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diff --git a/reading notes/A Short History of Progress p79.txt b/reading notes/A Short History of Progress p79.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..55a3544 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/A Short History of Progress p79.txt @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +A Short History of Progress p79 + + +The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behavior as we saw on Easter Island, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excess wealth and glory. + +The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behaviour as we saw on Easter Island: sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory. Canals were lengthened, fallow periods reduced, population increased, and the economic surplus concentrated on Ur itself to support grandiose building projects. The result was a few generations of prosperity (for the rulers), followed by a collapse from which southern Mesopotamia has never recovered. + +By 2000 B.C., scribes were reporting that the earth had "turned white." All crops, including barley, were failing. Yields fell to a third of their original levels. The Sumerians' thousand years in the sun of history came to an end. Political power shifted north to Babylon and Assyria, and much later, under Islam, to Baghdad. Northern Mesopotamia is better drained than the south, but even there the same cycle of degradation would be repeated by empire after empire, down to modern times. No one, it seems, was willing to learn from the past. Today, fully half of Iraq's irrigated land is saline — the highest proportion in the world, followed by the other two + +
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/delillo don the names.txt b/reading notes/delillo don the names.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..e978de9 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/delillo don the names.txt @@ -0,0 +1,70 @@ +--- +title: The Names +author: Don Delillo +pubyear: 1982 +edition: Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf +readdate: September 18, 2014 03:47:50 PM +tags: fiction + +--- + +He paused. "I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version." +page: 23 +notes: Said by the character Owen, the archaeologist, talking about going home versus going on to India. + +-- + +"Have you ever written?" she said. +"Never. I used to think it would be grand to be a poet. I was very young, this was long ago, I'm sure I thought a poet was a delicate pale fellow with a low-grade fever." +page:77 +notes: Said by Owen, talking about his childhood. + +-- + +My life was full of routine surprises. One day I was watching runners from Marathon dodge taxis near the Athens Hilton, the next I was turning a corner in Istanbul to see a gypsy leading a bear on a leash. I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event. +page:43-44 +notes: inner monologue by the narrator who is a "risk analyst" + +-- + +People were always giving her shirts. Their own in most cases. She looked good in everything; everything fit. If a shirt was too loose, too big, the context would widen with the material and this became the point, this was the fit. The shirt would sag fetchingly, showing the girl, the sunny tomboy buried in hand-me-down gear. She used to snatch things off hangers in Yonge Street basements, the kind of shapeless stuff men wore north. These were stores with hunting knives in faded scabbards in the window, huge khaki anoraks with fur-lined hoods, and she'd grab a pair of twelve-dollar corduroys that became immediately hers,setting off her litheness, the close-skinned physical sense she ex-pressed even sprawled across an armchair, reading. Her body had efficient lines that took odd clothing best, the weathered, the shrunken, the dull. People were pleased to see her in their work-shirts, old sweaters. She was not a friend who asked many favors or required of others a steadfastly sympathetic nature. They were flattered, really, when she took a shirt. +page:105 +notes: Narrator inner monologue about his ex-wife. + +-- + +"New ways to think about death. All the banking and technology and oil money create an uneasy flow through the region, a complex set of dependencies and fears. Everyone is there, of course. Not just Americans. They're all there. But the others lack a certain mythical quality that terrorists find attractive.""Good, keep going.""America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort them-selves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate.Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.People expect us to absorb the impact of their grievances. Interesting, when I talk to a Mideastern businessman who expresses affection and respect for the U.S., I automatically assume he's either a fool or a liar. The sense of grievance affects all of us, one way or another." +"What percentage of these grievances is justified?" +I pretended to calculate. +page: 114 +notes: the narrator talking at one of the many dinner scenes with all the expat business people in Athens. + +-- + +Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. + +This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.It is not surprising, therefore, to see men with submachineguns, to see vultures squatting on the baggage vehicles set at the end of the tarmac in the airport in Bombay when one arrives after a night flight from Athens. + +All of this we choose to forget. We devise a counter-system of elaborate forgetfulness. We agree on this together. And out in the street we see how easy it is, once we're immersed in the thick crowded paint of things, the bright clothes and massed brown faces. But the experience is no less deep because we've agreed to forget it. +page:254 +notes: inner monologue + +-- + + +The cows had painted horns. Blue horns in one part of the countryside, red or yellow or green in another. People who painted cows horns had something to say to him, Owen felt.There were cows with tricolor horns. There was a woman in a magenta sari who carried a brass water pot on her head, the garment and the container being the precise colors of the mingled bougainvillea that covered the wall behind her, the dark reddish purple, the tainted gold. He would reflect. These moments werea "control"—a design at the edge of the human surge. The white-clad men with black umbrellas, the women at the river beating clothes in accidental rhythms, hillsides of saris drying in the sun.The epic material had to refine itself in these delicate aquarelles. Or he needed to see it as such. The mind's little infinite. India made him feel like a child. He was a child again, maneuvering fora window seat on the crowded bus. A dead camel, stiff legs jutting. Women in a road crew wearing wide cotton skim, nose rings, hair ornaments, heavy jewelry dangling from their ears,repairing broken asphalt by hand, horn ok please. In the upper castes they calculated horoscopes precisely. +page:278 +notes: From Owen's long story about wandering around India. + +-- + +Owen smiled again, thinking how in the midst of this wandering among Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, the Buddhist students in Sarnath, stunned time and again by the fairytale dynamics of Hindu cosmology, he had begun to think of himself once more as a Christian, simply by way of fundamental identification, by way of linking himself to the everyday medley he found around him. When people asked, this is what he said. Christian. How strange it sounded.And how curiously strong a word it seemed, after all these years,to be applied to himself, full of doleful comfort. +page:281 +notes: From Owen's long story about wandering around India. + +-- + +"How big the world is. They keep telling us it's getting smaller all the time, but it's not, is it? Whatever we do to complicate things makes it bigger. It's all a complication. It's one big tangled thing." She began to laugh. "Modern communications don't shrink the world, the make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, the connect us to more things. The world isn't shrinking at all. People who say the world is shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm.: I didn't know what she meant by this but it sounded funny. It sounded funny to her too. She had to talk through her laughter. "No wonder people got to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don't trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books on that tell them how to run, walk and sit. We're trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications. +page: 323 +notes: Friend's wife Lindsay talking to the narrator. + diff --git a/reading notes/geography of time.txt b/reading notes/geography of time.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..c9bf6bd --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/geography of time.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +The work reported in subsequent chapters begins with the assumption that places, like people, have their own personalities. I fully concur with sociologist Anselm Strauss that “the entire complex of urban life can be thought of as a person rather than a distinctive place, and the city can be endowed with a personality of its own.” Places are marked by their own cultures and sub-cultures, each with their unique temporal fingerprints. +-- preface xvii + diff --git a/reading notes/lines from shadow country.txt b/reading notes/lines from shadow country.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..9f1dded --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/lines from shadow country.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Lines from Shadow Country + +"Your Father frightens them not because he is a monster but because he is a man." - Lucius' mother, p283 + +On a pine ridge along this road was Gator Hook, a shack community where the vacated sheds and decrepit dwellings of the road construction crews had been usurped by fugitives and drifters, also gator poachers, moonshiners and retired whores, in a raffish society often drunk on its own moonshine before noon. p288 + +In the rank growth alongside was a rust spotted white refrigerator, some rust-rotted oil drums, a charred stove of that marbled blue so ubiquitous in rubbish heaps throughout backcountry america. p289
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/lx post estuary time.txt b/reading notes/lx post estuary time.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..299d933 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/lx post estuary time.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +In nature, an estuary is the wide mouth of a river into which the tides flow, an area where the fresh water of the river and the salt water of the sea mix together. “In an estuary,” Lopez observes, “nature creates a set of organisms which are not from one side or the other, but completely different. In the same way, people who live on the Tijuana border have this kind of estuarian time. It’s not a Mexican time. It’s not an American time. It’s a different time. + +from geography of time, robert levine p206 note: [[rn The Geography of Time]]
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn a field guide to getting lost.txt b/reading notes/rn a field guide to getting lost.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..93bf4cc --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn a field guide to getting lost.txt @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +--- +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: A Field Guide to Getting Lost +author: Rebecca Solnit +date: August 08, 2013 03:47:50 PM + +--- + +p89 + +Cities are built by men (and to a lesser extent, women), but they decay by nature, from earthquakes and hurricanes to the incremental processes of rot, erosion, rust, the microbial breakdown of concrete, stone, wood, and brick, the return of plants and animals making their own complex order that further dismantles the simple order of men. This nature is allowed to take over when, for economic or political reasons, maintenance is withdrawn. Ruins are also created by the vandalism, arson, and war in which humans run wild. Cities in Europe and the American South have been consciously ruined by war, but this country's North and West have fallen into ruin only for other reasons. Ruins were the symbolic home of much of the art of the time, some photography and painting, much music, the science fiction movies of the time, even the backdrops for rock videos and fashion photographs, for clothes that looked ancient, worn, combat and cobweb stuff. They were landscapes of abandon, the abandon of neglect and violence that came first and the abandon of passion that moved into the ruins. + +A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it + + diff --git a/reading notes/rn a short history of progress p79.txt b/reading notes/rn a short history of progress p79.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..55a3544 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn a short history of progress p79.txt @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +A Short History of Progress p79 + + +The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behavior as we saw on Easter Island, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excess wealth and glory. + +The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behaviour as we saw on Easter Island: sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory. Canals were lengthened, fallow periods reduced, population increased, and the economic surplus concentrated on Ur itself to support grandiose building projects. The result was a few generations of prosperity (for the rulers), followed by a collapse from which southern Mesopotamia has never recovered. + +By 2000 B.C., scribes were reporting that the earth had "turned white." All crops, including barley, were failing. Yields fell to a third of their original levels. The Sumerians' thousand years in the sun of history came to an end. Political power shifted north to Babylon and Assyria, and much later, under Islam, to Baghdad. Northern Mesopotamia is better drained than the south, but even there the same cycle of degradation would be repeated by empire after empire, down to modern times. No one, it seems, was willing to learn from the past. Today, fully half of Iraq's irrigated land is saline — the highest proportion in the world, followed by the other two + +
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn early retirement extreme.txt b/reading notes/rn early retirement extreme.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..2587046 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn early retirement extreme.txt @@ -0,0 +1,125 @@ +rn- Early Retirement Extreme + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence +author: Jacob Lund Fisker;Zev Averbach; Ann Beaver +date: November 30, 2013 7:54:51 PM +--- + +Page 17 | Location 255-258 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 7:06:12 PM
+
+Remember that the shadows on the wall are just a part of life. There's no reason to only follow the rules of the shadows. I have been inspired by many different sources: books on backpacking, observations of animals and ecosystems, boating, cycling, people living in cars--even the homeless. I have read books on systems theory, biology, physics, finance, as well as more practical manuals on plumbing, house wiring, construction, etc., and then I have adapted these ideas to my own life.
