From African Drums to Borges’ Library of Babel: a history of information by James Gleick

The Information - James Gleick

James Gleick wrote Chaos. The book that inspired me to write my own fractals (the function of functions z -> z + c where z and c are complex numbers and c is a complex constant). I wrote it in Java and displayed it in an applet in the browser. Slow as hell but it worked. Chaos is a great read, up to the last word.

The experience is similar reading The Information. My notes.

From African drums to the OED

Gleick guides the reader through the development of information and communication systems over the past centuries.

The book sets off with the messaging system of tribes in Africa using drums. Gleick then continues to writing and how that forms and changes the process of thinking.

“The written word – the persistent word – was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.”

The next step in the development is logic and mathematics, the development of language and dictionaries and formalization of spelling.

Gleick tells the story of the development of the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED). The first creators of the OED used Milton and Shakespeare as the foundation for this English dictionary. Shakespeare stands out as a massive contributor to English. As an inventor or inventor or first recorder of thousands of words as we have seen, he is the most quoted author in the OED as well, with no less than over thirty thousand references.

As a sidenote (and not the last for this article), where Shakespeare in English is a central foundational reference for English Language, the Statenvertaling of the Bible holds a similar position for Dutch. You could write a PhD thesis on the cultural consequences of this fundamental differences, and similarities in these language foundations: one with a creative, theatrical, literary background, the other a formal, religious one.

Computation and logic

Gleick continues with the development of computation, from the creation of logarithmic tables to Charles Babbage, who we could view a the prophet of the modern computer. Babbage thought of programming language and memory, in the 19th century, way before these terms existed in such context. Gleick tells the story about Babbage’s working relation with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. Where Babbage seemed the inventor of the computing machine before its existence, Ada was the programmer of this non-existent machine, hitting programming problems that could only 100 years later be exercised on real computers.

“How multifarious and how mutually complicated are the considerations which the working of such an engine involve. There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or lesser degree exercising a mutual influence.”

(As a sidestep: two recent books have been published on Lovelace and Babbage that I have not yet have time to read. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua – a graphic novel I am really looking forward to. And Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark.)

Charles Babbage

Leaving Babbage, Gleick brings us to the development of the telegraph, a first electric apparatus speeding communication over distances. Communications were coded, and morse code becoming a standard at some point.

The limitations of logic

The need for secrecy was needed lead to the development of cryptography. Entree Claude Shannon who introduced the science of Information theory. Shannon worked on predictability and redundancy in streams of data representing encrypted texts. Claude Shannon invented how logical operations could process information and how to build these operations in systems with relays. Shannon wanted to build these systems to prove theorems.

At about the same time, Kurt Gödel came around and proved that the ideal mathematical world of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, where all mathematical theorems could be proved by logic, was false. Gödel proved that any logical system is inconsistent or incomplete. GEBHofstadter has explained this counter-intuitive conclusion in Gödel, Escher, Bach extensively and illustratively and Gleick makes no attempt to improve on that.

Turing at the same time proved a similar notion, the Entscheidungsproblem – by Hilbert – can every proposition be proven to be true or false – and Turings answer was no. He did this through the invention of a theoretical computer, the Turing Machine.

Interestingly, the main protagonist of the book, Claude Shannon, is a secluded mathematician working for Bell Labs. At the same time as Alan Turing, and incidently or not they both worked on cryptanalysis during the war without knowing this from eachother (classified, Turing from England, Shannon from the US), and they even have worked some time at Bell Labs and met up with lunch now and then. (The same Bell labs that is the subject of Douglas Coupland’s Kitten Clone, and the company that still today provides the backbone of our information highway, The Internet.)

The computer

All this work by eventually culminated in the creation of the information processing machine, nowadays knows as the computer.

Shannon continued to develop his Information Theory, looking at quantification of predictablility and redundancy to measure information content. He conducted some tests with his wife, using a Raymond Chandler’s detective Pickup on Noon Street,

“… put his finger on a short passage at random, and asked Betty to start guessing the letter, then the next letter, then the next. The more text she saw, of course, the better her chances of guessing right.”

