2011 in books
My 2011 reading list.
- Herman Melville – Moby Dick
- George Orwell – 1984
- Sun Tzu – The Art of War
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil (partially – to be revisited),
- Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita
- Ernest Hemingway – The Great Gatsby
- Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis
- Albert Camus – The Stranger
- Christopher Hitchens – Hitch 22: A Memoir
- Bill Bryson – Short History of Nearly Everything
- Timothy Ferris – The 4-Hour Body
- William Faulkner – Collected Stories (partially – to be revisited)
- Stephen Hawking – The Grand Design
- Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities
Abandoned:
- Henry James – Daisy Miller and Other Stories (perhaps try later)
- Michael Crichton – Airframe (never again)
- Stanley Fish – How to Write a Sentence (trivial)
- Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go (trivial, cliché)
- George W. Bush – Decision Points (misguided, fake, trivial)
In 2012, I will stick to the basics and stick to the classics. More Nietzsche, Dickens, Dostoevsky to keep me grounded. Edge questions to keep me up to speed. And develop my French.
More bike commuting thoughts
The least appropriate bike for city road commuting, is, ironically, the road bike. I decided to change it up a bit and take my 80′s Nishiki to work today, and it was overall a bad experience. The posture is too low, the ride too rough without front shocks, the brakes are too far to reach and hard to operate due to the road handlebars. The wheels are too thin – you end up worrying about the smallest of road hazards. My hands were numb by the time I arrived, even thought this is exactly the condition people use the road handlebars to alleviate.
Having commuted by bike for about 6 months, below is my list of bike requirements for short-range (under 10km) all-weather four-season commuting.
- Hybrid or mountain bike with smooth tires. My personal preference is 29er cross-country mountain bike. You want thicker tires to jump the occasional curb and smooth out the bumps in the road.
- Upright handle bars (flat, mustache etc.) Accessible brake levers.
- Disk brakes (especially in the winter)
- Large pedals with a good grip (clips optional)
- Front suspension (save your elbows and wrists)
- Fenders.
- USB-rechargeable lights.
- Rear or front basket in order to use a normal bag. I am not a huge fan of panniers for commuting.
I will write up my list of cycling clothing at a later time.
Field Note 12/08/2011
Inspired by s hawkng’s grand design and John Conely’s ‘game of life’…
If god exists, his manifestation will be in the free will mechanism. A sufficiently complex alien robot would effectively be considered ‘alive’, because we could not calculate his actions deterministically. Free Will is likely an irrelevant concept. And so is god.
December night
Decompressing at the office after a full day before heading out. Changing into the riding clothes. Winter bike commuting is far easier than I anticipated. It’s borderline more pleasant than summer riding. Streets are cool, bike lanes deserted. No sweat, no worries, only freedom to roam.
Checking out some ride porn before climbing my own bike and heading out into the darkness. I am in a good place.
c sharp major
completely rested and perfectly still
November sunshine filling the room
happiness neurons ablaze
Field notes 10.29.2011
10.29.2011
One of the fundamental difficulties that lie in the way of our understanding of the universe is that we humans must have a name for everything. Every object, concept or even a simple fragment of knowlege must be named. Humans have historically operated in a world of discreet macro-physical objects, and we instinctively project this same system onto the world that is inaccessible to our perception. Must the electron be named and pointed out? Even if we force ourselves to accept the uncertainty, we must still revert to the things we have seen in our macro life and imagine the concept of a “cloud”, which is still wrong.
To attain a true “understanding” or “awareness” as it were, we must stop discretizing our experiences into previously defined “buckets”. We need to get used to gray areas. Living with uncertainty and accepting seemingly irreconcilable concepts is our edge over “the machine”. It is our only hope against bigotry, morality, anxiety, fear, tribalism.
Field note: collective experience as purifying agent
Risk aversion and negative bias help filter out bad and mediocre things. The past as history retains it is a reduced gravy that consists of what is deemed preferable and of higher quality.
Being “modern”, living a modern life means dealing with a lot of noise, bad quality to noise ratios.
Must stop being bogged down in unimportant minutiae, things that are supposed to facilitate life but carry no intrinsic value. I. E. It’s ok to be behind the latest tends and gadgets.
Furthermore, training oneself to have a statistical outlook on life is hard, but it is the first step to taming the instinctive chaos. It is hard not to mistake special cases for general rules, especially negative events.
Another approach is thinking in terms of opportunity costs. What is an hour of free time worth? What does $1000 of disposable income represent? Should we spend Saturday mornings cleaning and doing laundy? Or should we hire help and pursue part-time graduate degrees? Perhaps go skiing instead?
Field note – October 12th 2011
Hapiness Hypothesis.
I took away three main powerful concepts: the rider and the elephant; the dimmension of ‘divinity’; and the importance of group and individual selection in human evolution. The divinity dimmension may just touch on something I have been struggling with for a long time. I do feel that a dimmension had been missing from my attempts to understand people. Most of us simply let their inner elephants stampede most of the time. On rare occasions that elephant is a beautiful, inspiring beast. But the rarest case of all is someone with a level of self-awareness and vision. Someone with an additional axis and an ability to percieve the shades of gray — a recognition of the fact that there is very little in this world that is certain or pure.
Field Notes
I have been using my iPod Touch to jot down some thoughts that pop in my head every now and then. Most of the time these notes are disjointed phrases that cannot be understood without the context of a particular situation I am in or a book I am reading at the time. Come to think of it, this entire blog is not very coherent either… But I digress. I decided to use the email-to-wordpress function and start posting these notes here.
When things go up, and up, and up for any stretch of time, even a temporary slowdown feels like a complete collapse, and crushes one under the weight of intense introspection. The objective reality is such that I do not have the right to complain about anything and should stop over-analyzing stupid office games that people take so damn seriously.
But there is a catch. Call it a rat race all you want, but if one stops participating, one is eventually relegated to the outskirts of relevancy and finds oneself being fifty years old with a ridiculous haircut and too many dog pictures on the desk, while being “coached” on “attitude” by a twenty-something middle-management up-start.
