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"Every step in my career had been towards becoming the monitor rather than the monitored."

"I bet you had a Tumblr."

That last chapterlet (IV) feels like it could only have been written by someone who had spent whole days walking deep in the countryside without a car to go back to. But is it too contemporary to see solitude as a sharpener, when narrating someone from a far more communal age? (I think the greatest plot-hole is the neglect of how normal it was for people in the past to always be surrounded by others)

"But life’s a gamble and I went all in, ’cause why the fuck not." (from the first page of The Smile) - the pholosophy of pretty much all the characters here, from one angle or another

2) "my old man" and "fam" AFAIK seem to jar generationally. Wld be better to get the opinion of someone in their early 20s though. Maybe it's bcos the narrator is a rich kid putting it on? But they know the slang of their own age group. Is this a translation issue, or is there equivalent in the original?

Very Virgine Despentes - but in a harsher country.
Wouldn't be surprised if we are supposed to think that this girl doesn't realise all the ways things *have* worked out for her so far (e.g. she is healthy enough to go to university and do all the messy lowlife stuff she does)

A lot of this actually does work as audio so far, and only occasionally would it help to look at a graph. Many of the graphs are from media articles anyway, and could probably be found by publication + subject

The opening part, about why it is so difficult to make ambulatory human-like robots that perform everyday chores, has aged startlingly well. Surprising in contrast to the way that The Blank Slate is so dated (and really ought to be out of print for that reason).

Unlike the vast majority of popular science health books (and other popular non-fiction), he contextualises where his views are controversial and explains thoroughly and credibly why he came to his particular conclusion, with citations (e.g. his recent change of mind about Vitamin D)

At last, a survey history by a medieval historian, and not someone who thinks the goal is to get to the 19th century as quickly as possible. 33% in and only around 1000AD.

At some point it became a bit too complex and involved, with too much new info, for audio and it's been on hiatus until such time as I want to catch up with the written version. And as China's economic powerhouse status looks to be waning, and I don't have a major intrinsic interest in the place, that isn't a personal priority.

Finished 23/05. Still need to add some notes in here.

From one set of steppe nomads to another - or their descendants a two or three thousand years later from Hungary to Siberia. Archaeology in C17th-18th from age of Peter the Great onwards. Some pioneers who recorded context and kept museums, but also much grave robbing and selling stuff, immensely frustrating to hear about. There was a time when a living could be made opening kurgans, but was over in C18th.

Sintashta culture a) appear to have invented the chariot, not near eastern civs as previously thought, b) appear to be the Indo Iranian homeland - incredible correspondences btwn evidence in burial mounds and description of funeral rituals in Rig Veda.
[I find it far more amazing to have invented spoked wheels as faster rather than wheels in the first place as there are round rolling things obvious in nature]

The angled slot may have been for a noseband attached to the reins that would pull down on the inside (left) horse’s nose, acting as a brake, when the reins were pulled, while the outside (right) horse was allowed to run free—just what a left-turning racing team would need. The chariot race, as described in the Rig Veda, was a frequent metaphor for life’s challenges, and Vedic races turned to the left.

Bows this long could be fired from horseback only to the side (the left side, for a right-handed archer) [though it sounds like javelins were more common in steppe warfare at this stage ... different kinds of wear are often found together, as if the right and left sides of the horse, or the right and left horses, needed slightly different kinds of control

Similarly, during the climatic crisis of the late MBA in the steppes, competing steppe chiefs searching for new sources of prestige valuables probably discovered the merchants of Sarazm in the Zeravshan valley, the northernmost outpost of Central Asian civilization.

Vehik found that long-distance trade increased greatly at the same time; trade after 1350 CE was more than forty times greater than it had been before then. To succeed in war, chiefs needed wealth to fund alliance-building ceremonies before the conflict and to reward allies afterward.

Susan Vehik studied political change in the deserts and grasslands of the North American Southwest after 1200 CE, during a period of increased aridity and climatic volatility comparable to the early Sintashta era in the steppes. Warfare increased sharply during this climatic downturn in the Southwest.

The same borrowed *arya- root developed into words with the meaning “slave� in the Finnish and Permic branches (Finnish, Komi, and Udmurt), a hint of ancient hostility between the speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian and Finno-Ugric