Shannon and Schrödinger bring physics and information theory were together in the notion of entropy. Information processing, thinking and artificial intelligence notions develop.

DNA and information theory

Information theory is found to apply to nature itself: DNA is discovered. The development of thinking of biology in term of computability, algorithms, procedures gives more insight into the building blocks of life itself. (And as an aside, if we are able to think of the biological mechanisms in terms of algorithms, can we do so too for societal mechanisms to which a human belongs. And to the intellectual developments, meaning can we also build a recipe for the development of information to knowledge to intelligence? Which would be logical in the context of the characteristic of life to move towards negative entropy.)

Richard Dawkins develops his ideas about the Selfish Gene. Which has much in common with the Antifragility thinking of Taleb. Chaitin and Kolmogorov develop a theory to measure how much information is contained in a given ‘object’. Complexity is described in computability terms. And complexity has computability problems, like Gödel’s theory and this was the Chaitin version of incompleteness.

Lastly, Gleick brings us to quantum computing, making computations on an atomic scale.

Dealing with information abundance

The book closes with a view on the proliferation of information, describing the development of Wikipedia. The amount of information we have access to nowadays is becoming a challenge in itself. There’s information in abundance, but to find useful information in the overwhelming pile is the trick. Dissemination, filtering, ordering and search becoming essential tools. This is still something we do not have under control yet.

Gleick leaves the reader with a challenge to self. Learn to deal with the amount of information available. Then I mean not to manage the information, but to being psychologically able to handle information abundance. The FOMO and threat of total information procrastination is real. We will need to learn to ignore. We will also need to our own ways to store, record, share the information we find useful or interesting.

How to manage Borges’ library of Babel.

The book is an achievement on itself. Admirable how much information (no pun intended) Gleick has been able to pack in a book.

This website is an attempt to record, organise and share information that comes to me.

Tim Robinson’s joy for precision

Tim Robinson’s books are amazingly interesting precise works of litarature. He has created a new genre of literature, a landscape biography.

With meticulous labor, Robinson in the two books Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth tells us about the history of the islands. He does this while describing his systematic hikes across the Aran Islands, painting a detailed view of the barren island.

The small Aran Islands are presented meter by meter, crag by crag, fissure by fissure.
As a mapmaker he records every limestone rock, house, barn, wall. But he also talks to the farmers. He talks about the isolation of the islanders. Their strange habits. Their faith. Their own Saint Enda of Aran. Their history.

The people of Aran were extremely poor and permanently threatened by famine. On their small rock island on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, they made a living by fishing, harvesting burning seaweed to sell the kelp (which contained iodine and alkali), and growing potatoes on their fissured rocky field fertilized with seaweed.

“Large families live of the bounties of a few small plots, and save all other income for the rent; the potato thrived on the plenteous labour of those families, the carting of sand and seaweed that created the plots out of rock, the spadework that doubled the shallow soil into ridges, the weeding and watering could be done by children. Fecundity led to overcrowding: the ridges full of low-quality potatoes vulnerable to drought, pests, diseases and prolonged salty winds that scorched their stems…” (Labyrinth)

“The Aranners distinguish about thirty types of seaweed, each with its own advantages and disadvantages as fertilizer, for various crops or as raw materials of kelp. The main division is between feamainn dhubh, blacked and feamainn dhearg, redwood. The former comprises the dark-toned Focus species that grow on the upper and middle shore, …” (Pilgrimage)

They hunt for basking sharks in wobbly boats, called currachs, made of lath and canvas …

“All available tackle – ‘spears, gaffs, bocáns, pocáns, buoys, boreógs, straimpíns, one knives and poles and chains taken from a ship wrecked at Big Cleft’ – was assembled and carried down to Port Bhéal and Dúin; a spear was attached by a rope and a cable to a chain wound around a big boulder in a depp pot-hole of the shore; five three-men in currachs were launched, a shark was eventually speared, and when it had run itself to exhaustion another team of fitted men hauled it ashore.” (Pilgrimage)

And go on life-endangering searches high on the cliffs for eggs and birds.

