“A kilogram of mass would convert into approximately 25 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. The energy in the mass of one raisin could supply most of New York City’s energy needs for a day.”
—Einstein: His Life and Universe (Walter Isaacson)
Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye
Amazon: “In Sit Down and Shut Up, Brad Warner tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, the Shobogenzo by 13th-century Zen master Dogen. Illuminating Dogenâs enigmatic teachings in plain language, Warner intertwines sharp philosophical musings on sex, evil, anger, meditation, enlightenment, death, God, sin, and happiness with an exploration of the power and pain of the punk rock ethos.”
This book got a lot of my highlighter. A few examples below:
“There are two basic kinds of thought. There are thoughts that pop up unannounced and uninvited. These are just the results of previous thoughts and experiences that have left their traces in the neural pathways of our brains. The other kind of thought is when we grab on to one of these streams of energy and start playing with it.”
“Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing.”
“Thoughts are nothing more than electrical activity, changes in the organic chemistry of the brain.”
“Words cannot capture what your life really is. […] All humankind’s problems today stem solely from our inability to see that words are just words.”
“Everything you ever do is always, always, always a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
“Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It’s the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world.” (Amazon)
I’ve been creeping in this direction for a while. Never on FB; deleted my Twitter account back in 2016; and said goodbye to Google+ last year. But my world is still noisier than I’d like and I got some good ideas from this book. Here’s a few excerpts:
“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The App Store wants your soul.”
“Checking your “likes” is the new smoking.” — Bill Maher
“(Smart phones are) slot machines in our pockets.”
“What’s the single biggest factor shaping our lives today?” (Our screens)
“We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.”
“The iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind.”
“You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.”
“A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.”
“Assuming that you use Facebook, list the most important things it provides you—the particular activities that you would really miss if you were forced to stop using the service altogether. Now imagine that Facebook started charging you by the minute. How much time would you really need to spend in the typical week to keep up with your list of important Facebook activities?”
Excerpts from Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee.
Imagine a stew of unregulated capitalism, addictive technology, and authoritarian values, combined with Silicon Valley’s relentlessness and hubris, unleashed on billions of unsuspecting users.
The most likely case is that the technology and business model of Facebook and others will continue to undermine democracy, public health, privacy, and innovation until a countervailing power, in the form of government intervention or user protest, forces change.
Surveillance, the sharing of user data, and behavioral modification are the foundation of Facebook’s success.
When users are riled up, they consume and share more content. Dispassionate users have relatively little value to Facebook.
Facebook is the fourth most valuable company in America, despite being only fifteen years old, and its value stems from its mastery of surveillance and behavioral modification.
It turns out that connecting 2.2 billion people on a single network does not naturally produce happiness for all. It puts pressure on users, first to present a desirable image, then to command attention in the form of Likes or shares from others. In such an environment, the loudest voices dominate, which can be intimidating. As a result, we follow the human instinct to organize ourselves into clusters or tribes.
The competition for attention across the media and technology spectrum rewards the worst social behavior. Extreme views attract more attention, so platforms recommend them.
Research suggests that people who accept one conspiracy theory have a high likelihood of accepting a second one.
Belonging is stronger than facts.
The Russians might have invented a new kind of warfare, one perfectly suited to a fading economic power looking to regain superpower status.
Technology tends to reflect the values of the people who create them.
When a company grows from nothing to 2.2 billion active users and forty billion dollars in revenues in only fourteen years, you can be sure of three things: First, the original idea was brilliant. Second, execution of the business plan had to be nearly flawless. And third, at some point along the way, the people who manage the company will lose perspective. If everything your company touches turns into gold for years on end, your executives will start to believe the good things people say about them. They will view their mission as exalted. They will reject criticism. They will ask, “If the critics are so smart, why aren’t they so successful and rich as we are?”
On Facebook, information and disinformation look the same; the only difference is that disinformation generates more revenue, so it gets much better treatment.
Huge amounts of data are available. Campaigns can buy a list of two hundred million voting-age Americans with fifteen hundred data points per person from a legitimate data broker for seventy-five thousand dollars.
Where Orwell worried about the burning of books, Huxley argued that the greater risk would be citizen no longer wanting to read.
Facebook is a threat to democracy.
Financial historian William J. Bernstein explores how communication tools shaped human history. Among the book’s many narratives:
Below are some excerpts from the book: Continue reading
Excerpts from Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff.
There’s a reason for our current predicament: an anti-human agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions, from education and religion to civics and media.