+ +--- +
+Page 18 | Location 263-268 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 7:07:46 PM
+
+one's entire philosophy must change. Later on I offer a philosophy modeled on the Renaissance ideal of the 17th century and the craftsmen of the 18th century who wrote the Constitution of the United States at the peak of the Age of Enlightenment. This is a framework of complexity where a person is skilled in more than just one area. It is, in a way, a contrarian approach to the contemporary idea of "one man-one specialization." It's an interlocking way of arranging one's life. In risk management parlance, one wants to transfer from a tightly coupled linear system of financed consumerism to a loosely coupled, complex system of the financially independent Renaissance man.
+ +--- + +Page 27 | Location 406-408 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 8:15:18 PM
+
+Dissatisfaction with the current situation may be high and the vision of an alternative may be high as well, but without a plan, this can only lead to frustration. There must be a strategy or at least a plan, and it must be practical. To get things done, it's much better to have a plan than to have passion, at least insofar as you act on it.
+ +--- + +Page 27 | Location 409-411 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 8:15:54 PM
+
+Changemongers thus have the following four variables to play with: Increase your dissatisfaction with present situation. Strengthen your vision of future situation. Build a plan to get from the present to the future. Lower the perceived cost of the plan.
+ +--- + +Page 41 | Location 622-626 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 8:56:09 PM
+
+The Darwinian "survival of the fittest" often has undertones of "survival of the best," a belief that the "fittest" are happy to reinforce. The distinction should not be forgotten, though. In competitive environments, the selection isn't for the best but for those that best fit the environment. People are not selected for the best attributes, they're selected for the fittest attributes. A world without trees selects the short-necked giraffe, which is better adapted. Similarly, the career track selects people who are willing to give up their lives for the sake of work.
+ +--- + +Page 45 | Location 679-683 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 9:56:59 PM
+
+The means to survival for a specialist is his ability to rapidly learn new subjects, quickly produce saleable works, and then move on. This is called skimming. It's the same strategy pursued by weeds, to use an ecological analogy. At the expert level (see Gauging mastery), a person needs 80-100 hours a week to stay competitive. For masters level, it's 60-80 hours, and to remain competent requires 40-60 hours a week.
+ + +--- + +Page 47 | Location 717-720 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 10:01:54 PM
+
+Our culture was founded on the idea that maximizing production equals maximizing happiness. In the past, pursuing this goal was admirable since any increase in production resulted in an increase in well-being: better food, better medicine, better clothing, better housing, better work, and better living. At some point the focus changed from better to more: more food, more medicine, more clothing, more bedrooms, more bathrooms, and more work. But can we honestly say this still results in better living and greater well-being?
+ +--- + +Page 50 | Location 765-767 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 10:07:24 PM
+
+garage and parking the car on the street. People don't seem to realize that the quest to bring more possessions in through the front door is a chronic disease, and that the shortage of space is a symptom rather than an underlying problem.
+ +--- + +Page 61 | Location 931-933 | Added on Saturday, November 23, 2013 10:27:17 PM
+
+Many more people started prodigally wasting the abundance of resources and goods that were suddenly at their disposal. This has now turned into a collaborative/exploitative arrangement, where a few get wealthy selling waste to the many, while the many are employed in arrangements in which they have little control over what they produce.
+ +--- + +Page 83 | Location 1253-1258 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2013 9:31:36 PM
+
+Anyone who has been out in the world for a while and experienced a lot of different situations has a good idea of what is normal, and thus can describe a bad situation as what it is: simply a bad situation. Conversely, people with less agency and a belief that they are not in control of their destiny are more likely to be stressed and to suffer the associated health effects. Combined with self-confidence, agency is the attitude that any problem can be fixed, given enough resources in the form of time, effort, and determination. This attitude rests either on a thorough knowledge of or training in what is to be done, or on the surety that such knowledge or training can be attained. This attitude is often transferable from one field to another, completely unrelated field.
+ +--- + +Page 83 | Location 1263-1266 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2013 9:34:02 PM
+
+We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn.
+ +--- + +Page 88 | Location 1342-1346 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2013 9:43:14 PM
+
+the present methodical, milestone-governed specialist approach is largely a mopping-up operation which leads to increasing levels of detail but no new ways of understanding things. This way of thinking has dominated our culture for some time, where problems are formulated and solved within the present framework of thinking, leading to the world and way of life described in The lock-in. If you want to change your life, don't be tempted to outsource your life or your operations. You'll never know which kind of connections or synergies you're missing and you'll only make yourself
+ +--- + +Page 101 | Location 1540-1546 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2013 10:01:48 PM
+
+technically adept person will be able to quickly crunch numbers and manipulate equations, while perhaps not quite understanding the underlying concepts of his chosen specialization, whereas a more experienced person will quickly understand the underlying concepts of even unfamiliar subject areas. In physics and mathematics, such experienced people are said to have physical intuition or mathematical maturity, respectively. Sadly, many educations focus more on technical details because they are more easily testable. Even without the need for testing, many authors and educators are guilty of obscuring the fundamentals by giving equal time to all pieces of information.33 Automatically grasping what is important only comes with experience. Now, there are
+--- + +Page 101 | Location 1546-1548 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013 10:42:10 PM
+
+However, working in the same place for five years does not imply five years of experience. If you've been doing exactly the same thing, day in and day out for five years, and it only took a day to learn, you have one day's experience, five years over.
+ +--- + +Page 103 | Location 1567-1569 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013 10:55:12 PM
+
+it's more useful to look at expertise by considering the following list, which parallels the development mentioned above. Copying Comparing Compiling Computing Coordinating Creating
+ +--- + +Page 107 | Location 1632-1636 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013 10:57:56 PM
+
+For instance, at any one time I have four to six simultaneous projects going. If I restricted myself to just one project for the sake of simplicity, or tried to switch projects on a pre-arranged schedule dictated by time management, there would be a lot of downtime when my subconscious was processing a problem while I would be sitting around doing nothing and being underutilized. Hence, not allowing yourself to do anything but focus on one specific task will actually not increase productivity for creative work. It will only increase productivity for assembly line work
+ +--- + +Page 110 | Location 1677-1678 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013 11:02:09 PM
+
+It's important to understand that doing the right thing (good strategy) is much more important than doing things right (good tactics).
+ +--- + +Page 125 | Location 1906-1908 | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013 8:38:31 PM
+
+Yet enormous amounts of resources in our society are aimed towards solving problems heterotelically. Sometimes the solution is the cause of a new problem, but thanks to short-term thinking, the focus is often on responding to problems rather than preventing them. Our culture seems to have an ongoing fascination with action, and "reaction" is ironically more visible than "proaction."
