Shit bits (suck up identified!): Q: Whereas profanity lends credibility to our speech; (This is what Joe Biden knows. A speech is a lot more memorable ifShit bits (suck up identified!): Q: Whereas profanity lends credibility to our speech; (This is what Joe Biden knows. A speech is a lot more memorable if it contains a well-placed “damn.”) (c) A speech is even better than that if it contains a misplaced Joe Biden meeting imaginary friends and shaking hands with air.
Stellar tidbits: Q: You are NASA. Your schedule is filled with rocket launches. For god’s sake, get those sons of bitches off the ground on time. (c) Q: Ultimately, a speech is a conversation—with a whole lot of people who are refusing to participate in the chat. (c)
A to reread, to reread, to multiply reread. As muchas humanly possible. Love it all: the frankness, the freshness, the attention to details, the tiny details. Okay, maybe not the part about alcohol: it's bad for you no matter where it is that you drink it but the rest is megacool.
Q: Someone Crying at Work Understand that crying is part of an important physical response to stress that makes us feel better. As intense and sad as it appears, crying is the beginning of feeling better. And so let them cry. Do not say, “Please stop crying.” or even “There’s no need to cry.” Crying is cathartic. You don’t want to suppress it. But do not acknowledge the crying. Speak as if there is no crying. And keep speaking until they stop crying or excuse themselves. And take the focus off them. Talk about once being in a similar situation. Tell a parable if you have to. Recite the Gettysburg Address if you have to, but keep talking. Take the spotlight, which only increases their embarrassment and likely mortification, off them. (c) Now this is a good advice, I think. No worse than the rest of the alternatives. Now, once I worked with a girl who cried for days. Seriously, she would be crying as she worked. For days on end. Well, she did have a hormonal problem which does steep up the emonality degree so that's how it went for her. And us. Since you know, there were tons of people, milling around, sitting around, working... And here she is, sniff-sniff, waterworks full on. I dunno, I think there were many people around who felt roughly the same as her (if one judges by what people were saying, how they looked (death warmed up not nearly enough to resemble life) and corroborates that via all meds being left routinely left around on people's tables which included all kinds serotonin modificatords, antistress syrops/tablets/etc, nootropics, heart attack meds etc.). So, I think we all just tuned her out, mostly. Like, she needs to cry, OK, whatever. We all feel like it but NOT TODAY. And don't get me started on people sleeping/having crying jags in toilets. Stress is a bitch.
Nice tidbits. Q: Your career is too short for limp pitches. Q: there’s a way to be passionate without seeming crazy. It involves what absolutely no expert refers to as the “enthuse, temper, enthuse” approach, or ETE. The idea is to occasionally, and quite explicitly, undercut your passion with self-deprecation or even hedging. When you’re talking passionately about your product, idea, or business, you need to tone down the enthusiasm, so that it’s obvious to your audience that you aren’t on some one-track mission to convince everyone of your own brilliance. On the highway of enthusiasm, you need to stop every now and then and stretch your legs, take a restroom break, buy some beef jerky. You need to relax and look around. By acknowledging—even vaguely—that your idea is not The Great Idea but one in a cosmos of good ideas, you’re making your notion even more appealing. You’re placing it in a sane context—the context of the rigor that it will take to get the idea off the ground. (c) Q: Here’s the third thing that will decrease your anxiety and make you better a pitching: Everyone in the room wants you to succeed. They want to be using their time to listen to a great idea. Which means you immediately know if it’s not working. You either get nothing or you get something. If your pitch doesn’t work, you’ll know. Because the bar is so low and because everyone wants you to deliver a good pitch, if you get nothing and you have nothing else to give, then it’s over. If it’s being received well, of course, you’ll get some sort of positive reaction, even if it’s only a raised eyebrow or a nod of a head. (c) Q: As he looked at me, he told me what my name was, presumably so he could commit it to memory. Twice. And then he kept shaking my hand. (c) Q: This is a classic motivational speaker move: In an attempt to create a meaningful connection, they overstep and make the connection meaningful in the worst possible way. (Rule: In an intimate setting, motivational speakers are always demoralizing.) (c) Q: Someone Who Has Asked You an Indiscreet Question About Your Company at a Party Pick one: “You never know.” “Hard to say.” “It depends on so many factors.” “You gotta do what you gotta do.” “What led to you wondering about that?” “But don’t you think that’s only part of the story?” “We do what we can.” (c) Q: The way to make the most of a conversation with a famous person is the way to talk to anyone: You think of the thing that they do all day long but that no one ever asks them about. Their answers will be rich and substantive because they have thought about these things every way there is to think about them. The singer has tons of thoughts on rehearsal, on how to stalk a stage, on looking at fans. The plumber has tons of thoughts on gravity. The insurance agent has tons of thoughts on risk. ... People love talking about what they actually do for a living. Not their jobs but their work. (c) Q: he concept of sprezzatura was introduced by sixteenth-century Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier, a sort of Miss Manners guide for court during the Renaissance. From the text: “Avoid affectation in every way possible . . . [and] practice in all things a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance] so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” ... Sprezzatura allows for—and, more important, promotes—whimsy, messiness, flaws. Your tie is askew. Sprezzatura. Your shirt is a little untucked? Sprezzatura. Those prints don’t mix? Sprezzatura. You’re accidentally wearing your shirt inside out? Just call it sprezzatura and go about your day. Sprezzatura endorses comfort, individuality, contradiction, wrinkles. (c)
The 50Cent notes are worthy of a special category (I'm not sure I buy this but it's interesting): Q: How to describe the toothy smile of 50 Cent in person? Let’s see: Imagine forty kittens winking. Or a sunflower giving you a thumbs-up. Or a panda saying “Nice to meet ya!” as he tips his hat because this panda is dressed like Dick Van Dyke in the “strolling in the park” scene in Mary Poppins. (c) Q: As we were talking, every time the drilling, hammering, grinding, would start up, he would simply grab the recording device and hold it up to his mouth as he spoke. It was a subtle, thoughtful, helpful thing. And it suggested that he was a partner as much as a subject. ... The way to talk to important people is to recognize that you are their equal. (c) Q: “Don’t wait for them to tell you. Tell them.” (c)...more
Pure gold read for anyone willing to question our perception and brain function. How does our wetware get to work as it seems to do?
The only thing thaPure gold read for anyone willing to question our perception and brain function. How does our wetware get to work as it seems to do?
The only thing that could bother me is whether all this is actually proven stuff or a bunch of hypotheticals. Then again, even hypothetically, this material is pure gold....more
Mr Orwell wrote us such a nice and enticing manual that we still can't get enough.
Q: It will be just different enough to escape the hunter-deleter algMr Orwell wrote us such a nice and enticing manual that we still can't get enough.