Thinking, feeling, connected people undermine the institutions that would control them. […] Our institutions and technologies aren’t designed to extend our human nature, but to mitigate and repress it.
It doesn’t take much to tilt a healthy social landscape toward an individualist or repressive one. A scarcity of resources, a hostile neighboring tribe, a warlord looking for power, and elite seeking to maintain its authority, or a corporation pursuing a monopoly all foster antisocial environments and behaviors. Continue reading
I have 825 books in my LibraryThing. I started using the site in 2005 just after it launched. I’ve been tagging the books in my catalog for years but just got around to putting them into Collections. Philosophy & Religion for example.
“When the original Land Rover had been drawn up, there had been no proper styling team at Solihull. The appearance of the vehicle had been dictated partly by its intended function and partly by manufacturing requirements, and nobody had worried too much about what it looked like. This was, after all, a commercial vehicle and buyers were unlikely to set too much store by aesthetics as long as it did the intended job.”
— Land Rover: 65 Years of the 4 x 4 Workhorse by James Taylor (Amazon)
I received this as a Christmas gift. I don’t know if you would have to own and drive one of these old trucks to appreciate the Land Rover story. Maybe. Packed with history.
“In his book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” Kai-Fu Lee, a well-known artificial-intelligence expert, venture capitalist and former president of Google China, argues that China and Silicon Valley will lead the world in AI. But his highly readable book covers a lot of other ground as well, and among the most interesting insights are his descriptions of the differences between Chinese and Silicon Valley tech culture.” (Washington Post review) Not quite finished but here are some excerpts:
If artificial intelligence is the new electricity, Chinese entrepreneurs will be the tycoons and tinkerers who electrify everything from household appliances to homeowners’ insurance. […] Ambitious mayors across China are scrambling to turn their cities into showcases for new AI applications. They’re plotting driverless trucking routes, installing facial recognition systems on public transportation, and hooking traffic grids into “city brains” that optimize flows.
China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. […] The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.
Adoption of mobile payments happened at lightning speed. By the end of 2016, it was hard to find a shop in a major (Chinese) city that did not accept mobile payments. […] By the end of 2017, 65 percent of China’s over 753 million smartphone users had enabled mobile payments. […] It got to the point where beggars on the streets of Chinese cities began hanging pieces of paper around their necks with printouts of two QR codes, one for Alipay and one for WeChat. […]
For 2017, total transactions on China’s mobile payment platforms reportedly surpassed $ 17 trillion—greater than China’s GDP. […] Data from mobile payments is currently generating the richest maps of consumer activity the world has ever known, far exceeding the data from traditional credit-card purchases or online activity captured by e-commerce players like Amazon or platforms like Google and Yelp. […] Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing.
U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R& D budget.
Between 2007 and 2017, China went from having zero high-speed rail lines to having more miles of high-speed rail operational than the rest of the world combined.
It no longer makes sense to think of oneself as “going online.” When you order a full meal just by speaking a sentence from your couch, are you online or offline? When your refrigerator at home tells your shopping cart at the store that you’re out of milk, are you moving through a physical world or a digital one?In the United States we build self-driving cars to adapt to our existing roads because we assume the roads can’t change. In China, there’s a sense that everything can change—including current roads. Indeed, local officials are already modifying existing highways, reorganizing freight patterns, and building cities that will be tailor-made for driverless cars.
Much of today’s white-collar workforce is paid to take in and process information, and then make a decision or recommendation based on that information—which is precisely what AI algorithms do best.
Just finished the latest Harry Bosch novel (Dark Sacred Night) but but we really can’t call it that. Right there on the cover it says “A Ballad and Bosch Novel.” In 2017 author Michael Connelly introduced the character Renee Ballard in The Late Show and she gets equal billing with Harry in the new book.
In the previous novel (Two Kinds of Truth) Harry was getting on in years. 68 by my count. In this latest story, Renee does some of the more physical stuff it would be difficult to imagine someone Harry’s age doing. He must be getting close to the big seven-oh.
This seems like a real challenge for an author with a beloved character that’s been around for a lot of years. Lucas Davenport — the main guy in John Sanford’s Prey series — is getting on in years but Sandford gave us Virgil Flowers some years ago and he could bring Kidd out of mothballs. I try not to think about how old Lucas Davenport is for the same reason I don’t think about how old my dog is. I don’t want to know.
The late Sue Grafton froze Kinsey Millhone in the 80s but that ruled out tech like mobile phones and personal computers. I much prefer Connelly’s (and Sandford’s) approach: let the characters age. Teaming Renee and Harry in this new book worked for me. They make a good team.