“Razor bills, guillemots, and black guillemots, puffins and cormorants were the birds usually taken on the cliffs. Both eggs and birds were eaten, …
…
The hunt was conducted as follows. The men would walk across the the cliffs at dusk with the rope, which was often a communal investment. One end of it would be tied around the cliff man’s waist and between his legs, and the other made fast to an iron bar driven into a crevice or wedged in a cairn on the clifftop. A team of up to eight would lower the cliff man, guided by signals from a man stationed out on a headland from which he could watch the progress of the descent. The cliff man would carry a stick to keep himself clear of the cliff face while swinging of the rope…” (Pilgrimage)

A masterpiece of scrupulous investigation. Wonderfully written with massive joy and persistence.

Design your future – Taylor Pearson on the end of jobs

Create your own job. the end of jobs

Taylor Pearson tells us in The End of Jobs. And explains how profitable this can be in today’s world.

Jobs as we know them will largely disappear. We are at the end of the Frederick Taylor work era.

Jobs are replaced by entrepreneurs. Everyone can be an entrepreneur, building a meaningful life doing what they want, now serving the long tail of markets has become profitable.

Douglas Adams’ Salmon of Doubt on Beatles, Bach, Wodehouse, technology, Apple, atheism and hurling the chairs around.

Douglas Adams died young. Aged 49, in 2001.

But in his short life he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Enough for a meaningful life.

The Salmon of Doubt bundles the unpublished work he left on his Mac when he died.

When I read about this book first, it promised to be the unfinished sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But it is not. At best a very very little bit.

The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

The first number of stories are articles Adams wrote for different newspapers and magazines. After 2 thrids into it, the book finally gets to the proposed draft for the 6th sequel of the Hitchhikers Guide. But this part is prefaced with a remark by Adams saying a lot of the material in The Salmon does not work and could be yanked out.
Most of the stories following are unfinished Dirk Gently chapters. Dirk Gently is a bizar detective novel series created by Adams. A different topic than the Hitchhiker’s Guide, very amusing though.

The book starts right off with an introduction by Terry Jones (Monty Python, yes that Terry Jones).

“You are, without doubt, holding in your hands one of the best-introduced books in the English language. We hope you enjoy the Introduction to the New Edition that follows this Introduction to it and continue to read on even into the book itself. “

He is referring to the fact this is the third introduction in sequence to the new edition of the book.

“But with this handsome volume, I hope that Douglas’s work has finally achieved the full complement of Introductions that it deserves. Perhaps future editions might even boast a Foreword and a Foreword to the Foreword, so as to keep Douglas’s wonderful writing to the forefront of properly prefaced literature. Please enjoy this book and, when you have finished it, do not leave it on the train.”

The books has gathered published and unpublished articles and parts of books that are very entertaining but also provide a peak into the mind of the man who created The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, giving the number 42 its special meaning.
He talks about his love for The Beatles.

“It bewildered me that no one else could hear it: impossible harmonies and part playing you had never heard in pop songs before. The Beatles were obviously just putting all this stuff in for some secret fun of their own, and it seemed exciting to me that people could have fun in that way.”

To Adams the English writer P.G. Wodehouse is just as important to English literature as Milton, Shakespeare and Keats.

PG. Wodehouse

“Shakespeare? Milton? Keats? How can I possibly mention the author of Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin and Pigs Have Wings in the same breath as these men? He’s just not serious! He doesn’t need to be serious.”

And Bach.

“The familiarity of the Brandenburgs should not blind us to their magnitude. I’m convinced that Bach is the greatest genius who ever walked among us, and the Brandenburgs are what he wrote when he was happy.”

Technology becomes almost an obsession for Adams. He can be real nerdy, is a gadget freak and a life long Apple adept. He writes about the limitations of the technology at that time and the improvements he wants to see. Some are quite predictive. He fulminates about how the different technologies on his Mac do not integrate, and how he wants to see improvements.