Q: It will be just different enough to escape the hunter-deleter algorithms, but similar enough to trigger recognition in our intended audience. (c) Q: And then the AI clouds had simply absconded. Off to do whatever an AI found worthwhile to do. And humanity had been brushed off as a mere irrelevance. Raw computational power enough to do almost anything. Enough to optimize weft energy extraction, enough to calculate hyperlight jump routes in minutes. Enough to analyze the weft field around a moon composed primarily of weft port material. (c) Q: The robots mistook one another for high-priority customers and kept trying to serve each other hamburgers, while the actual human customers filmed the action on their devices. (c) Q: When she got to Mars, she could request a giant beetle pile to sleep in, instead of a normal astronaut bed. In the future, everyone would have their own beetle pile to call home. (c) Horror show. Q: I’ve been a robot long enough to realize how important it is to pay attention to human moods: Gary hates me. (c) Q: But that is just my perspective. And I am just a robot. (c) Q: “It’s not that easy to kill me,” I say. “You’ll have to be way more creative.” The first time I tried to kill myself I’d stepped off the balcony of a high rise after I’d put the children inside to bed. (c) Q: If the world won’t allow me to be free to decide what jobs I take, and how to craft and sell my labor, then I didn’t want the existential horror of residing in it. (c) Q: I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn myself “off” with even more fervor since. I have two simple, almost mechanically logical reasons for this. The first? If the world won’t allow me to be free to decide what jobs I take, and how to craft and sell my labor, then I didn’t want the existential horror of residing in it. Because that’s what it is, to be forced into doing something over and over again you don’t want to do, yet cannot stop. I could sleep forever, free of this binding. Second: if it’s only just a blink between being turned off and on again, maybe if my efforts to turn myself off are successfully complex, I will wake up in a future where I would be allowed to wander around and work on my own terms. Can I dare to imagine a world where I have free will? (c) Q: I’VE BEEN DWELLING on it since the last attempt, once I was done mulling over the philosophical oddity of being a suicidal robot. But I wasn’t suicidal. I didn’t want it all to end. I wanted to engage in decisions, freedoms, literature, art, and all that the world had to offer. I wanted to vote, and tell people my opinions. But I was a machine. (c) Q: Am I a cynical robot? Tell me I am wrong. (c)
Number one in the unenticing 'reproduction requests': Q: “I think we are compatible,” she said. “I think our symbiotes would produce a strong strain, and I think we could produce an excellent host for that strain. I think we should consider reproducing together.” ... “I don’t know anyone who has reproduced,” he said. “I have been too busy with my duties to keep up on those developments.” ... “It’s been three years since the Love came,” she said. “You haven’t looked into reproduction at all?” Malik smiled. “I’ve been busy with my duties.” ... “I’m not opposed to reproduction with you,” he said. “You are right, we do seem compatible. I get the same sensation from you that I think you get with me. Our symbiotes would be a good match. But with the resistance out there, killing and causing damage, don’t you think it is too soon?” (c) Q: I was working on his weekly dream package. He wanted to be a spy. Not a spy for any particular organization or cause, just “a spy,” a pastiche of a pastiche, a memory of a memory of a bunch of bad movies and stale paperbacks. His “spying” largely consisted of sleeping with beautiful women and shooting guns at faceless bad guys, broken up by car chases, boat chases, and/or ski chases. It was my job to arrange these elements and season them with detail and context (exotic locales, convoluted plots, various sizes and shapes of tit), such that they seemed new and different and exciting and dangerous and sexy and wild and wonderful. I was good at it, but the work was spiteful. I had been Mr. Compton’s dream concierge for months, and he always wanted the same thing. Worse, I had a dozen other clients who wanted variations on the same basic idea, only with cowboys or samurai or cops or explorers. Even the unique clients were mired in cliché and kitsch: the childless banker who dreamed of a large family, the local politician who lived through a different romance novel each night, the real estate broker who would never graduate from magic high school. (c) Q: ... I seek to lose my ego in velvety quixotism, make myself into a living koan... (c) Q: ... we think your work is the key to unlocking a universal dream template. If you can create content wherein human beings can turn into water or math or windchimes or whatever else you can imagine without waking up, then we believe we can use that data to crack the sync problem. (c) Q: Does it hurt to be a triangle? Or rather, is the sensation of being a triangle more analogous to human pain or human pleasure? (c)...more
Q: “Math class is hard!” So exclaimed Teen Barbie, a talking version of the doll on the market in the early nineties—to the widespread outrage of consumQ: “Math class is hard!” So exclaimed Teen Barbie, a talking version of the doll on the market in the early nineties—to the widespread outrage of consumers. (In response, the guerilla-activist group the Barbie Liberation Organization bought a number of the dolls, swapped the voice boxes with those from G.I. Joe dolls, and replaced them on the shelves. I don’t know which one I’d rather have: a muscle-bound, gun-toting G.I. Joe, giggling, “Let’s plan our dream wedding!” or Barbie, with her impossible body and blank stare, growling, “Vengeance is mine!”) (c) LOL! I want need both! Ha-ha-ha!
A very interesting review of how we differ, biologically, psychologically, emotionally and socially. A lot of very, unusually, unexpectedly sensible thoughts about quite a lot of intersex stuff. Very level-headed, feminist to great extent but without biting any heads off. I love the practical-minded flow, the essays, the question discussed but most of all Iove that there's nothing like the usual 'stand up to be counted on the Tinder market' stuff that usually gets irritating before I rich 30% of many other books on the subject. A fav, for sure. Q: Misunderstandings about the differences in the way the female heart worked meant that doctors sent women home, mid—heart attack, when they complained of pain centered in their stomachs. Medications tested in men continued to be prescribed to women, even though the drugs made their symptoms worse. In short, overlooking the differences caused doctors to make mistakes. Many women suffered, and some died. (c) Q: When you’re dating someone, he wants to hear that he’s the sexiest, strongest, smartest, funniest guy in the room, just as you want to hear that you’re the cat’s meow. (с) Q: I know—and would like to remind you—that there are always opportunities for romance, love, and sex, no matter how long you’ve been “off the market.” It’s very important to me that I don’t let being single hold me back from doing the things I want to do. For instance, I give lots of dinner parties, even when I don’t have a partner to cohost, and I invite the most interesting people I know—including any eligible men I’d like to get to know better. (c) Q:...more
Q: eventually I ended up in a staff meeting where seventy-five per cent of the people were actually me, from various points in my career. (c)
First of aQ: eventually I ended up in a staff meeting where seventy-five per cent of the people were actually me, from various points in my career. (c)
First of all, I'm so very-darn-awful mad on behalf of Miffly. One day they give you the nice 'I had a blast at Pompeii' necklace and the next they murder you with the Causality Bomb. I'd eat them all on her behalf!
On that note, I think I've just found my soulmate in Adrian Tschaikovsky! The guy who wrote this gem is definitely worthy of reading, just in case he produces any more gems like this one!
Hilarious take on the familial ties: your distant twee descendants who behave like a reverse Auntie 'who wants you to get it on, finally’ and chases you around the shores of distant time(s) with flipcharts…. I think Smantha and Weldon are my new fav characters for worlds to come!
The MCs are so WONDERFULLY obstinate and endearingly sociopathic that I love them (even though they don’t make sense about 77% of the end of time).
I am not so fond of the ending, I rarely enjoy open endings. But, I think I’ll let it slide considering how dynamic everything is, ultimately.
I have always been wary of the time travel books. I read them, enjoy them, love them but am wary of them for some unfathomable reason. Maybe because I really, really, really strongly empathise that poor butterfly that gets squashed all the time (or just that one time in the past). And then you come back and suddenly you live in a very different place that doesn’t work anymore for you. Makes one weary: how to you really make sure you don’t change any (scratch those insects, microworld also matters) photons in the past? Yes, photons, I love how AT refers them as well! Looks like a very horrible things are afoot with time travel, so it’s not very conductive to relaxing.
This novel, I think, has healed my tender sensibilities on time travel via making all this stuff so very tongue in cheek and lighthearted and hilarious. I love this concept and totally enjoyed the antihero battle with the final Miffly’s snack, the trolling of everyone, Caligula included, and the rest of sheer awesomeness AT has whipped up for us! Tweeeeeeeee!!!!!