+ +--- + +Page 167 | Location 2552-2555 | Added on Friday, November 29, 2013 11:32:55 AM
+
+In general, people who live a life of abundance, like "primitive" tribesmen (see Human capital and necessary personal assets) or Californians, will be happy to give things away, the latter primarily to create more space in their garages, and the former presumably because they can easily build replacements.
+ +--- + +Page 179 | Location 2733-2742 | Added on Friday, November 29, 2013 7:49:52 PM
+
+Make a list of activities (verbs) that you need to do--sleeping, eating, washing up--and what you want to do--writing, hiking, cycling, entertaining, working, skating, talking, cooking, playing, exercising, etc. Now consider whether you do some of these activities often enough to have "in-home" facilities or whether you're better off outsourcing them. Consider this list and extend it to your general facilities--for example, how long since you last used the guest room, the bar room, the home cinema room, etc. Consider that some rooms could have multiple uses (see Monouse and Multiuse). In particular, are the facilities available nearby already? In this case, there's really no reason to duplicate them at home. For instance, if you're a gym rat and spend six days a week at the gym, maybe you can shower there and thus don't need elaborate bathroom facilities at home. If you eat in cafeterias most of the time, maybe you don't need anything fancier than a microwave and a minirefrigerator for your in-home kitchen facilities. Hence, if you currently have rooms and facilities that mostly go unused or could go unused with a change of habit or hobby to something that requires less stuff on location, yet provides as much enjoyment, don't include them in your next home.
diff --git a/reading notes/rn geography of time.txt b/reading notes/rn geography of time.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..c9bf6bd --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn geography of time.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +The work reported in subsequent chapters begins with the assumption that places, like people, have their own personalities. I fully concur with sociologist Anselm Strauss that “the entire complex of urban life can be thought of as a person rather than a distinctive place, and the city can be endowed with a personality of its own.” Places are marked by their own cultures and sub-cultures, each with their unique temporal fingerprints. +-- preface xvii + diff --git a/reading notes/rn how i found freedom in an unfree world.txt b/reading notes/rn how i found freedom in an unfree world.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..c222f28 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn how i found freedom in an unfree world.txt @@ -0,0 +1,91 @@ +rn- How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World +author: Harry Browne +date: September 29, 2013 12:56:31 PM +--- + +p22: + +No one can tell you what identity you *should* have. But we can discuss some ways to look inside yourself to discover the identity that's naturally yours. Only then can you act consistently, purposefully, and in ways that will bring happiness to you. And every artificial identity that you cast off will bring more freedom to you. + +Instead of taking for granted assumptions about what you "should" be, start from the inside -- from inside of *you*. Find out who *you* are -- that unique collection of feelings, desires, perceptions, and understanding. Respect what you see in yourself. + +Then look at the world and decide what you can have that would ignite your nature into real happiness. And then figure out how you can make it happen. + +We'll discuss later some techniques of this self-exploration. If done with energy and honesty, it can be one of the most important, rewarding, and exciting tasks you can undertake. Let it all come from within you. Don't try to identify with an ideal person, a label, or a code that others think is best for you. They aren't you; they can't make your decisions for you. + +THE IDENTITIES OF OTHERS + +At the same time, you can waste precious time when you ignore the individual identities of other people. They aren't you- you can't expect them to be. When you misread someone's identity, you expect from him what he can't provide. You can't make a stone catch fire; neither can you make someone be something he isn't. + + + +--- + +3. You have to treat things and people in accordance with their own identities in order to get what you want from them. You don't expect a stone to be a fish. And it's just as unrealistic to expect one person to act as someone else does. You don't control the identities of people, but you can control how you deal with them. + +4. You view the world subjectively—colored by your own experience, interpretation, and limits of perception. **It isn't essential that you know the final truth about everything in the world; and you don't have the resources to discover it**. + +**Instead, the test to be applied to any idea is: does it work?** Does your identification of things lead to the consequences you expect? If it does, what you've perceived was true enough for that situation. But recognize the context of the situation and be skeptical when generalizing from that test to draw broader conclusions. + +These observations can help to keep you out of the Identity Trap. You don't have to try to live a life that isn't yours. What others say you should be is based either upon what they are or upon the way they feel you'd be of more value to them. Neither can be a valid basis for determining how you should live your life. They're doing and saying what makes them happy, and their conclusions are drawn from their own limited, subjective experience. + +You are what you are. And it will be up to you to discover what that is. I'll help you in every way I can in this book, but the decisions will be up to you. The Identity Traps are the belief that you should live in a way determined by others and the assumption that others will react to things as you would. These two traps are the most basic of all traps. They might seem terribly obvious to you. If so, good + +--- + +p46: + +All the answers must come from you—not from a book or a lecture or a sermon. To assume that someone once wrote down the final answers for your morality is to assume that the writer stopped growing the day he wrote the code. Don't treat him unfairly by thinking that he couldn't have discovered more and increased his own understanding after he'd written the code. And don't forget that what he wrote was based upon what he saw. + +No matter how you approach the matter, you are the sovereign authority who makes the final decisions. The more you realize that, the more your decisions will fit realistically with your own life. + +Personal morality is an attempt to consider all the relevant consequences of your acts. If you think out your morality for yourself, it should open up a better life that will be free from the bad consequences that complicate matters. + +And it should lead you more directly to those things that bring you happiness. Along the way, you should be able to act more freely; for once you've looked ahead to recognize potentially troublesome situations, you're free to act more impulsively in pleasant circumstances—knowing there's no danger that bad problems will ensue. + +**When you decide to take matters into your own hands, someone may ask you, "Who do you think you are? Who are you to decide for yourself in the face of society and centuries of moral teachings?"** + +**The answer is simple: You are you, the person who will five with the consequences of what you do. No one else can be re sponsible, because no one else will experience the consequences of your actions as you will.** + +**If you're wrong, you will suffer for it. If you're right, you will find happiness. You have to be the one to decide. "Who are you to know?" It's your future at stake. You have to know.** + +--- + +p63 + +To say "You can do it if you'll just believe you can" is to try to wish away reality. In those situations that involve direct alternatives, your own mental attitude can make quite a difference. But in situations involving indirect alternatives, false confidence can induce you to waste your time futilely trying to change others. + +It's easy to get involved in a group with the assumption that you'll work hard to persuade others of the Tightness of your ideas. But those others are individual human beings—each with his own knowledge, attitude, goals, and plans. Your mental attitude will have no more effect in changing his nature than his mental attitude could change yours. + +A realistic man recognizes the identity of each person he deals with. He knows that he can't change the identity of the other person just by willing it. He takes the identities of others seriously and then decides what direct alternatives exist for him in view of those identities. + +That doesn't mean that no one ever changes his ideas or plans. But the changes occur only when they make sense to the individual—when they are harmonious with his basic nature. **There are occasions when you must sell something to someone else--possibly even sell for a living. But an efficient salesman doesn't approach the world with the idea that his persuasive powers could change anyone.** + +**Rather, he accepts people as they are and relies upon two talents: (1) his ability to locate people whose self-interests would be satisfied by his product or service; and (2) his ability to demonstrate to those people the connection between his product and their self-interest.** + +**I realize that most salesmen waste their time trying futilely to persuade anyone and everyone they meet. But that's why most salesmen make poor livings for the amount of time they spend at it.** + +The most successful salesmen, consciously or intuitively recognize and accept the identities of the people they deal with! They take seriously their prospects' attitudes and objections. And they don't waste their time with inappropriate prospects. Because they realize that they can't sell everyone, they're more selective in picking the people they'll try to sell. + + + +--- + +p67 + +From a libertarian point of view you rarely see a victim. To borrow Harry Browne's words: + +>If you think that someone or some group of people is unjustly poor, your opinion implies that someone else should be giving them more money—through jobs or charity. That "someone else" is the person whose happinessseeking methods disturb you. In the same way, if you feel that certain people are being repressed politically, it implies that someone has the power to keep them from doing what they want to do. + + +In other words you get to the source of the problem much faster and without necessarily focusing on the victims at all because they are not the concern, the concern is solving their problem , in this case eliminating the individual whose happiness seeking is causing them to be "victims" + +Extrapolating you also could save that the key to solving most problems is fine ding out how people seek happiness and helping them optimize how they do that, which is just a stones throw from Buddhism. + +But what if an individuals method of maximizing happiness is to minimize the happiness of others? + + + diff --git a/reading notes/rn man's search for meaning.txt b/reading notes/rn man's search for meaning.