Category — books

(he de contaros que las hadas son gorditas, peludas y morenas, que están dentro de nosotras y que salen cuando dices “basta”)

She had lost something dark and complicated deep within herself. She was a different person now. Freer, much easier at heart. She felt footloose. Mellowed. Agile and even giggly. Full of honest joy.

She stared at a fluffy morning cloud through the tinted panels of the roof. “Oh my God,” she told the cloud, “I’ve finally become a Californian.”

Vera stared through the camp’s apparent confusion, out to sea. Morning on the Adriatic. How pure and simple that sea looked… Although, when Vera had learned analysis, she had come to see that the famous “Adriatic blue” was spectrally nuanced with cloudy gray, plankton green, mud brown, and reflective tints of sky; that apparently “simple and natural” blue emerged from a wild mélange of changing cloud cover, solar angles, seasonal changes in salinity, floods, droughts, currents, storms, even the movements of the viewer…

The sea had no “real” blue. And the camp was no “real” camp. There was a mélange of potent forces best described as “futurity”. They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.

It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

This post from Penelope Trunk is so awesome you all should go and read it. Penelope deconstructs Tim Ferris‘ “i am so cool, i work only 4 hours and am famous and rich and fit” image, plus gives some good time-management tips.

It's childish. It's a childish, semantic game. And it reminds me of him winning the Chinese National Kickboxing Championships by leveraging a little-known rule that people are disqualified if they stop outside the box. So he pushed each of his opponents outside the box to win.

He is winning the I-work-less-than-you game with a similarly questionable method: semantics.

5 Time management tricks I learned from years of hating Tim Ferriss (found via Ade’s friendfeed)

Fiction – including poetry – should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE).

Novels should be required reading because fiction "does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does," said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University's Brooks World Poverty Institute.

[...]

Tom Clougherty, policy director of the Adam Smith Institute, said fiction was "a useful tool in aiding people's understanding, sparking their interest, and humanising issues".

But he warned: "There's a problem. Fiction works by appealing to people's emotions, not their intellect or rationality."

He said issues like poverty and international development were "emotionally charged" and consequently solutions often failed to take into account hard, unpalatable facts.

"Years of aid won't sort out fundamental problems," he said, concluding: "Fiction absolutely can't replace factual, evidence-based analysis."

Novels ‘better at explaining world’s problems than reports’ – Telegraph.

People rarely wanted details. They wanted hocus-pocus and John gave it to them. John had good hunches and he acted on them quickly, with almost alien accuracy. He believed that most people had at least a few good ideas each day, but that they rarely used them. John had no brakes. There was no lag time between his idea and its implementation. He was a film commando. Sometimes it frightened him how easily people would follow somebody who conveyed the appearance of direction or will.

Taking in new things and using them to evolve is the very meaning of existence.

‘You know what your trouble is?’ he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. ‘You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise.’

I couldn’t resist trying Douwe’s rewritten version of Google Share for looking at the mindshare at some of my favorite sci-fi authors. Here is the result:

Interesting that Cory Doctorow seems to have a larger part of the web’s sci-fi-related mindshare than Charles Stross.

Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant life form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.

The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.

I’ve written in the past about sci-fi tackling interesting philosophical ideas. Bruce Sterling says it better:

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless.

And SF writers have every opportunity to kick up our heels — we have influence without responsibility. Very few feel obliged to take us seriously, yet our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation.

In a letter Rant wrote to me, he said, everybody being inside cars, you couldn’t tell women from men. Black from white. If you asked him, the tough teams to beat were always the gimps. Gimps or queers. You put hem in a car on a level playing field and you’d see some pent-up frustration. Nobody drove as hard as paraplegics with hand controls. Or skinny, hundred-pound girls.

You are your own favorite hobby. You’re an expert on you.

All a good salesman does is make eye contact, mimic your body language, nod or laugh or grunt to prove he’s spellbound — those noises or gestures, they’re called “verbal attends.” A salesman only has to prove that he’s just as obsessed with you as you are with yourself. After that, the two of you share a common passion: you.

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser’s own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: ‘Learn, guys.’

She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife that she kept in her belt.

Management-speak deciphering tip #1457: when somebody at work says ‘unprofessional,’ substitute ‘unusual’ or ‘threatening’. See if that helps you understand better what they really mean.

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional. Long hair is unprofessional if it grows out of a male head, but perfectly okay if it grows out of a female head. Posters of any kind are unprofessional. Comfortable shoes are unprofessional. Dancing around your desk when something good happens is unprofessional. Giggling and laughing is unprofessional. (It’s all right to smile, but not too often.)