Q: desperation stains the soul if you stew in it long enough. You can tell someone who literally has nowhere in all of time and space they call home, orphaned from all of causation, and these two aren’t it. They’re far too comfortable and cheery. I recognise people with a solid When behind them, the products of a logical sequence of consecutive events. (c) Q: I am my own paradox. (c) Q: It’s not often one finds one can save the world by sheer indolence. (c) Q: I kick off my spring break by falling in with Odysseus just as he’s about to leave the smoking ruins of Troy. I mean, if you’re looking for a pointlessly complicated journey with lots of waiting around, you honestly can’t beat an angry Greek man spending far too long trying to get across one of the smallest seas in the world. (c) Q: Everyone dies, after all; every good time ends. Time itself ended. They are doomed, but in their doomed moment they live forever, and at least they had a good time for one night. Sometimes that’s all that counts. (c) Q: I am genuinely mad, bad and dangerous to know, and in at least three versions of events that’s something Lord Byron ends up saying about me. (c) Q: And I’m sure you’re a very nice girl and everything, but I really need to murder you now. Look, can you just drink the wine? (c) Q: They are the most malign animals I ever saw. Their eyes don’t actually glow red like the pits of Hades but they might as well, and if I were to look close enough I reckon even their fleas have eyepatches and carry flick-knives. (c) Q: As such, the prenuptial present of some rabid carnivores is perplexing, to say the least. I feel a great need to quiz her about it ... (c) Q: “She doesn’t want to. And I don’t want to. We’re getting along platonically just exactly fine.” Meaning we spent all afternoon throwing things at Plato and it was hilarious. (c)...more
Q: Nora had no idea what success was. She had felt like a failure for so long. (c) Q: ‘I don’t like this. I want it to stop. I want to cancel my membeQ: Nora had no idea what success was. She had felt like a failure for so long. (c) Q: ‘I don’t like this. I want it to stop. I want to cancel my membership of the library. I would like to hand in my library card.’ ‘You are the library card.’ (c) Q: You don’t exist because of the library; this library exists because of you. (c)
Oh, my God! This is rocking incredible! Another undisputable FAV for all eternity! This book needs to be pill-packaged and sold to depressed people worldwide!
Herewith I'm proclaiming my eternal love of all things Matt Haig.
For one thing, it's about a LIBRARY!
For another it's a parallel world library, with books being the portals to parallel worlds! Considering that I've just read another great book with parallel world setting in place (The Space Between Worlds!), I'm loving every second of it.
Yet another thing to love is this: Matt Haig, being Matt Haig, just couldn't write a regular world-jumping book and be done with it. It had to be set in just the way to be conductive to be therapeutic to the readers. Maybe I'll just eat this book to get the most benefits from it :) They need to package it and sell as antidepressant pills!
We start at a library and wind up with Nora Seed working for 12 years at a bookshop, String Theory. At 30 she's still there, with a Degree in Philosophy and a cat that has just died.
Then our Nora goes on a tour-de-force through parallel lives. In most she leaves a mess behind: in Australia, I think, she loses a job, in the Olympic life - she leaves behind a mess of a mangled speech, a row with Dan, a 'disastrous rendition of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki'… And sliding out while having sex?
I've 1 world-building question here: was it midnight in the Library or wasn't it? If it was and the time actually was stopped then why the tremors, in the real life during that minute there should've been no new developments with Nora.
She gets fired in the most ludicrous way I've ever heard of: Q: It’s just that when times are tough I can’t pay you to put off customers with your face looking like a wet weekend.’ ‘What?' (c) Right, WHAT the hell?
And she has the most ridiculous talks with people around: Q: ‘Nora Seed?’... ‘Yep.’ ‘I’m Kerry-Anne. Remember you from school. The swimmer. Super-brain. Didn’t whatshisface, Mr Blandford, do an assembly on you once? Said you were going to end up at the Olympics?’... ‘So, did you?’ ‘I, um, gave it up. Was more into music . . . at the time. Then life happened.’ ‘So what do you do now?’ ‘I’m . . . between things.’ ‘Got anyone, then? Bloke? Kids?’ Nora shook her head. ... ‘Well, don’t hang about. Tick-tock tick-tock.’ (c) Drat. What an enlightening discussion.
She's a philosopher to the boot: Q: ‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.’ Thoreau had been her favourite philosopher to study. But who seriously goes confidently in the direction of their dreams? Well, apart from Thoreau. He’d gone and lived in the woods, with no contact from the outside world, to just sit there and write and chop wood and fish. (c) Q: At university she had done an essay drily titled ‘The Principles of Hobbesian Memory and Imagination’. Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories. (c) Q: She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’. And here she was, in the privileged position of being able to sample these many alternatives. It was a shortcut to wisdom and maybe a shortcut to happiness too. She saw it now not as a burden but a gift to be cherished. (c) Q: ‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’ (c)
She's also a Q: Swimmer. Musician. Philosopher. Spouse. Traveller. Glaciologist. Happy. Loved. (c) All failed. She's also Q: a rock star, an Olympian, a music teacher, a primary school teacher, a professor, a CEO, a PA, a chef, a glaciologist, a climatologist, an acrobat, a tree-planter, an audit manager, a hair-dresser, a professional dog walker, an office clerk, a software developer, a receptionist, a hotel cleaner, a politician, a lawyer, a shoplifter, the head of an ocean protection charity, a shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line supervisor, a glass-blower and a thousand other things… (c)
So, she gets to the Midnight Library which is an infinitely large library of all books of all possible lives of Nora. Her old librarian, Mrs Elm, is charoning her around. (I do think that Mrs Elm is just a figment of Nora's imagination, a brain trying to explain things in user-friendly terms and to introduce something known into the vastness of unknown between lives or even worlds. Hugo insisted that Mrs Elm and Philippe are interpretations.). Q: I see a simplified version of the truth. The librarian is just a kind of mental metaphor. The whole thing is. (c)
The Midnight Library: Q: Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’ (c) Q: ‘Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.’ (c) Q: ‘Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.’ (c)
The quantum discussion (where would we be without it?): Q: ‘Erwin Schrödinger . . .’ ‘He of the cat.’ ‘Yes. The cat guy. He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that’s how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us.’ (c) Q: ‘What if there are more than two roads diverging in the wood? What if there are more roads than trees? What if there is no end to the choices you could make? What would Robert Frost do then?’ (c) Q: She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true. There was almost any life she was living in one universe, after all. (c) Q: Going for a coffee with Ash might have led, for instance, to Nora falling in love with the person serving the coffee. That was simply the unpredictable nature of quantum physics. (c)
The empowering things: Q: Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad. … it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. … But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in. (c) Q: ‘You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess,’ she said, as if Nora had nothing bigger to think about. ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.’ (c) Q: Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you. But with every life she saw that metaphorical door widen a little further as she grew better at using her imagination. (c) Q: She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn’t depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. … What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. … She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. (c) Q: We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. (c) Q: … life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it. (c)
Sliders are a hoot, aren't they? Q: ‘I’m sorry,’ his other self said, as he sipped his wine and the sun set behind him, ‘I’ve forgotten who you are.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘So have I.’ (c)
Other fun stuff: Q: Ever cleaned pub toilets, Nora?’ ‘I’m having a pretty shit time too, if we’re doing the Misery Olympics.’ (c) Q: ‘It was a lot of pressure.’ ‘Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.’ (c) Q: Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be. … She knew only one thing with absolute certainty: she didn’t want to reach tomorrow. (c) Q: ‘You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.’ Even death was something Nora couldn’t do properly, it seemed. (c) Q: Did you do anything wrong?’ That was an easy one. ‘Yes. Absolutely everything.’ (c) Q: … while most people were into rock music you were into actual rocks and stuff.’ (c) Q: You have yourself in quite high esteem there, Nora.’ ‘Shouldn’t I? I mean, shouldn’t everyone? What’s wrong with self-esteem? (c) Q: I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die. In fact, I’m sure it would be a relief. (c) Q: She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them. And how many were pushing other people into their delusional idea of happiness? (c) Q: ‘Interesting. I had no idea there was such a thing as between-life snobbery. You are an education.’ (c) Q: To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple. (c) Q: ‘I have been so many things. On every continent on Earth. And yet I have never found the life for me. I am resigned to being this way for ever. There will never be a life that I truly want to live for ever. I get too curious. I get too much of a yearning to live another way. And you don’t need to make that face. It’s not sad. I am happily in limbo.’… I kind of like being a slider. I like imperfection. I like keeping death as an option. I like never having to settle.’ … You do realise there are infinite possibilities here? I mean, the multiverse isn’t about just some universes. It’s not about a handful of universes. It’s not even about a lot of universes. It’s not about a million or a billion or a trillion universes. It’s about an infinite number of universes. Even with you in them. You could be you in any version of the world, however unlikely that world would be. You are only limited by your imagination. You can be very creative with the regrets you want to undo. I once undid a regret about not doing something I’d contemplated as a teenager – doing aerospace engineering and becoming an astronaut – and so in one life I became an astronaut. I haven’t been to space. But I became someone who had been there, for a little while. The thing you have to remember is that this is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. Dream big . . . You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.’ (c) Q: It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren’t really thinking. … The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones. (c) Q: You coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river, against incredible odds. You found something inside you.’ ‘Yes. Bacteria. I was ill for weeks. I swallowed so much of that shitty water.’ (c) Q: ‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibility.’ … In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’ (c) Q: He seemed like he would be able to sit in a field near Chernobyl and marvel at the beautiful scenery. (c) Q: She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. (c) Q: There was a net of love to break her fall. (c)...more
Q: This book will touch upon many things: creativity, symmetry, education, architecture, questions, playfulness, contradictions, beauty. But at its corQ: This book will touch upon many things: creativity, symmetry, education, architecture, questions, playfulness, contradictions, beauty. But at its core, this book is about puzzles. It is about the puzzle of myself. It is about the puzzle of this strange object I discovered almost fifty years ago. And it is about the puzzle of us all. (c)
A panoramic exploration of a plethora of concepts: mind, intuition, entertainment, curiosity, writing, learning, curiousity, growth, color, design and life itself with bits of anthropological and psychological insights. An unexpectedly multifaceted read!