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..db04e67 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn man's search for meaning.txt @@ -0,0 +1,86 @@ +rn- Man's Search for Meaning + +tags: #readingnotes, refx +book: Man's Search for Meaning +author: Viktor Frankl +date: October 30, 2013 4:02:15 PM +--- + +p60: + +Seen from this point of view, the metal reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him — mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful. + +An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. + +--- + +p77: + +We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. + +These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. "Life" does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man's destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand. + +--- + +p80: + +As we said before, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. **Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,"** could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why — an aim — for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, "I have nothing to expect from life any more." What sort of answer can one give to that? + +--- + +p91: + +Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them. We had to strive to lead them back to this truth, or the consequences would have been much worse than the loss of a few thousand stalks of oats. I can still see the prisoner who rolled up his shirt sleeves, thrust his right hand under my nose and shouted, "May this hand be cut off if I don't stain it with blood on the day when I get home!" I want to emphasize that the man who said these words was not a bad fellow. He had been the best of comrades in camp and afterwards. + +Apart from the moral deformity resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure, there were two other fundamental experiences which threatened to damage the character of the liberated prisoner: bitterness and disillusionment when he returned to his former life. + +Bitterness was caused by a number of things he came up against in his former home town. When, on his return, a man found that in many places he was met only with a shrug of the shoulders and with hackneyed phrases, he tended to become bitter and to ask himself why he had gone through all that he had. When he heard the same phrases nearly everywhere— "We did not know about it," and "We, too, have suffered," then he asked himself, have they really nothing better to say to me? + +The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one's fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible + +--- + +p105: + +gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being, We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. **What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him, What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call "noodynamics," i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it.** And one should not think that this holds true only for normal conditions; in neurotic individuals, it is even more valid. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life. + +Having shown the beneficial impact of meaning orientation, I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. + +--- + +p112: + +To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy.” But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation. + +--- + +p113: + +This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon—laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh. Doing so would be the same as urging people posed in front of a camera to say “cheese,” only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles. In logotherapy, such a behavior pattern is called “hyper-intention.” It plays an important role in the causation of sexual neurosis, be it frigidity or impotence. The more a patient, instead of forgetting himself through giving himself, directly strives for orgasm, i.e., sexual pleasure, the more this pursuit of sexual pleasure becomes self-defeating. Indeed, what is called “the pleasure principle” is, rather, a fun-spoiler. + +--- + +p116: + +As for the third issue, addiction, I am reminded of the findings presented by Annemarie von Forstmeyer who noted that, as evidenced by tests and statistics, 90 percent of the alcoholics she studied had suffered from an abysmal feeling of meaninglessness. Of the drug addicts studied by Stanley Krippner, 100 percent believed that “things seemed meaningless.” + +--- + +p117: + +To invoke an analogy, consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief? + +--- + +p118: + +As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Edith Weisskopf-Joelson observed in this context that the logotherapeutic "notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience." + +Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. + +--- + +p125: + +You may be prone to blame me for invoking examples that are the exceptions to the rule. “Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt” (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza. You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? **It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best**. + diff --git a/reading notes/rn one acre homestead (mcdonald, sara simmons).txt b/reading notes/rn one acre homestead (mcdonald, sara simmons).txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..45c0b28 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn one acre homestead (mcdonald, sara simmons).txt @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +rn- One Acre Homestead (McDonald, Sara Simmons) + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: One Acre Homestead +author: Sara Simmons McDonald +date: November 30, 2013 8:44:18 PM +--- + +One Acre Homestead (McDonald, Sara Simmons)
+- Your Highlight Location 1396-1402 | Added on Monday, May 13, 2013 8:59:22 PM
+
+Public education has a mission: to serve public interest. The public interest in our modern society means, above all, a single-minded focus on national economic goals, namely GDP/GNP growth. Young people in school are being trained to contribute to these national economic standards, both as consumers and as potential employees or business owners. To a lesser extent, students are there to boost US ranks in international competitions over who has the smartest kids—another way to boost our world economic standing. This attitude trickles down. Now parents truly seem to believe that their children must measure up to these national standards, first and foremost, or something is wrong. Many parents are afraid to homeschool their children because they fear the requirements they have to meet to prove their children are learning.
+ +--- + +Location 1420-1426 | Added on Monday, May 13, 2013 8:59:52 PM
+
+It is an unquestioned cultural assumption in developed countries that your food will come from the grocery store, and all of your household supplies will be brought in from some distant source. In his essay “Feminism, The Body, and The Machine,” Wendell Berry observes, “The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.”
+ +--- + +Location 1428-1432 | Added on Monday, May 13, 2013 9:00:26 PM
+
+I, personally, side with Wendell Berry and other authors, who assert that the home is the basic economic unit—the foundation on which the rest of capitalist society is based. If we cannot invest ourselves in our own homes, then where are we headed as a society? In truth, the concept of home is gender-neutral and universally desirable. The home should function well as a symbol of security. While security is never guaranteed, an insecure home is no good place to be. Home economics is, at its very basis, the study and practice of making a secure and functioning home.
+ +--- + +Location 1450-1455 | Added on Monday, May 13, 2013 9:02:06 PM
+
+In economic terms, declining marginal value means that every extra hour of work provides less benefit than the previous hour. This is especially true if you have other ways to use your time. If the other things you’d do with that 20 surplus hours a week have profit potential, then there is a monetary opportunity cost for working an extra 20 hours per week. The opportunity cost is the lost profit from other ventures, and should be subtracted directly from the monetary compensation for those 20 hours per week.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn prometheus rising.txt b/reading notes/rn prometheus rising.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..6e6a63b --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn prometheus rising.txt @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +rn- Prometheus Rising + +tags: #readingnotes +book: Prometheus Rising +author: Robert Anton Wilson
date: August 23, 2013 12:56:31 PM
--- + +p163
+As noted earlier, when the bio-survival circuit flashes danger, *all other mental activity ceases*. + +There is no "time" on the bio-survival circuit; reflexes act without emotional ego, rational mind or adult personality participating: "I just found myself doing it." + +All the martial arts—judo, akido, kung fu, etc.—are reimprinting techniques for the bio-survival circuit. They are intended to ensure that what happens mechanically ("without thought") really does serve bio-survival, since the reflexes imprinted accidentally on this circuit are not that dependable. + +The mechanical nature of the bio-survival circuit is of key importance in brainwashing. *To create a new imprint, reduce the victim to an infantile state, i.e., first-circuit vulnerability.* + +
diff --git a/reading notes/rn sewer, gas and electric the public works trilogy (matt ruff).txt b/reading notes/rn sewer, gas and electric the public works trilogy (matt ruff).txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..a8b9965 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn sewer, gas and electric the public works trilogy (matt ruff).txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +rn- Sewer, Gas and Electric- The Public Works Trilogy (Matt Ruff) + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: Sewer, Gas and Electric- The Public Works Trilogy +author: Matt Ruff +date: November 30, 2013 8:42:56 PM +--- + +Page 189 | Location 2890-2891 + +you don't disprove someone's pessimism by adding up good and evil on a dessert napkin to see which is the greater total. Hope's a choice, not a sum; you can have as much of it as you damn well feel like having, regardless of actual circumstances.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn the diamond age.txt b/reading notes/rn the diamond age.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..839d267 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn the diamond age.txt @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +rn- The Diamond Age + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: The Diamond Age +author: Neal Stephenson +date: November 30, 2013 8:39:32 PM +--- + +Page 78 | Location 1188-1192 | Added on Thursday, July 25, 2013 5:09:41 AM
+
+"Common as the air" meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver glow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving- no, demanding- of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.
+ +--- +
+Page 295 | Location 4517-4522 | Added on Friday, July 26, 2013 11:20:10 PM
+
+The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things. From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.
+ +--- + +Page 338 | Location 5166-5169 | Added on Saturday, July 27, 2013 1:47:17 PM
+
+"the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people-and this is true whether or not they are well-educated-is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations-in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.
+ +--- + +Page 453 | Location 6932-6944 | Added on Monday, July 29, 2013 11:47:44 PM
+
+"Precisely. The names are pulled out of a hat. The participants have only a few hours' warning. Here, the ritual is done with a cliff and a rope, because there happened to be a cliff in the vicinity. In other R.D.R. nodes, the mechanism might be different. For example, person A might go into a room, take a pistol out of a box, load it with live ammunition, put it back in the box, and then leave the room for ten minutes. During that time, person B is supposed to enter the room and replace the live ammunition with a dummy clip having the same weight. Then person A comes back into the room, puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger." "But person A has no way of knowing whether person B has done his job?" "Exactly." "What is the role of the third person?" "A proctor. An official of the R.D.R. who sees to it that the two participants don't try to communicate." "How frequently must they undergo this ritual?" "As frequently as their name comes up at random, perhaps once every couple of years," Hackworth said. "It's a way of creating mutual dependency. These people know they can trust each other. In a tribe such as the F.D.R., whose view of the universe contains no absolutes, this ritual creates an artificial absolute."