Conversely, professional means unsurprising. You will be considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like everyone else, a perfect drone.

Of course, this perverted sense of professionalism is pathological. In a healthier organizational culture, people are thought professional to the extent they are knowledgeable and competent.

Ah, the contempt of it. The glut of contempt we seem to have achieved. Our own disguised contempt for ‘primitives’, the contempt of those who left the Culture when the war was declared for those who chose to fight the Idirans; the contempt so many of our own people feel for Special Circumstances… the contempt we all guess the Minds must feel for us… and elsewhere; the Idirans’ contempt for us, all of us humans; and human contempt for Changers. A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a little post about Seth Godin’s book The Dip, but procrastination had gotten the best of me. Now that Seth is asking in his blog for owners of a copy of the book to lend it to someone, I feel I have no excuse to put it off longer.

The Dip is, like most Godin’s posts, insightful, inspirational and brief (you could read the book in less than an hour). It also contains some great illustrations by Hugh McLeod.

The message of the book is deceptively simple: The Dip is the slog between starting and mastery. The Dip is the reason we are here.

Some quotes:

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff a the right time.

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition.

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess.

It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality.

The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.

If you are in Zurich, you can borrow my copy. Just ask.

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.

“All ready.” She grinned. “You got the tickets?”

I waved them. She turned to the nearest ninja, dipped her chin a bit, and turned big green eyes up at him. “Could we get a cab?”

Four ninjas howled and leapt into Lexington Avenue, waving their swords about. A yellow cab swerved left and clipped one ninja, sending him flying ten feet back to splatter on the rear of a limo. Another ninja stood and watched in shock, which meant he wasn’t going to ninja his way away from the cab, which took him like a mad bull’s horns and flipped him over the roof. The cab mounted sidewalk and jammed on the brakes just as the fender bodyslammed ninja three. The cabbie leaned over and flung open the door, which opened hard on ninja four, batting him down. Scrawled in the dirt on the door were the letters WMD. Inside was an immense black man with an X carved into his forehead. Trix and I were the last ones standing. He grinned like a kid at Christmas and yelled, “Where we going, tiny white people?”

What? The person behind all this might be a copy of me? So she was just put to sleep, that’s all… Gosh, this is just like something the Puppeteer‘d do…Wha? No brain damage? She even has frontal lobes? Wow, am I ever lucky!

Knowledge was power. And in seizing knowledge, humanity had gripped a power as bright and angry as a live wire. At stake were issues vaster than any before: the prospects were more dazzling, the potentials sharper, and the implications more staggering than anything ever faced by humanity or its successors.
Yet the human mind still had its own resources. The gifts for survival were not found only in the sharp perceptions of the Shapers, with their arsenals of brain-stretching biochemicals, or the cybernetic advances of the Mechanists and the relentless logic of their artificial intelligences. The world was kept intact by the fantastic predilection of the human mind for boredom.
Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous. Nothing much had ever come of it. Under the shadow of cosmic revelations, life still swathed itself in comforting routine.

Catching up with long-overdue feed items I come across a reference to Clive Thompson’s musings on sci-fi as the last last bastion of philosophical writing. Thompson writes:

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

[...]

Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Serendipitously, a later post on the same blog points to an amusing visualization of books preferred at certain US colleges, correlated with the average SAT scores from those universities. Booksthatmakeyoudumb offers a conveniently genre-sorted chart which shows Philosophy as the genre correlated with the highest SATs; following as a close second is, yes, you guessed right, science fiction.

Ender’s game beats Anna Karenina. Tolstoy is surely the better writer, but Scott Card gave us the most food for thought.

The TV console in the living room of Chateau Cthulhu — the geek house I share with Pinky and Brains, both of whom work for the Laundry — is basically brain candy, installed by Pinky in a desperate attempt to reduce the incidence of creative psychosis in the household. I think this was during on of his rare fits of sanity. The stack contains a cable decoder, satellite dish, Sony Playstation, and a homemade webTV receiver that Brains threw together during a bored half hour. It hulks in the corner opposite the beige corduroy sofa like a black-brushed postmodern sculpture held together with wiring spaghetti; its purpose is to provide a chillout zone where we can collapse after a hard day’s work auditing new age websites in case they’ve accidentally invented something dangerous. Cogitating for a living can result in serious brain-sprain: if you don’t get blitzed on beer and blow or watch trash TV and sing raucously once in a while, you’ll end up thinking you’re Sonic the Hedgehog and that ancient Mrs. Simpson over the road is Two-Tails. Could be messy, especially if Security is positively vetting you at the time.