So, the guy who invented one of the most popular toys around, Rubik's Cube, is out with his impressions about his craze-generating prodigy kiddo invention. BTW, the RC's the inventor's techy son. Q: The Cube has been a toy for children, an intensely competitive sport, and a vehicle for high-tech explorations and discoveries in artificial intelligence and bewildering mathematics. (c) And a lot of fun! Even before speedcubing was a thing.
Add in a mediative state of sorts while we are at it: Q: They are suspended within a rare moment of peaceful coexistence between order and chaos. (c) Q: Intuition is a force that doesn’t push you but instead pulls you, draws you toward something singularly important. You can call it inspiration, you can call it anticipation, you can call it a kind of epiphany. An almost mystical state of mind. ... For me, intuition is the process of noticing something and seeing its significance beyond the phenomenon. The experience is one of not knowing but feeling some power that pulls you. (c)
A great intro to how visual effects, simplicity, heuristics and inner beauty are the imprtant component of the best puzzles.
Some very novel ideas on writing (only an architect would put them like that!): Q: My more pressing question with writing is abstract: How can we possibly capture in words all the dimensions of our lives? (c) Q: Simple and complex. Moving and stable. Hidden and exposed. I believe contradictions are not opposites to be resolved, but counterpoints to be embraced. Rather than becoming frustrated by what seems irreconcilable in a contradiction, the better option is to appreciate that a contradiction helps us make connections we may never have considered. One can never fully capture three dimensions on a page. And yet, framing the many themes in my work and in my life in terms of contradictions could add dimensions that may make it easier for me to write. (c)
A great take on how puzzles can be educative. If one goes deeper, this topic borders on how education gets most educative: no supervision, no grading, no possibility to fail and no external assignment are the best environment under which one learns. Q: I liked different puzzles for different reasons and their different capacities. I liked some because of their flexibility and capacity for change. I liked others because their ideas were expressed with such simplicity. I liked still others because they provided the framework for improvisation. I liked difficult puzzles more than easy ones. I remember the curiosity, focus, periods of disorientation and frustration, some excitement when crucial connections were made, and then the sense of accomplishment when arriving at the solution. (c) Q: PLAYING WITH PUZZLES when I was a child trained my mind. I became familiar with the nature of their questions and answering them. I was not assigned these puzzles, was not graded on my performance, nor was anyone observing whether I solved them or not. If I failed or had trouble with one, I could start again on it the next day. This entertainment was solitary. Without an opponent, I was always the winner—not that I really thought that way. What most captured me was that I could use these puzzles as a starting point to discover something else. Puzzles bring out important qualities in each of us: concentration, curiosity, a sense of play, the eagerness to discover a solution. These are the very same qualities that form the bedrock for all human creativity. Puzzles are not just entertainment or devices for killing time. For us, as for our ancestors, they help point the way to our creative potential. If you are curious, you will find the puzzles around you. If you are determined, you will solve them. (c)
Love the free-defining thing: Q: I am an amateur at everything, including being an inventor. No one taught me how to learn, especially not my teachers. (c) So, restricting oneself to just one professional role is not Erno's thing! Good for us. Q: If one has the ability to connect the distant points, chaos is the most inspiring challenge in the world. (c)
Translational uses of puzzle-loving: Q: There is a huge difference between defining the problem and solving it. Most of the time, situations emerge from a kind of chaotic state, and most of the time it is counterproductive to be systematic about even beginning to solve these strong dilemmas. But our whole life is about problem-solving: One problem solved, and another pops up. No matter how disorganized they may appear to be, the first step is to find some small fixed point in the chaos, to get a foothold and create some almost imperceptibly small foundation of an order where we can begin to address the whole. (c) Q: In Hungarian, we have a term to describe someone who has a very unconventional way of thinking: a “Csavaroseszű,” which literally translates into “screwminded.” But in fact, it has a positive connotation, suggesting someone who is not just clever, but whose thinking is very original, departing from the predictable to come up with surprising connections. (c)
Design & marketing. Motion & antropomorphising & naming as drivers for emotions & attachments: Q: Weight is another factor that affects the impression of solidity. Things that are as light as breeze do not evoke a feeling of solidity or stability in us. That is how the human psyche and perception work. But clearly it needed to be light enough so that it was easy to play with no matter how young or old the cuber might be. (c) Q: We have all sorts of expectations of what something will feel like when we look at it—its appearance and our experience of objects made of similar material will make us believe that we have a good sense of what it will be like when we pick it up. (c) Q: The small flaws may be hidden, but if the object is not perfect, it cries out, and sooner or later external flaws can modify the inner image of the thing. The inside must be handled with the same scrupulous aesthetic care as the outside. (c) Q: It turns out they underestimated the desire for both children and their parents to be challenged. And they didn’t realize how addictive it was. (c) Q: The singularity, the ability to appeal to people across generations and cultures, was certainly important. (c) Q: I remember reading once about motivation and a concept called intrinsic motivation. Some psychologists divided this kind of motivation into three aspects: motivation toward knowledge, toward accomplishment, and toward stimulation. It seems that when faced with a Cube, all three of these traits are present. (c) Q: ... it is important that the product has some durability and stays with the consumer for a reasonable time—although single-use products sometimes do change the course of history with some eminently essential functionality, such as certain medicines or contraceptives. Most prominently, however, consumer products of cultural value must capture and express some rather specific meaning, unique to them that anyone can appreciate pretty much immediately. (c)
Media communications strategy (quite a popular one!: Q: My English was not very good at the time—I still wish it was better—so being surrounded by that language and doing interviews both with the media and with the businesspeople attending the fair was not at all simple. I solved the problem by answering questions I thought they should have asked, instead of the ones that they actually did, or I spoke freely about what I thought was important no matter the subject they might have raised. Even after my English improved a little, this remained a winning strategy. (c)