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn the geography of time .txt b/reading notes/rn the geography of time .txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..3368a27 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn the geography of time .txt @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: The Geography of Time +author: Robert Levin +date: 2014-07-25 22:15 +--- + + +It has been observed that the Chinese character for “crisis” is composed of the character for “danger” plus that for “opportunity.” And the word “crisis” in our own language derives from the Greek word for “decision.” In a similar vein, the fruits of individualism and hard work provide the potential for both psychological wealth and disaster.11 Ultimately, how we structure our time is a choice between alternatives. A rapid pace of life is neither inherently better nor worse than a slow one. + +p159 + +-- + +The well- prepared visitor should seek out homework assignments that utilize on-site practice. Innovative teachers have been known to devise rather elaborate practice conditions. Anthropologist Greg Trifonovich of the East-West Center, for example, used to prepare Peace Corps volunteers and teachers for conditions in rural Pacific societies by creating a simulated village. One of the behaviors that Trifonovich taught was how to live without clock time. He showed students, for example, how to tell time by observing the sun and the tides.18 Whatever your technique, realize that mastering the language of time will require rehearsal, and mistakes. +
But be assured that it is well worth the effort. Cross-cultural training produces a wide range of positive skills. Research has shown, for example, that people who are well prepared for transcultural encounters have better working relationships with people from mixed cultural backgrounds; are better at setting and working toward realistic goals in other cultures; are better at understanding and solving the problems they may confront; and are more successful at their jobs in other cultures. They also report more pleasurable relationships with their hosts, both during work and free time; are more at ease in intercultural settings; and are more likely to enjoy their overseas assignments. The most astute of cross-cultural students also seem to develop a more general interest and concern about life and events in different countries—what has been called a general “world-mindedness.”19 + +Trifonovich, G. (1977). On cross-cultural orientation techniques. In R. Brislin (ed.), Culture Learning: Concepts, Applications and Research, 213–22. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii.
19. Brislin, R., and Yoshida, T. (1994). Intercultural Communication Training: An Introduction. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. + +p202 + +-- + +Almost by definition, cultural behaviors signify something very different to insiders than they do to the visitor. When we attribute a Brazilian’s tardiness to irresponsibility, or a Moroccan’s shifting of attention to their lack of focus, we are being both careless and ethnocentrically narrow-minded. These misinterpretations are examples of what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error—that, when explaining the behaviors of others, there is a pervasive tendency for people to underestimate the influence of the situation and to overestimate others’ internal personality dispositions. For example, when I hear strangers lose their temper, I infer that they must be angry people. When I lose my own temper, I blame it on the situation—perhaps the other person was being annoying or the situation was frustrating. After all, I know that I rarely lose my temper, so there must be something unique to this situation that set me off.
An important ingredient in the fundamental attribution error is how much information you have about the person you are judging. The less familiar you are with others, the more likely you are to resort to explanations that reside inside the other person. When we enter foreign environments—which are, by definition, alien—the fundamental attribution error is an accident waiting to happen.
The careful observer would be wise to attend to the advice of Clifford Geertz: “cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses.” Without fully understanding a cultural context, we are likely to misinterpret its people’s motives. The result, inevitably, is conflict. + +p203 + +-- + +Vicente Lopez, when describing his former Chicano commuter culture, argues that his fellow time travelers have done more than master the two cultures’ times; they have developed their very own time sense, one unique to their own subculture—what Lopez calls an “estuary” culture. In nature, an estuary is the wide mouth of a river into which the tides flow, an area where the fresh water of the river and the salt water of the sea mix together. “In an estuary,” Lopez observes, “nature creates a set of organisms which are not from one side or the other, but completely different. In the same way, people who live on the Tijuana border have this kind of estuarian time. It’s not a Mexican time. It’s not an American time. It’s a different time. The Chicanos are not Americans and are not Mexicans. They live by their own set of rules and have their own unique values and time and pace of life.” +
And how could it be otherwise? As Oswald Spengler once wrote, “It is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to time that one culture is differentiated from another.”21 When a new culture is born, so too is a singular time sense. + +p206 + +-- + +It is they who have developed the idea of psychological androgyny. Psychologically androgynous people combine both traditional masculine traits (such as assertiveness) and feminine traits (such as nurturance) in their personality repertoire. The androgynous person is not a psychological neuter who falls midway between extreme masculinity and femininity, but one who has both strong masculine and feminine attributes at his or her disposal.
A number of studies have demonstrated the value of psychological androgyny. Whereas masculine types do better in traditional “male” situations and feminine types excel in “female” situations, experiments have shown that androgynous people—both men and women—are more likely to succeed at both masculine and feminine tasks. It has been demonstrated, for example, that masculine and androgynous personalities are better than feminine types at resisting group pressure to conform, but that feminine and androgynous people do better on tasks such as counseling a fellow student with problems.20 Androgynous and feminine spouses—both husbands and wives—also tend to have happier marriages.21 The androgynous person, in other words, has access to the best of both worlds. +
The pace of life moves in an analogous pattern. “The question is not just what floor of the building you’re living on,” as the transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber puts it, “but how many floors you have access to as you negotiate your way through life.”22 Many situations are best met by a temporal approach requiring a rapid pace of life: speed, attention to the clock, a future orientation, the ability to value time as money. Other domains in life— rest, leisure, the incubation of ideas, social relationships—are more adequately met with a relaxed attitude toward time. The per- son, or the culture, who combines both modes in a temporal repertoire—or even better, who can draw upon a multiplicity of modes—is more likely to be up to all occasions. Jeremy Rifkin speaks of the dangers of temporal ghettos. People who are con- fined to rigid and narrow temporal bands are unprepared to determine their own futures and political fates.23 Multitemporality is the ticket out of these temporal ghettos. To have the ability to move quickly when the occasion demands it, to let go when the pressure stops, and to understand the many temporal shades of grey may be the real answer to the question of “Which pace of life is best?” + +As Lewis Mumford wrote:
Though our first reaction to the external pressure of time necessarily takes the form of the slow-down, the eventual effects of liberation will be to find the right tempo and measure for every human activity; in short, to keep time in life as we do in music, not by obeying the mechanical beat of the metronome—a device only for beginners—but by finding the appropriate tempos from passage to passage, modulating the pace according to human need and purpose.24 +
Like the psychological androgyne, the truly multitemporal person and culture does not simply fall in the average range, but has the ability to move as rapidly or slowly as is needed. Not surprisingly, another significant result of the University of Michigan study was that personal flexibility (versus rigidity) was an effective buffer against stress and job dissatisfaction no matter what one’s occupation. The European who works hard enough to achieve, but who can decelerate to enjoy la dolce vita, the fruit of his or her labors, possesses an element of this multitemporality. The Japanese worker who excels at both speed and slowness also understands the skill. This is hardly to say that all European and Japanese workers have mastered multitemporality. If anything, in fact, the data highlight the price that many in these countries are paying for their rapid pace of life; it is no coincidence that coronary heart disease rates in Western Europe are some of the highest in the world and that suicide is a serious problem in Japan. But the traditional values in these cultures offer potential templates—recipes of a sort—that illuminate paths by which the mindful individual may take control of his or her time.
Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “Time is the element in which we exist . . . We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.” How to be productive enough to be comfortable, to minimize the temporal stress on which this achievement is built, and to simultaneously make time for caring relationships and a civilized society—this is the multitemporal challenge. + +p218-220 + +-- + +While planning what was to turn into my twelve- month trip around the world, it seemed as if every seasoned and/or frustrated traveler I met offered words of advice. These ranged from lists of places that I absolutely had to visit or avoid, to graphic descriptions of what would happen to my body if I even thought about drinking the water. But the single most prophetic wisdom came from an unlikely source. While sitting in the chair of a rather unworldly dentist, my mouth stuffed with the usual un- pleasant objects, he offered the longest nondental communication that ever passed between us: “I went to another country once. You learn a lot about yourself.” + +He was right on the money. After a year of vagabonding across some twenty countries on three continents, visiting every marvel in touring distance from the Great Wall of China to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, having collected multinational data on what would turn out to be the focus of my professional research ever since, what I mostly carried home with me was a new point of view. +
My most lasting insights, those that continue to make a difference in how I live my life, always seem to hover about the theme of time. When people live on the road for extended periods, there seems to be a point when they shift into the consciousness of a transient. Most travelers I have questioned about this transition re- port that the critical cutoff seems to occur sometime around three months. After that, the days of the week and even the months of the year—especially for those who have the good sense to follow the warm weather—meld into one another. Expectations and plans for the future become stunted, or nonentities. +
There is something about the frequent, swift, and often dra-matic changes that are the fabric of long-term traveling—deciding in the middle of breakfast to pack up and head for another country before check-out time; ending a seemingly intimate affair be- cause one partner is inspired to head east while the other selects west—that usually leaves no alternative other than to live from day to day. The force is so strong that it feels more somatic than a volitional choice. I know that personally, by the end of each extended excursion, it felt as if I was physically incapable of fixing my thoughts on either the future or the past. This is not to presume that I had transcended time to some idyllic Zen present-connectedness; more often than not I was, as we say in psychology, simply out to lunch. It was temporal limbo. Having spent most of my life until then as a future-oriented person—a future often defined by the expectations of others—I found it almost comical to observe how my mind was unable to focus on what was coming tomorrow, even when it might be an event that I had been anticipating for months, such as my first visit to the Great Pyramids. But it was definitely the beat of my own clock. As the philosopher Johann Herder once wrote, “everything transient has the measure of its time within itself.”
