quick read (272 pages) and I went through it in about 2 days. After the author sharing his initial experience with visiting the Andamans, he explores the history of British colonization of the archipelago, the attempts to convert (ā€œsaveā€) local tribespeople, and some of the exploitation and abuse that happened as well.

More recently, attempts to interact with native tribespeople in other parts of the Andaman Islands has given insight into various issues the tribes face as they integrate with modern society. Disease is obviously the biggest, but alcoholism plays a part as well:

They live now in a restricted tribal reserve at the southern end of the island; these onetime hunter-gatherers now depend largely on food supplied by the Indian authorities. Malnutrition rates, alcoholism, and infant mortality are reportedly high. In 2008, at least eight Onge men and boysā ā€”almost a tenth of the tribeā€™s remaining populationā ā€”died after drinking the contents of a bottle that they had found on the beach, which they believed to be an alcoholic beverage; it was actually a toxic chemical solvent.

Through it all, a tiny little island located 20 miles off the coast seemed to defy these attempts. Itā€™s partly due to the treacherous reefs around the island, and partly due to the fact that British colonizers saw nothing of value on the tiny island.

Calling the Sentinelese an ā€œun-contactedā€ tribe is a bit of a misnomer, since there were various expeditions throughout the last 100 years or so that involved kidnapping (!), dropping off various gifts (coconuts, pots and pans), a shipwreck in 1981 (check it out on Google Maps!), and the misguided attempts of an American evangelical who illegally landed on the island in 2018 and was quickly killed by the inhabitants.

In 1956, the Indian government passed a law that prohibited visitors from coming in contact with the island (though as seen above, this has not been strictly enforced). In more recent times, the Sentinelese have taken a more protective approach (rightly so, considering recent history).

Via Wikipedia:

The Sentinelese have repeatedly attacked approaching vessels, whether the boats were intentionally visiting the island or simply ran aground on the surrounding coral reef. The islanders have been observed shooting arrows at boats, as well as at low-flying helicopters. Such attacks have resulted in injury and death. In 2006, islanders killed two fishermen whose boat had drifted ashore, and in 2018 an American Christian missionary, 26-year-old John Chau, was killed after he attempted to make contact with the islanders three separate times and paid local fishermen to transport him to the island.

Overall, I thought the book was an interesting look at the history of this area, and an exploration into our fascination with un-contacted tribes that still exist in the modern world and the way in which we tend to idealize them (and treat them in a similar way to the animals we see at the zoo or on a safari).

3/5 stars