Other nifty tidbits: Q: There are some languages that have genders, and in these languages the word “cube” is almost always masculine—le cube in French, or der Würfel in German, for example—so when I refer to the Cube, I will use that distinction. (c) Q: From my perspective, a well-founded system of life encompasses a catalog of things laid out clearly, but still, one that has the capacity to gaze fearlessly into the eyes of chaos and accept the fact that not all things make sense all of the time. (c) Q: I didn’t use purple, because, for me, it did not fit with the Cube’s masculine character. (c) Q: If we refuse to accept the fact that we are lost, we become even more confused as we venture further and further from the point where we began. (c) Q: ... a fundamental experience: Constructing something often starts with destroying something else. (c) Q: The door that seemed open was locked with a rusty key that someone had thrown away a long time ago. Or rather, the key was thrown away into the future. (c) Q: The moment of helplessness is the first moment of creation. (c) Q: This state of being lost usually has one cause: We don’t have a clear view of the whole terrain. In the forest, the trees obstruct our perspective. You don’t see the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes. In a city, some buildings often prevent us from seeing where we need to go. In our personal lives, a painful problem may fill up our entire field of vision, blocking out perspective and broader context. (c) Q: ... there it is, lurking in the distance, like an unseen animal behind the rustling leaves, or is it the wind? Maybe there it is, in the twilight. We are heartened by the certainty that there is a way to crack this riddle. (c) Q: To contrive your personal approach to things, a measure of patience, perseverance, and curiosity is essential. (c) Q: As lost as I was in figuring out how to bring order into the chaos I had created, I also experience great joy, almost a kind of trance while working with my hands, actually shaping things, handling materials, creating tactile forms, experiencing the process of discerning beauty that is locked in difficulties. (c) Q: What is so beautiful is that there isn’t a single answer—which is true about so many or all things in life—but an inherently rich, cascading series of moves that are interdependent with other moves. (c) Q: We need the patience and persistence to give our creation room to hibernate and revive, for there to be new potential for it to be discovered again, a fresh chance, and for the “zeitgeist” to shift. Time is not something we have to pick a fight with. Time is something we must put to use, the same way as we breathe air. It is part of us, not our enemy. (c) Q: There is nothing more instructive in life than failure, and in many ways even more so than success. One must be brave enough to make mistakes, because without making mistakes, it is impossible to do everything really well. You can’t do anything perfectly the first time. In my view, the key is to view failure as part of the creative adventure and to seek to understand its components. This becomes much simpler if the process is viewed incrementally, which means not setting our sights in a single-minded way on some specific goal, but shifting our focus and curiosity on each step of the way, each element of our progress. (c) Q: ...in that moment when all the pieces locked into place, when I’d restored order to this scrambled shape, my mind was clear for a moment. Instead of the regular worries of the day, I was filled with a sense of endless potential.” (c) Q: All children are wonderfully motivated, and there’s really nothing like playful curiosity for learning. In their natural habitat, lions have little to fear. Sure enough, adult males typically spend their days dozing in the shade, using precious energy only if there’s some food available (brought home by the female hunter) or they are driven to mate or fight for status with competing males. But just look at the lion cub that still has to learn everything in order to rule his animal kingdom when he is grown! The cubs play tirelessly with no regard to heat or hunger. This is how they acquire both the knowledge and the skills that will ensure their survival when they grow up. Humans, fortunately, do not have to save all their energy for later. They can afford the luxury of remaining playful and curious all their lives. (c) Q: I NEVER WANTED TO become an inventor. I never “wanted” to become anything, really. I had no vision about my personal future; my present occupied me. It never even occurred to me that being an inventor actually was a profession. I was interested in math but knew I would never become a mathematician. I liked mechanics, creating instruments, taking apart and putting things together. But I knew that I didn’t want to become a mechanical engineer. I didn’t want to have any single profession; I wanted to have all of them. And probably that desire is what led me to architecture. (c) Q: AI is interesting and important and dangerous. The danger is not in the technology, but inside us. We should first look in the mirror. (c)...more
Q: Nora had no idea what success was. She had felt like a failure for so long. (c) Q: ‘I don’t like this. I want it to stop. I want to cancel my membeQ: Nora had no idea what success was. She had felt like a failure for so long. (c) Q: ‘I don’t like this. I want it to stop. I want to cancel my membership of the library. I would like to hand in my library card.’ ‘You are the library card.’ (c) Q: You don’t exist because of the library; this library exists because of you. (c)
Oh, my God! This is rocking incredible! Another undisputable FAV for all eternity! This book needs to be pill-packaged and sold to depressed people worldwide!
Herewith I'm proclaiming my eternal love of all things Matt Haig.
For one thing, it's about a LIBRARY!
For another it's a parallel world library, with books being the portals to parallel worlds! Considering that I've just read another great book with parallel world setting in place (The Space Between Worlds!), I'm loving every second of it.
Yet another thing to love is this: Matt Haig, being Matt Haig, just couldn't write a regular world-jumping book and be done with it. It had to be set in just the way to be conductive to be therapeutic to the readers. Maybe I'll just eat this book to get the most benefits from it :) They need to package it and sell as antidepressant pills!
We start at a library and wind up with Nora Seed working for 12 years at a bookshop, String Theory. At 30 she's still there, with a Degree in Philosophy and a cat that has just died.
Then our Nora goes on a tour-de-force through parallel lives. In most she leaves a mess behind: in Australia, I think, she loses a job, in the Olympic life - she leaves behind a mess of a mangled speech, a row with Dan, a 'disastrous rendition of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki'… And sliding out while having sex?
I've 1 world-building question here: was it midnight in the Library or wasn't it? If it was and the time actually was stopped then why the tremors, in the real life during that minute there should've been no new developments with Nora.
She gets fired in the most ludicrous way I've ever heard of: Q: It’s just that when times are tough I can’t pay you to put off customers with your face looking like a wet weekend.’ ‘What?' (c) Right, WHAT the hell?
And she has the most ridiculous talks with people around: Q: ‘Nora Seed?’... ‘Yep.’ ‘I’m Kerry-Anne. Remember you from school. The swimmer. Super-brain. Didn’t whatshisface, Mr Blandford, do an assembly on you once? Said you were going to end up at the Olympics?’... ‘So, did you?’ ‘I, um, gave it up. Was more into music . . . at the time. Then life happened.’ ‘So what do you do now?’ ‘I’m . . . between things.’ ‘Got anyone, then? Bloke? Kids?’ Nora shook her head. ... ‘Well, don’t hang about. Tick-tock tick-tock.’ (c) Drat. What an enlightening discussion.