So when I arrived home to resume my role as a university professor it was with the sensibility of a vagabond. My intellect was temporally unavailable, and I was disoriented from many of the usual ingredients of culture shock. Many long-term travelers will tell you that the shock of returning home is often more jarring than that of leaving. I believe this is because we return with the dangerous illusion that, having arrived home, it is at last permissible to let up, to cease the hard work of coping with constant change. (It is for good reason that the word “travel” is related to the French “travail,” meaning hard work and penance.) But social psychologists will tell you that it is at those very moments when people hold an “illusion of invulnerability” that they are really the most susceptible targets. + +p220-221
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn the information diet.txt b/reading notes/rn the information diet.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..ea92a83 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn the information diet.txt @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +rn- The Information Diet + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: The Information Diet +author: Clay A. Johnson +date: November 30, 2013 8:40:29 PM +--- + +Page 32 | Location 474-477 | Added on Sunday, July 21, 2013 9:41:23 PM
+
+In 1995, in the very early days of the World Wide Web, Clifford Stoll wrote in Silicon Snake Oil (Anchor), **“Computers force us into creating with our minds and prevent us from making things with our hands. They dull the skills we use in everyday life.”** Keller, Stoll, and Carr all point to something interesting: new technologies do create anthropological changes in society. Yet
+ +--- +
+Page 60 | Location 915-918 | Added on Sunday, July 21, 2013 10:47:14 PM
+
+Westen and his colleagues found that when these subjects processed “emotionally threatening information” about their preferred candidates, the parts of the brain associated with reasoning shut down and the parts responsible for emotions flared up.[41] Westen’s research indicates that once we grow biased enough, we lose our capacity to change our minds.
+ +--- +
+ +Page 61 | Location 927-928 | Added on Sunday, July 21, 2013 10:47:32 PM
+
+We already know that things like confirmation bias make us seek out information that we agree with. But it’s also the case that once we’re entrenched in a belief, the facts will not change our minds.
+ +--- + +Page 62 | Location 937-941 | Added on Sunday, July 21, 2013 10:48:44 PM
+
+“Why do humans reason?,”[43] they argue instead that “reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.” Mercier and Sperber argue that our minds may have evolved to value persuasion over truth. It certainly is plausible— human beings are social animals, and persuasion is a form of social power.
+ +--- +
+Page 68 | Location 1032-1038 | Added on Sunday, July 21, 2013 10:52:39 PM
+
+Back in 1954, psychologist James Olds found that if he allowed a rat to pull a lever and administer a shock to its own lateral hypothalamus, a shock that produced intense pleasure, the rat would keep pressing the lever, over and over again, until it died. He found that “the control exercised over the animal’s behavior by means of this reward is extreme, possibly exceeding that exercised by any other reward previously used in animal experimentation.”[48] This launched the study of brain stimulation reinforcement, which has been shown to exist in all species tested, including humans. At the heart of brain stimulus reinforcement is a neurotransmitter called dopamine.
+ +--- +
+Page 74 | Location 1120-1127 | Added on Sunday, July 21, 2013 10:58:37 PM
+
+2007, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists -- the last major scientific body to reject climate change’s existence and cause -- changed its mind. Climate scientists reached consensus: global warming is “unequivocal” and mankind is the primary cause.[54] Since then, no recognized scientific body has dissented from the theory[55] or rejected the idea of climate change. In the five years since consensus was reached by the scientific community, the number of people doubting climate change’s occurrence has increased. When the battle for scientific minds ended, the doubt production machines shifted into overdrive.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn the joyous cosmology adventures in the chemistry of consciousness (alan watts).txt b/reading notes/rn the joyous cosmology adventures in the chemistry of consciousness (alan watts).txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c51064f --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn the joyous cosmology adventures in the chemistry of consciousness (alan watts).txt @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +rn- The Joyous Cosmology - Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (Alan Watts) + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: The Joyous Cosmology - Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness +author: Alan Watts +date: November 30, 2013 8:45:52 PM +--- + +Page 14 | Location 202-207 | Added on Sunday, February 10, 2013 10:27:45 PM
+
+It thus escaped our attention that the organism as a whole, largely unconscious, was using consciousness and reason to inform and control itself. We thought of our conscious intelligence as descending from a higher realm to take possession of a physical vehicle. We therefore failed to see it as an operation of the same formative process as the structure of nerves, muscles, veins, and bones---a structure so subtly ordered (that is, intelligent) that conscious thought is as yet far from being able to describe it.
+ +--- + +Page 15 | Location 219-224 | Added on Sunday, February 10, 2013 10:30:05 PM
+
+We believe, then, that the mind controls the body, not that the body controls itself through the mind. Hence the ingrained prejudice that the mind should be independent of all physical aids to its working---despite microscopes, telescopes, cameras, scales, computers, books, works of art, alphabets, and all those physical tools apart from which it is doubtful whether there would be any mental life at all. At
diff --git a/reading notes/rn the pleasures of walking.txt b/reading notes/rn the pleasures of walking.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..b207a66 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn the pleasures of walking.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +rn- The Pleasures of Walking + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: The pleasures of Walking +author: (editor) Edwin V. Mitchell +date: November 12, 2013 11:08:37 AM +--- + +p91 + +From On going on a journey by William Hazlitt: + +All that part of map that we do not see before us is blank. The world in our conceit of it is not much bigger than a nutshell. It is not one prospect expanded into another, county joined to county, kingdom to kingdom, lands to seas, making an image voluminous and vast; -- the mind can form no larger idea of space than the eye can take in at a single glance. The rest is a name written in a map, a calculation of arithmetic. For instance, what is the true signification of that immense mass of territory and population, known by the name of China to us? An inch of pasteboard on a wooden globe, of no more account than a China orange! **Things near us are seen of the size of life: things at a distance are diminished to the size of the understanding.** We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our own being only piecemeal. In this way, however, we remember an infinity of things and places. The mind is like a mechanical instrument that plays a great variety of tunes, but it must play them in succession. One idea recalls another, but it at the same time excludes all others. In trying to renew old recollections, we cannot as it were unfold the whole web of our existence; we must pick. out the single threads. So in coming to a place where we have formerly lived, and with which we have intimate associations, every one must have found that the feel ing grows more vivid the nearer we approach the spot, from the mere anticipation of the actual impression:
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn the secret of selling anything (harry browne).txt b/reading notes/rn the secret of selling anything (harry browne).txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..a2636f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn the secret of selling anything (harry browne).txt @@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +rn- The Secret of Selling Anything (Harry Browne) + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: The Secret of Selling Anything +author: Harry Browne +date: November 21, 2013 7:54:51 PM +--- + + +Page 16 | Location 235-238 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013 9:26:03 PM
+
+This, then, is the story of life: each individual seeks happiness. His concept of what will bring him happiness will differ from that of every other human being; happiness will be relative to him. His resources (time, energy, knowledge and property) are limited; so he must choose constantly between the many alternative courses of action he sees. And he does this by placing values on everything he sees. These values lead him to prefer one thing more than another.
+ +--- +
+Page 17 | Location 252-252 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013 9:27:14 PM
+
+Profit is the increase in happiness by replacing one situation with another.
+ +--- + +Page 18 | Location 274-276 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013 9:29:28 PM
+
+So profit can come in many different ways: through money, knowledge, contentment, spiritual understanding, leisure, etc.. In each case, it is what increases the individual’s happiness.
+ +--- +
+Page 19 | Location 279-281 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013 9:29:54 PM
+
+All individuals seek profit of one kind or another... which means that each individual is seeking to increase his own happiness in whatever way he believes he can.
+ +--- + +Page 20 | Location 293-298 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013 9:31:24 PM
+
+There’s an old saying that “one man’s gain must be another man’s loss.” Many people take that old adage for granted as the whole truth. And yet , it is totally false. Why? SECRET OF SELLING ANYTHING/Harry Browne 23 Because happiness is relative. And what pleases one person is not necessarily going to please the next person. This means that two individuals ~ with different values ~ can arrange an exchange between them that will satisfy both of them. Neither has to triumph over the other one. Both can gain.
+ +
+--- + +Page 22 | Location 326-327 | Added on Wednesday, November 20, 2013 9:33:37 PM
+
+The universal fallacy is the belief that an individual would willingly accept something unprofitable to himself.
+ +--- + +Page 25 | Location 377-378 | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013 9:38:04 AM
+
+The extent of your own profit depends upon your ability to satisfy the needs and desires of others.
