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welcome to the cotkey ride home for for Thursday, September 16th, 2021.

I'm Jackson Bird today.

How the social lives of characters from Jane Austen novels are analogous to our digital ones today.

And what we can learn from them about being overstimulated.

Plus, a study illustrating how we could build bases on Mars out of astronaut blood.

And a couple of updates from the world of Lego.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

Early in 2020, crucially, before the pandemic kicked off in earnest here in the U.S.

In her digital voyage column at J-Store Daily, tech writer Alexandra Samuel reflected on a

recent rereading of a few of Jane Austen's novels.

In particular, she shared parallels she had noticed between our current

social media-tinged lives and the social lives of Jane Austen's Regency-era characters.

Samuel points to the, quote, sheer volume of social interaction required of both English gentry

and social media users, end quote.

She cites their month-long visits with one another, in addition to a daily practice of

calling, which Samuel quotes fellow scholar Candice Nolan Grant as describing as a convention

in which you would visit someone's household for at least 15 minutes, and if they weren't

...