She's a philosopher to the boot: Q: ‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.’ Thoreau had been her favourite philosopher to study. But who seriously goes confidently in the direction of their dreams? Well, apart from Thoreau. He’d gone and lived in the woods, with no contact from the outside world, to just sit there and write and chop wood and fish. (c) Q: At university she had done an essay drily titled ‘The Principles of Hobbesian Memory and Imagination’. Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories. (c) Q: She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’. And here she was, in the privileged position of being able to sample these many alternatives. It was a shortcut to wisdom and maybe a shortcut to happiness too. She saw it now not as a burden but a gift to be cherished. (c) Q: ‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’ (c)
She's also a Q: Swimmer. Musician. Philosopher. Spouse. Traveller. Glaciologist. Happy. Loved. (c) All failed. She's also Q: a rock star, an Olympian, a music teacher, a primary school teacher, a professor, a CEO, a PA, a chef, a glaciologist, a climatologist, an acrobat, a tree-planter, an audit manager, a hair-dresser, a professional dog walker, an office clerk, a software developer, a receptionist, a hotel cleaner, a politician, a lawyer, a shoplifter, the head of an ocean protection charity, a shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line supervisor, a glass-blower and a thousand other things… (c)
So, she gets to the Midnight Library which is an infinitely large library of all books of all possible lives of Nora. Her old librarian, Mrs Elm, is charoning her around. (I do think that Mrs Elm is just a figment of Nora's imagination, a brain trying to explain things in user-friendly terms and to introduce something known into the vastness of unknown between lives or even worlds. Hugo insisted that Mrs Elm and Philippe are interpretations.). Q: I see a simplified version of the truth. The librarian is just a kind of mental metaphor. The whole thing is. (c)
The Midnight Library: Q: Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’ (c) Q: ‘Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.’ (c) Q: ‘Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.’ (c)
The quantum discussion (where would we be without it?): Q: ‘Erwin Schrödinger . . .’ ‘He of the cat.’ ‘Yes. The cat guy. He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that’s how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us.’ (c) Q: ‘What if there are more than two roads diverging in the wood? What if there are more roads than trees? What if there is no end to the choices you could make? What would Robert Frost do then?’ (c) Q: She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true. There was almost any life she was living in one universe, after all. (c) Q: Going for a coffee with Ash might have led, for instance, to Nora falling in love with the person serving the coffee. That was simply the unpredictable nature of quantum physics. (c)
The empowering things: Q: Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad. … it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. … But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in. (c) Q: ‘You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess,’ she said, as if Nora had nothing bigger to think about. ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.’ (c) Q: Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you. But with every life she saw that metaphorical door widen a little further as she grew better at using her imagination. (c) Q: She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn’t depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. … What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. … She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. (c) Q: We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. (c) Q: … life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it. (c)
Sliders are a hoot, aren't they? Q: ‘I’m sorry,’ his other self said, as he sipped his wine and the sun set behind him, ‘I’ve forgotten who you are.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘So have I.’ (c)
Other fun stuff: Q: Ever cleaned pub toilets, Nora?’ ‘I’m having a pretty shit time too, if we’re doing the Misery Olympics.’ (c) Q: ‘It was a lot of pressure.’ ‘Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.’ (c) Q: Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be. … She knew only one thing with absolute certainty: she didn’t want to reach tomorrow. (c) Q: ‘You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.’ Even death was something Nora couldn’t do properly, it seemed. (c) Q: Did you do anything wrong?’ That was an easy one. ‘Yes. Absolutely everything.’ (c) Q: … while most people were into rock music you were into actual rocks and stuff.’ (c) Q: You have yourself in quite high esteem there, Nora.’ ‘Shouldn’t I? I mean, shouldn’t everyone? What’s wrong with self-esteem? (c) Q: I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die. In fact, I’m sure it would be a relief. (c) Q: She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them. And how many were pushing other people into their delusional idea of happiness? (c) Q: ‘Interesting. I had no idea there was such a thing as between-life snobbery. You are an education.’ (c) Q: To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple. (c) Q: ‘I have been so many things. On every continent on Earth. And yet I have never found the life for me. I am resigned to being this way for ever. There will never be a life that I truly want to live for ever. I get too curious. I get too much of a yearning to live another way. And you don’t need to make that face. It’s not sad. I am happily in limbo.’… I kind of like being a slider. I like imperfection. I like keeping death as an option. I like never having to settle.’ … You do realise there are infinite possibilities here? I mean, the multiverse isn’t about just some universes. It’s not about a handful of universes. It’s not even about a lot of universes. It’s not about a million or a billion or a trillion universes. It’s about an infinite number of universes. Even with you in them. You could be you in any version of the world, however unlikely that world would be. You are only limited by your imagination. You can be very creative with the regrets you want to undo. I once undid a regret about not doing something I’d contemplated as a teenager – doing aerospace engineering and becoming an astronaut – and so in one life I became an astronaut. I haven’t been to space. But I became someone who had been there, for a little while. The thing you have to remember is that this is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. Dream big . . . You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.’ (c) Q: It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren’t really thinking. … The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones. (c) Q: You coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river, against incredible odds. You found something inside you.’ ‘Yes. Bacteria. I was ill for weeks. I swallowed so much of that shitty water.’ (c) Q: ‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibility.’ … In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’ (c) Q: He seemed like he would be able to sit in a field near Chernobyl and marvel at the beautiful scenery. (c) Q: She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. (c) Q: There was a net of love to break her fall. (c)...more
Q: The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. (c) Q: ‘Do the Statues exist because they embody the IdThe Paradox Book of Paradoxes.
Q: The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. (c) Q: ‘Do the Statues exist because they embody the Ideas and Knowledge that flowed out of the other World into this one?’ (c) Q: … may your Paths be safe … your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty.’ (c)
The opening is the weakest I've ever seen anywhere. At the beginning I was flabbergasted at how bad the setting is. Just imagine: in the middle of nowhere sits an endless hotel house. Since it's so very endless, it has windows and is partially flooded and partially cloudy. And, yes, there are windows, so, it's no endless in all directions, just in some of them. Maybe.
Then there is a lot of fun gibberish about Statues and places (no, Places) where they are located: Halls, Houses, Vestibules, Doorways, Staircases, Passageways, Plinths, Niches, Apses and all kinds of other Buildings and parts thereof, intact or not. The architectural nightmare where the MCs exist is immense and unending, but, BUT there are Windows and Cortyards and Sky and Clouds which should mean that there must be at least some endings somewhere… Sounds like a nightmare? There's more:
There are rooms in this house. What a shocker! They go prenumbered, like this: Q: … I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Hall to the South. (c)
2 alive guys traipse around this House. A bunch of dead guys (in the form of skeletons) are lying around. The MC is called Piranesi (like this guy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovann...). Was it allusion to his Carceri? It's not his name, obviously, but that's what he's called by 'the Other' (Val Ketterley). The Other is someone Piranesi has weekly meetings with (I'm getting the nice and comfy corporate feeling from this).
Yeah, and all the capitalisation made me feel by this point like it was written in German. I do realise why his had to be done in precisely this way but it's quite irritating.
So, the guy, Piranesi, is stalking the house. He does that for years. Years are distinguished like this: - 'the Year I discovered the Coral Halls', - 'the Year I named the Constellations', - 'the Year I counted and named the Dead', - 'the Year that the Ceilings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First North-Eastern Halls collapsed', - 'the Year I travelled to the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Western Hall', Everything's happening in 'the Year the Albatross came to the South-Western Halls'.
The world setting out is a total mindfuck. Then some magic starts happening: the worlds achieves some weirdo dynamic, reveals start happening.
That's what I thought, preparing at this point for another horrible read.
Deliria diary basically. Yes, it is a bit (lot!) like Borges and a bit like Wilde but it's not anything of theirs since they generally did not prefer to stay away from all meaning for the sake of pretty picture (or text, as is the case with Piranesi). But these pretty pictures after some point started revealing something incredible.
I'm pretty sure that this novel has bright future and will be either popular or widely known. Why? Not because it's good. But because it's quirky and it's very much a standalone, unlike other recently published stuff. And yeah, since people will love to twist it this way and that and try and find some extremely well-hidden meaning in between all the Statues. The Statue of Angel on smth will be interpreted as an allusion to maybe Thomas Aquinas, the Water will be made to sound as maybe Time or Knowledge or Life or Energy or smth equally fitting (a lot of things could be made to fit such blank imagery), the Sky will maybe become some interpretation of Limits in something (Learning, Understanding, Possibilities, Life, etc… ), the House - some crucible of smth equally meaningful… Well, who knows…. A lot of things can be understood in a lot of alternative ways.