+ +--- + +Page 40 | Location 605-606 | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013 10:46:53 PM
+
+People only pay for what they want ~ so you will succeed only if you are providing people with what they want.
+ +--- + +Page 43 | Location 648-648 | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013 10:49:59 PM
+
+Find out what people want and help them get it!
+ +--- + +Page 51 | Location 778-779 | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013 11:00:51 PM
+
+The key element in the solution was my simple question, “What’s the biggest sales problem facing you right now ?” Everything flowed irresistibly from that. +
+--- + +Page 53 | Location 792-799 | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013 11:05:16 PM
+
+Any businessman is concerned about dozens of things at any given time. Here are just a few examples: poor employee rapport; lethargic salesmen; bad leads from his advertising; finding new markets; a negative image in his customers’ eyes; quarterly taxes to be paid next Tuesday; spotty distribution; a competitor’s new line; cost-profit squeezes; seasonal delivery problems; lagging sales; higher transportation costs; new government regulations; suppliers cheating him; etc., etc., etc. Not motivated??? How could a man with so many problems not be motivated? He’s a live bundle of motivations. There are so many things he wants, so many problems to solve, so many hopes, so many dreams. He’s loaded with motivations. Everyone is already motivated. The only question is “By what?” Your job is to find out what it is that motivates your prospect. And then show him how he can get what he wants through your product or service. Only then will he buy.
+ +--- + +Page 53 | Location 809-810 | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013 11:06:26 PM
+
+his motivations are the hopes and dreams and plans he has that he feels will bring him happiness. Those motivations exist before you ever walk onto the scene. You can try, if you wish, to change his motivation. But why bother?
+ +--- + +Page 56 | Location 841-845 | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013 11:09:15 PM
+
+Find this prospect’s motivation and appeal to it. That’s all there is to it. Find this prospect’s motivation and appeal to it. The emphasis is on the word this. The individual is different from all other human beings in the world. He has his own life, his own outlook, his own nature, his own personality, his own ideas, his own goals, his own plans. You cannot treat him as a carbon copy of every prospect you’ve ever faced. He isn’t. If you try to put him into a mold, you’ll fail. Unless you appeal to him in a way that fits what he is, he won’t respond.
diff --git a/reading notes/rn you are not a gadget.txt b/reading notes/rn you are not a gadget.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..99bc065 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn you are not a gadget.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +rn- You Are Not a Gadget + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: You Are Not a Gadget +author: Jaron lanier +date: 2012 +--- + +If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists and artists, the society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty headed and contentless + +--- + +"It's easy to break into physical cars and houses, for instance, and yet few people do so. Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. It is only human choice that makes the human world function. Technology can motivate human choice but not replace it."
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rn your money or your life.txt b/reading notes/rn your money or your life.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..7379f32 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn your money or your life.txt @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +rn- Your Money or Your Life + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: Your Money or Your Life +author: Vicki Robin;Joe Dominguez;Monique Tilford +date: November 30, 2013 8:41:41 PM +--- +
+ +Page 15 | Location 217-222 | Added on Wednesday, July 10, 2013 10:35:42 PM
+
+Today, the average CEO in the United States makes more in a day than the average worker makes in year. This isn’t said to fuel envy of the wealthy and demand a piece of the pile for the poor. Rather, it’s to point out that while absolute poverty deprives our bodies of necessities, relative poverty—being so much poorer than people no smarter or more willing to work than we are—makes us dissatisfied with our lot in life no matter how much we have. It corrodes society and the psyche—saps our belief in justice and fairness and hope. It makes us poor amidst plenty. We feel left out, lonely10 and are more likely to give up on the dream that we can have a better life than our parents.
+ +---
+ +Page 36 | Location 544-547 | Added on Wednesday, July 10, 2013 10:56:31 PM
+
+The perfect work life would offer enough challenge to be interesting. Enough ease to be enjoyable. Enough camaraderie to be nourishing. Enough solitude to be productive. Enough hours at work to get the job done. Enough leisure to feel refreshed. Enough service to feel needed. Enough silliness to have fun. And enough money to pay the bills . . . and then some.
+ +--- + +142 | Location 2166-2173 | Added on Tuesday, July 16, 2013 2:09:22 PM
+
+For many of us, however, “growing up” has meant outgrowing our dreams. The aspiration to write a great book has shrunk to writing advertising copy. The dream of being an inspiring preacher has evolved into being an administrator and a mediator between the factions in the congregation. Instead of really knowing who their patients are, how their patients live or the challenges in their lives, doctors today are plagued with back-to-back fifteen-minute patient visits and malpractice suits. The dream of traveling around the world becomes two weeks a year of hitting the tourist traps. Living a fulfilling and meaningful life seems almost impossible, given the requirements of simply meeting day-to-day needs and problems. Yet, at one time or another practically every one of us has had a dream of what we wanted our lives to be. People with a diagnosis of cancer often get that divorce or take the trip they’ve been dreaming about or take up a new hobby that’s been patiently waiting for its time in the sun.
+ +--- + +Page 143 | Location 2178-2182 | Added on Tuesday, July 16, 2013 10:20:25 PM
+
+* What did you want to be when you grew up? +* What have you always wanted to do that you haven’t yet done? +* What have you done in your life that you are really proud of? +* If you knew you were going to die within a year, how would you spend that year? +* What brings you the most fulfillment—and how is that related to money? +* If you didn’t have to work for a living, what would you do with your time?
diff --git a/reading notes/rn zen and the art of motorcycle maintanence.txt b/reading notes/rn zen and the art of motorcycle maintanence.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..3782cb9 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn zen and the art of motorcycle maintanence.txt @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +rn- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanence + +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance +author: Robert M. Pirsig +date: November 12, 2013 9:59:06 PM +--- + +Page 5:
+
+Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. **We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes**. Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns and don't get swung from side to side in any compartment. Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you're from and how long you've been riding. + +It was some years ago that my wife and I and our friends first began to catch on to these roads. We took them once in a while for variety or for a shortcut to another main highway, and each time the scenery was grand and we left the road with a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this time after time before realizing what should have been obvious: these roads are truly different from the main ones. The whole pace of life and personality of the people who live along them are different. They're not going anywhere. They're not too busy to be courteous. The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. It's the others, the ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it. The discovery was a real find. + +I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I'm looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling. + +But once we caught on, of course, nothing could keep us off these roads, weekends, evenings, vacations. We have become real secondary-road motorcycle buffs and found there are things you learn as you go. + +We have learned how to spot the good ones on a map, for example. If the line wiggles, that's good. That means hills. If it appears to be the main route from a town to a city, that's bad. The best ones always connect nowhere with nowhere and have an alternate that gets you there quicker. If you are going northeast from a large town you never go straight out of town for any long distance. You go out and then start jogging north, then east, then north again, and soon you are on a secondary route that only the local people use. + +The main skill is to keep from getting lost. Since the roads are used only by local people who know them by sight nobody complains if the junctions aren't posted. And often they aren't. When they are it's usually a small sign hiding unobtrusively in the weeds and that's all. County-road-sign makers seldom tell you twice. If you miss that sign in the weeds that's your problem, not theirs. Moreover, you discover that the highway maps are often inaccurate about county roads. And from time to time you find your “county road” takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer's backyard. + +So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to “get somewhere” it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.
+
+--- +
+Page 58 | Location 874-878 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013 10:36:47 PM
+
+You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between Johns view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge. + +
+--- + +Page 59 | Location 887-891 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2013 10:38:18 PM
+
+At first this difference seemed fairly minor, but then it grew-and grew-and grew-until I began to see why I missed it. Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.