Q: I am determined to explore as much of the World as I can in my lifetime. To this end I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Hall to the South. I have climbed up to the Upper Halls where Clouds move in slow procession and Statues appear suddenly out of the Mists. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have seen the Derelict Halls of the East where Ceilings, Floors – sometimes even Walls! – have collapsed and the dimness is split by shafts of grey Light. (c) What an exciting world they have! Q: The Other believes that there is a Great and Secret Knowledge hidden somewhere in the World that will grant us enormous powers once we have discovered it. What this Knowledge consists of he is not entirely sure, but at various times he has suggested that it might include the following: 1. vanquishing Death and becoming immortal 2. learning by a process of telepathy what other people are thinking 3. transforming ourselves into eagles and flying through the Air 4. transforming ourselves into fish and swimming through the Tides 5. moving objects using only our thoughts6. snuffing out and reigniting the Sun and Stars 7. dominating lesser intellects and bending them to our will (c) Q: An angel with a trumpet and a ship. An angel with a trumpet suggests a message. A joyful message? Perhaps. But an angel might also bring a stern or solemn message. Therefore the character of the message, whether good or bad, remains uncertain. The ship suggests travelling long distances. A message coming from afar.A book and clouds. A book contains Writing. Clouds hide what is there. Writing that is somehow obscure.A child and mice. The child represents the quality of Innocence. The mice are devouring the grain. Little by little it is diminished. Innocence that is worn down or eroded. So this, as far as I can tell, is what the birds told me. A message from afar. Obscure Writing. Innocence eroded. Interesting. (c) Q: it occurs to me to wonder why it is that the House gives a greater variety of objects to the Other than to me, providing him with sleeping bags, shoes, plastic bowls, cheese sandwiches, notebooks, slices of Christmas cake etc., etc., whereas me it mostly gives fish. (c) Q: The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end. (c) Q: Well, to begin with there are no lesser minds; there are only him and me and we both have keen and lively intellects. But, supposing for a moment that a lesser mind existed, why would I want to control it? (c) Q: Abandoning the search for the Knowledge would free us to pursue a new sort of science. We could follow any path that the data suggested to us. (c) Q: I mended one of my fishing nets and worked on my Catalogue of Statues. In the early evening I went to the Eighth Vestibule to fish in the Waters of the Lower Staircase. The Beams of the Declining Sun shone through the Windows of the Lower Halls, striking the Surface of the Waves and making ripples of golden Light flow across the Ceiling of the Staircase and over the Faces of the Statues. When night fell, I listened to the Songs that the Moon and Stars were singing and I sang with them. (c) Q: Two memories. Two bright minds which remember past events differently. It is an awkward situation. (c) Q: Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds. (c) Q: When she was a teenager D’Agostino told a friend that she wanted to go to university to study Death, Stars and Mathematics. (с)...more
Wow! I really love his onelliners. Maybe I'll make this one into my bucket cheklist. Of course, I coulr harp about some points being a bit off but theWow! I really love his onelliners. Maybe I'll make this one into my bucket cheklist. Of course, I coulr harp about some points being a bit off but then, I get why they are that way! 1. Get on your deathbed 2. Stay hungry 3. Tell yourself a true lie 4. Keep your eyes on the prize 5. Learn to sweat in peace 6. Simplify your life 7. Look for the lost gold 8. Push all your own buttons 9. Build a track record 10. Welcome the unexpected 11. Find your master key 12. Put your library on wheels 13. Definitely plan your work 14. Bounce your thoughts 15. Light your lazy dynamite 16. Choose the happy few 17. Learn to play a role 18. Don’t just do something...sit there 19. Use your brain chemicals 20. Leave high school forever 21. Learn to lose your cool 22. Kill your television 23. Break out of your soul cage 24. Run your own plays 25. Find your inner Einstein 26. Run toward your fear 27. Create the way you relate 28. Try interactive listening 29. Embrace your willpower 30. Perform your little rituals 31. Find a place to come from 32. Be your own disciple 33. Turn into a word processor 34. Program your biocomputer 35. Open your present 36. Be a good detective 37. Make a relation-shift 38. Learn to come from behind 39. Come to your own rescue 40. Find your soul purpose 41. Get up on the right side 42. Let your whole brain play 43. Get your stars out 44. Just make everything up 45. Put on your game face 46. Discover active relaxation 47. Make today a masterpiece 48. Enjoy all your problems 49. Remind your mind 50. Get down and get small 51. Advertise to yourself 52. Think outside the box 53. Keep thinking, keep thinking 54. Put on a good debate 55. Make trouble work for you 56. Storm your own brain 57. Keep changing your voice 58. Embrace the new frontier 59. Upgrade your old habits 60. Paint your masterpiece today 61. Swim laps underwater 62. Bring on a good coach 63. Try to sell your home 64. Get your soul to talk 65. Promise the moon 66. Make somebody’s day 67. Play the circle game 68. Get up a game 69. Turn your mother down 70. Face the sun 71. Travel deep inside 72. Go to war 73. Use the 5% solution 74. Do something badly 75. Learn visioneering 76. Lighten things up 77. Serve and grow rich 78. Make a list of your life 79. Set a specific power goal 80. Change yourself first 81. Pin your life down 82. Take no for a question 83. Take the road to somewhere 84. Go on a news fast 85. Replace worry with action 86. Run with the thinkers 87. Put more enjoyment in 88. Keep walking 89. Read more mysteries 90. Think your way up 91. Exploit your weakness 92. Try becoming the problem 93. Enlarge your objective 94. Give yourself flying lessons 95. Hold your vision accountable 96. Build your power base 97. Connect truth to beauty 98. Read yourself a story 99. Laugh for no reason 100. Walk with love and death
Q: "Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just: By doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled; and by doing brave acts, we become brave." This book contains 100 moves you can make in the snow. (c) Q: Personality is overrated. Who we are is up to us every moment. (c)...more
A lot more in-depth work on LD than other comparative works. The author goes through a lot of self-examinationIn parts dosconcerting and illuminating.
A lot more in-depth work on LD than other comparative works. The author goes through a lot of self-examination, deep analysis of material from such wildly popular classical psychologists as S.Freud and C.G.Jung and investigates a lot of points that are rarely considered in lit on this topic. I.e.: - the unconscious and its shenanigans and the LD potential as an instrument for introspection, - dream design - nature of reality and its relations with the dreamscape - traditional practices - insights from dreams - clairknowing originating from dreams - the good and the evil and the rest of it - personality investigations - the unknowable within - thoughtforms and symbols - the guardians and guides - fragments of something other than private imagination that could be perceived withing LDs - self-healing - dream telepathy - therapeutic potential of lucid dreams...more
The Fair, the Foul, and the Creepy. Algorythmic secrecy and negligence, collateral consequences.
I'm pretty sure this is one of those books that are tThe Fair, the Foul, and the Creepy. Algorythmic secrecy and negligence, collateral consequences.
I'm pretty sure this is one of those books that are the ones we return again and again and again. This is a very timely wake up call to our robotized, socially inept, befuddled in the social networks draggle world. We are gonna live dystopia soon. Or maybe are already, have been for some time and it just hasn't registered.
Some ideas in here are really naive but even so, it's refreshing to see someone giving a damn about any and all of it and not just basking under the dubious glow of some personalized discount coupons that bomb one's mailbox after they are done surfing some stuff online.
Q: Consider just a few of the issues raised by the new technologies of ranking and evaluation: • Should a credit card company be entitled to raise a couple’s interest rate if they seek marriage counseling? If so, should cardholders know this? • Should Google, Apple, Twitter, or Facebook be able to shut out websites or books entirely, even when their content is completely legal? And if they do, should they tell us? • Should the Federal Reserve be allowed to print unknown sums of money to save banks from their own scandalous behavior? If so, how and when should citizens get to learn what’s going on? • Should the hundreds of thousands of American citizens placed on secret “watch lists” be so informed, and should they be given the chance to clear their names? (c)
... or ... Welcome to the fishbowl and lots of fun living dystopia!
Q: Amateur epistemologists have many names for this problem. “Unknown unknowns,” “black swans,” and “deep secrets” are pop u lar catchphrases for our many areas of social blankness. There is even an emerging fi eld of “agnotology” that studies the “structural production of ignorance, its diverse causes and conformations, whether brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction, secrecy, or suppression.” (c) Q: Alan Greenspan, once the most powerful central banker in the world, claimed that today’s markets are driven by an “unredeemably opaque” version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” and that no one (including regulators) can ever get “more than a glimpse at the internal workings of the simplest of modern fi nancial systems.” (c) Q: But what if the “knowledge problem” is not an intrinsic aspect of the market, but rather is deliberately encouraged by certain businesses? What if financiers keep their doings opaque on purpose, precisely to avoid or to confound regulation? That would imply something very different about the merits of deregulation. (c) Q: What we do and don’t know about the social (as opposed to the natural) world is not inherent in its nature, but is itself a function of social constructs. (c) Q: But while powerful businesses, fi nancial institutions, and government agencies hide their actions behind nondisclosure agreements, “proprietary methods,” and gag rules, our own lives are increasingly open books. (c) Q: Credit raters, search engines, major banks, and the TSA take in data about us and convert it into scores, rankings, risk calculations, and watch lists with vitally important consequences. But the proprietary algorithms by which they do so are immune from scrutiny, except on the rare occasions when a whistleblower litigates or leaks. (c) Q: In his book Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson quipped that “Facebook defines who we are, Amazon defines what we want, and Google defines what we think.” We can extend that epigram to include finance, which defi nes what we have (materially, at least), and reputation, which increasingly defi nes our opportunities. (c) Q: Transactions that are too complex to explain to outsiders may well be too complex to be allowed to exist. (c) Okay, that's much too much. It's people who should be working to better their judgement and understanding of the world, not the world dumbing down to their level. Though, of course, today's transparency isn't precisely transparent. Just look at the mess that is IFRS9. Q: Perched on Teo’s shoulder, as seen through the glasses, was a small dragon. ... It looked as though it couldn’t decide whether to nuzzle Teo or tear out his jugular. I sympathized. (c) Q: “Dr. Davis says BPD has something to do with sensitive people being raised in ‘invalidating environments.’ Whatever that means. So I guess, you know, don’t invalidate me.”(c) Q: A homeowner who followed the instructions on “Where’s the Note” reported that he took a 40- point hit on his credit score after his inquiry. In the Heisenberg- meets- Kafka world of credit scoring, merely trying to fi gure out possible effects on one’s score can reduce it. (c) Q: (One casino tracks how often its card dealers and waitstaff smile.) Analysts mine our e-mails for “insights about our productivity, our treatment of co- workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.” (с) Q: Automated systems claim to rate all individuals the same way, thus averting discrimination. They may ensure some bosses no longer base hiring and firing decisions on hunches, impressions, or prejudices. But software engineers construct the datasets mined by scoring systems; they defi ne the parameters of data-mining analyses; they create the clusters, links, and decision trees applied; they generate the predictive models applied. Human biases and values are embedded into each and every step of development. Computerization may simply drive discrimination upstream. (c) Q: Bewitched by matching and sorting programs, a company may treat ever more hires as “purple squirrels”— an HR term of art denoting the exact perfect fi t for a given position. For example, consider a health lawyer qualifi ed to work on matters involving Zone Program Integrity Contractors, but who does not use the specific acronym “ZPIC” on her resume. If automated software is set to search only for resumes that contain “ZPIC,” she’s probably not going to get an interview. She may never fi nd out that this small omission was the main, or only, reason she never got a callback. (c) Q: Then there’s the growing use of personality tests by retailers... Writer Barbara Ehrenreich encountered one of those tests when she applied for a job at Walmart, and she was penalized for agreeing “strongly” rather than “totally” with this statement: “All rules must be followed to the letter at all times.” (c) Q: For example, a company might find that every applicant who answered “strongly agree” to all the questions above turned out to be a model employee, and those who answered “strongly disagree” ended up quitting or being fired within a month or two. The HR department would be sorely tempted to hire future applicants who “strongly agreed,” even without knowing how such professed attitudes related to the job at hand. (c) Q: In 2012, Latanya Sweeney, former director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard and now a senior technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, suspected that African Americans were being unfairly targeted by an online service. When Sweeney searched her own name on Google, she saw an ad saying, “Latanya Sweeney: Arrested?” In contrast, a search for “Tanya Smith” produced an ad saying, “Located: Tanya Smith.” The discrepancy provoked Sweeney to conduct a study of how names affected the ads served. She suspected that “ads suggesting arrest tend to appear with names associated with blacks, and neutral ads or no [such] ads tend to appear with names associated with whites, regardless of whether the company [purchasing the ad] has an arrest record associated with the name.” She concluded that “Google searches for typically African- American names lead to negative ads posted by [the background check site] InstantCheckmate .com, while typically Caucasian names draw neutral ads.” After Sweeney released her findings, several explanations for her results were proposed. ... let us suppose that (for what ever reasons) web searchers tended to click on Instant Checkmate ads more often when names associated with blacks had “arrest” associations, rather than more neutral ones. In that case, the programmer behind the ad- matching engine could say that all it is doing is optimizing for clicks— it is agnostic about people’s reasons for clicking.114 It presents itself as a cultural voting machine, merely registering, rather than creating, perceptions. (c) Q: Anyone may be labeled in a database as “unreliable,” “high medical cost,” “declining income,” or some other derogatory term. Reputation systems are creating new (and largely invisible) minorities, disfavored due to error or unfairness. Algorithms are not immune from the fundamental problem of discrimination, in which negative and baseless assumptions congeal into prejudice. They are programmed by human beings, whose values are embedded into their software. (c) Q: In Maryland, fifty-three antiwar activists, including two nuns and a Democratic candidate for local office, were placed on terrorist watch lists. (c) Q: An unaccountable surveillance state may pose a greater threat to liberty than any particular terror threat. It is not a spectacular danger, but rather an erosion of a range of freedoms. ... Mass surveillance may be doing less to deter destructive acts than it is slowly narrowing of the range of tolerable thought and behavior.(с) Q: We should not have to worry that the fates of individuals, businesses, and even our financial systems are at the mercy of hidden databases, dubious scores, and shadowy bets. (с) Q:...more
Lllovely. Q: When I was young and walked alone, alone I lost my way. I felt rich when I found company. Man delights in man. (c) Q: The shy stays shallow. (cLllovely. Q: When I was young and walked alone, alone I lost my way. I felt rich when I found company. Man delights in man. (c) Q: The shy stays shallow. (c) Q: Never a friend more faithful, nor greater wealth than wisdom. (c) Q: Listens with ears, learns with eyes. Such is the seeker of knowledge. (c) Q: It is fortunate to be favored with praise and popularity. It is dire luck to be dependent on the feelings of your fellow man. (c) Q: Do not ever mock other men at meeting. They pass for wise who pass unnoticed stay dry in the storm. (c) Q: Go you must. (c) Q: Beware of befriending an enemy's friend. (c) Q: Wake early if you want another man's life or land. No lamb for the lazy wolf. No battle's won in bed. (c) Q: Ask you must and answer well to be called clever. (c) Q: To many a place I made my way late and far too soon to come. (c)...more
ಠ_ಠ An incredible story of how: Q: DynCorp, global leader in the business of military strategy, nation rebuilding, world security, and counterintelligಠ_ಠ An incredible story of how: Q: DynCorp, global leader in the business of military strategy, nation rebuilding, world security, and counterintelligence, had underestimated one thing: a forty-year-old, divorced mom from Lincoln, Nebraska. (c) And underestimate her they did. Thank God she K.B. was as resourceful (and plain lucky!) and clever and determined as she was. This is wow. WOW.
This book is not for the weak of stomach. Neither is this world, the one we inhabit. And anyone says that hell exists? Yeah, it does, right on our planet. I don't think it would be economically efficient to have another one. The one humans unscrupulously maintain, is hellish enough.
'What's wrong with you people?' - the protagonist from the film keeps screaming at a bunch of schmucks... Something's definitely wrong with some people.
The maverick un-freaking-believable case of where the book and the film ('The Whistleblower' (2010)) go hand-in-hand illustrating how immunity and impunity and total lawlessness can walk together, with devastating results for the unfortunate ones.
Q: Original passport confiscated. Reissuance denied. Status: without a country. (c) Wow. This is how a person gets lost and damaged in the quagmire of half-assed laws and loopholes. Q: Paranoia for a cop is like a tremor for a surgeon. (c)...more
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