+ +--- + +Page 105 | Location 1598-1603 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013 8:56:40 PM
+
+But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/rocker rudolf anarcho-syndicalism.txt b/reading notes/rocker rudolf anarcho-syndicalism.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..8bb987c --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rocker rudolf anarcho-syndicalism.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: Anarcho-Syndicalism Theory and Practice +author: Rudolf Rocker +pubyear: 1938 +edition: AKPress 6th ed. 2004 +readdate: October 2014 +tags: non-fiction + +--- + +The portentous development of our present economic system, leading to a mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of privileged minorities and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the people, prepared the way for the present political and social reaction, and befriended it in every way. It sacrificed the general interests of human society to the private interests of individuals, and thus systematically undermined the relationship between man and man. People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should be only a means to insure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source. +page: 2 + +-- + +Anarchism found a valuable advocate in Peter Kropotkin, who set himself the task of making the achievements of modern natural science available for the development of the sociological concepts of Anarchism. In his ingenious book, *Mutual Aid—A Factor of Evolution*, he entered the lists against so-called *Social Darwinism* whose exponents tried to prove the inevitability of the existing social conditions from the Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence by raising the struggle of the strong against the weak to the status of an iron law for all natural processes, to which even man is subject. In reality this conception was strongly influenced by the Malthusian doctrine that life's table is not spread for all and that the unneeded will just have to reconcile themselves to this fact. + +Kropotkin showed that this conception of nature as a field of unrestricted warfare is only a caricature of real life, and that along with the brutal struggle for existence, which is fought out with tooth and claw; there exists in nature also another principle which is expressed in the social combination of the weaker species and the maintenance of races by the evolution of social instincts and mutual aid. +page: 7 + +-- + +Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas, institutions, and social forms. It is, therefore, not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the anarchist freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility fo every himan being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn then to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the mere effective and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown. +page: 16 + +-- + +"No one can finally spend more than he has. That holds good for individuals; it holds good for peoples. If one spends oneself for power, for high politics, for husbandry, for commerce, parliamentarism, military interests -- if one gives away that amount of reason, earnestness, will, self-mastery, which constitutes one's real self for one thing, he will not have it for the other. Culture and state -- let no one be deceived about this -- are antagonists: the 'Culture State' is merely a modern idea. The one lives on the other, the one prospers at the expense of the other. All great periods of culture are periods of political decline. Whatever is great in a cultured sense is non-political, is even anti-political. -- Nietzsche (source not given) +page: 17 + +-- + + diff --git a/reading notes/solnit rebecca wanderlust.txt b/reading notes/solnit rebecca wanderlust.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..9cb97c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/solnit rebecca wanderlust.txt @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +title: Wanderlust A History of Walking +author: Rebecca Solnit +pubyear: 2000 +edition: Penguin Books +readdate: September 25, 2014 03:47:50 PM +tags: non-fiction + +--- + +This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage,one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and.that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete -- for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can. Walking can also be imagined as a visual activity, every walk a tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known. Perhaps this is where walking's peculiar utility for thinkers comes from. The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far. Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind and what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination +page: 6 +notes: I like this passage as the basis for a luxagraf post. That you can travel all around the world without going anywhere at all. This notions that "a certain kind of wanderlust ca only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of a car... etc". Reminiscent of Edward Abbey's advice: "you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the...cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe." + +-- + +Although I came to think about walking, I couldn't stop thinking about everything else, about the letters I should have been writing, about the conversations I'd been having. At least when my mind strayed to the phone conversation with my friend Sono that morning, I was still on track. Sono's truck had been stolen from her West Oakland studio, and she told me that though everyone responded to it as a disaster, she wasn't all that sorry it was gone, or in a hurry to replace it. There was a joy, she said, to finding that her body was adequate to get her Where she was going, and it was a gift to develop a more tangible, Concrete relationship to her neighborhood and its residents. We talked about the more stately sense of time one has afoot and on public transit, where things must be planned and scheduled beforehand, rather than rushed through at the last minute, and about the sense of place that can only be gained on foot. Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors -- home, car, gym, office, shops -- disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the while world rather than in interiors built up against it. +page: 9 +notes: I like the point about walking and public transit requiring more planning and that that can be better than "rushing" through. usually i think of it as the opposite, that the necessary planning and leaving early is a disadvantage of walking and public transit. also love the disconnected spaces. fits with the other idea below that to never arrive is just as half-a-journey as rushing through the journey without looking around. + +-- + +Four-legged animals are as stable as a table when all four feet are on the ground, but humans are already precariously balanced on two be-fore they begin to move. Even standing still is a feat of balance, as anyone who has watched or been a drunk knows. +page: 32-33 + +-- + +Reading the accounts of human walking, it is easy to begin to think of the Fall in terms of the falls, the innumerable spills, possible for a suddenly upright creature that must balance all its shifting weight on a single foot as it moves:, John 2Napier, in an essay on the ancient origins of walking, wrote, "Human walking is a unique activity during which the body, step by step, teeters on the edge of catastrophe... Man's bipedal mode of walking seems potentially catastrophic because only the rhythmic forward movement of first one leg and then the other keeps him from falling flat on his face." This is easiest to see in small children for whom the many aspects that will later unite seamlessly into walking are still distinct and awkward. They learn to walk by flirting with falling—they lean forward with their body and then rush to keep their legs under that body. Their plump bowed legs always seem to be lagging behind or catching up, and they often tumble into frustration before they master the art. Children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for them: the desire for that which is out of reach,for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden. And so walking begins as delayed falling, and the fall meets with the Fall. Genesis may seem out of place in a discussion of science, but it is often the scientists who have dragged it in with them, unwittingly or otherwise. The scientific stories are as much an attempt to account for who we are as any creation myth and some of them seem to hark back to the central creation myth of Western culture, that business of Adam and Eve in the Garden. +page: 33 +notes: connected to the quote above. really like the bit about children, which is 100 percent true with my experience watching the girls grow up and learn to walk. it's a controlled fall for some time and it always starts with the desire to get something that no one will get for them. Walking is autonomy at this point, or if you will, the first steps toward autonomy. + +-- + +There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in Christian pilgrimage as there is in mountaineering. To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes during a journey. Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one's body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp. We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the journey. Too, we tend to imagine life as a journey, and going on an actual expedition takes hold of that image and makes it concrete, acts it out with the imagination in a world whose geography has become spiritualized. The walker toiling along a road toward some distant place is one of the most compelling universal images of what it means to be human, depicting the individual as small and solitary in a large world, reliant on the strength of body and will. +page: 50 +notes: + +-- + +the children's books that I loved best were full of characters falling into books and pictures that became real, wandering through gardens where the statues came to life and, most famously, crossing over to the other side of the mirror, where chess pieces, flowers, and animals all were alive and temperamental. These books suggested that the boundaries between the real and the represented were not particularly fixed, and magic happened when one crossed over. +page: 70 +notes: had never really thought about it, but the books i loved as a child also fit this pattern, the narnia books fall into a picture, alice and wonderland obviously, others as well. + +-- + +Climbing is about climbing. Mountaineering, on the other hand, is still amount mountains +page: 134 + +-- + +as the great surveyor and mountaineer Clarence King recounts, when in 1871 he got to the top of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous forty-eight states, he found that "a small mound of rock was piled on the peak, and solidly built into it an arrow-shaft, pointing due west." Mountains attracted attention and long before romanticism spawned mountaineering. +page: 135 + +-- + +Though Europeans led to world in the development of modern mountaineering, that mountaineering came out of romanticism's recovery of an appreciation for natural places that much of the rest of the world had never lost +page: 135 +notes: of course it did, only white people are so fucked up as to believe that mountains would "high and hideous", "rubbish of the earth" and so on. The rest of the world wasn't so stupid. Wish that Solnit had citations for those quotes. + +-- + +the mountains so frequently portrayed in Chinese poetry and paintings were a contemplative retreat from politics and society. In China, wandering was celebrated -- "To 'wander' is the Taoist code word for becoming ecstatic," writes a scholar -- but arriving was sometimes regarded with ambiguity. One of the eighth-century poet Li Po's compositions is titled "On Visiting a Taoist Master in the Tai-T'ien Mountains and Not Finding Him," a common theme in Chinese poetry then. +page: 144 diff --git a/reading notes/the source for ancient flood stories.txt b/reading notes/the source for ancient flood stories.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..7750073 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/the source for ancient flood stories.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +title: A Short History of Progress p79 +date: 20140726 22:52:58 +tags: #readingnotes #environment #ancient + +The Empire of Ur is apparently the source of the flood stories, the runoff became so bad -- there was no topsoil left to hold rainfall -- it would just wash across the land and there was so much salt it would turn the land white when the water dried. + +-- + +The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behaviour as we saw on Easter Island: sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory. Canals were lengthened, fallow periods reduced, population increased, and the economic surplus concentrated on Ur itself to support grandiose building projects. The result was a few generations of prosperity (for the rulers), followed by a collapse from which southern Mesopotamia has never recovered. + +By 2000 B.C., scribes were reporting that the earth had "turned white." All crops, including barley, were failing. Yields fell to a third of their original levels. The Sumerians' thousand years in the sun of history came to an end. Political power shifted north to Babylon and Assyria, and much later, under Islam, to Baghdad. Northern Mesopotamia is better drained than the south, but even there the same cycle of degradation would be repeated by empire after empire, down to modern times. No one, it seems, was willing to learn from the past. Today, fully half of Iraq's irrigated land is saline — the highest proportion in the world, followed by the other two + +p79
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/reading notes/waitzkin josh the art of learning.txt b/reading notes/waitzkin josh the art of learning.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..a16fda6 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/waitzkin josh the art of learning.txt @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +title: The Art of Learning +author: Josh Waitzkin +pubyear: +edition: +readdate: September 01, 2014 03:47:50 PM +tags: non-fiction + +--- + +I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday—the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life's hidden richness—is where success, let alone happiness, emerges. +page: + + +The key was to roll with the evolving situation and contour new tactics around the principles we had discovered back home. When hit with such surprises, if you have a solid foundation, you should be fine. **Tactics come easy once principles are in the blood**. +page:238 +notes: emphasis mine + + |