“What I want to be able to do is this:

– Turn on the machine.
– Work.
– Have a bit of fun provided I’ve done enough of 2, which is rarely, but that’s another issue.”

(That latter refers to his reputation of being unable to deliver in time and missing deadlines. “I love declines, I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” But that’s another issue.)

“What I’m talking about is the death of the “application.” I don’t mean just when they “unexpectedly” quit, I mean it’s time we simply got rid of them.”

He wants his problem of having different devices and still share everything he does on any device. Today IT nerds will start yelling CLOUD immediately before he could have finished his sentence.

“All I want to do is print from my portable. (Poor baby.) That isn’t all I want, in fact. I want to be able regularly to transfer my address book and diary stacks backward and forward between my portable and my IIx. And all my current half-finished chapters. And anything else I’m tinkering with, which is the reason why my half-finished chapters are half-finished. In other words, I want my portable to appear on the desktop of my IIx.”

He wants to get rid of “technology”. His definition of technology is interesting.

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.”

The world changes rapidly and Adams describes the need for a vision on what the world will look like in the no so far future, as well as our inability to do so. His reasoning precedes the scientific works of Daniel Gilbert – Stumbling On Happiness – who writes about his scientific findings in similar terms.

“Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game. But increasingly it’s a game we all have to play because the world is changing so fast and we need to have some sort of idea of what the future’s actually going to be like because we are going to have to live there, probably next week.”

“We were wrong about trains, we were wrong about planes, we were wrong about radio, we were wrong about phones, we were wrong about . . . well, for a voluminous list of the things we have been wrong about”

Relating the inability to predict the future to the application of technology, we all have heard some of the horrible technology predictions, for example Worst Tech Predictions).

The one Douglas Adams mentions I had not heard yet, but is equally amusing. Followed by a fabulous prediction from himself.

“One such that I spotted recently was a statement made in February by a Mr. Wayne Leuck, vice-president of engineering at USWest, the American phone company. Arguing against the deployment of high-speed wireless data connections, he said, “Granted, you could use it in your car going sixty miles an hour, but I don’t think too many people are going to be doing that.” Just watch. That’s a statement that will come back to haunt him. Satellite navigation. Wireless Internet. As soon as we start mapping physical location back into shared information space, we will trigger yet another explosive growth in Internet applications. At least—that’s what I predict. I could, of course, be wildly wrong.”

Adams defines himself as an radical Atheist. And he is very serious about this.

“So, I do not believe-that-there-is-no-god. I am, however, convinced that there is no god, which is a totally different stance and takes me on to my second reason.”

He has given this a lot of thought and the chapter on the topic in this book is a logical flow of reasoning that brings Adams to the conclusion that there is no real god, but there is an artificial god.
Adams argues (deduces) that god is what defines life.

“So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.”

He links his view on god to his insight in technology and computers. He argues that the complexity of life is not something specific to life itself, but that this can be seen in other forms as well, such as computer programs.

“The computer forms a third age of perspective, because suddenly it enables us to see how life works. Now, that is an extraordinarily important point because it becomes self-evident that life, that all forms of complexity, do not flow downward, they flow upward, and there’s a whole grammar that anybody who is used to using computers is now familiar with, which means that evolution is no longer a particular thing, because anybody who’s ever looked at the way a computer program works, knows that very, very simple iterative pieces of code, each line of which is tremendously straightforward, give rise to enormously complex phenomena in a computer—and by enormously complex phenomena”

Adams of course does not give references to his information source, but Mandelbrot and others have shown (read James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science) that from very simple mathematics, extremely complex phenomena emerge.

It is also unclear of Adams may have been aware of the work of Stephen Wolfram, who published his bible A New Kind of Science on this topic, in 2002, one year after Adams’ death. (Just noticed that, interestingly, both Gleick and Wolfram books refer to the field they  describe in their books as a new science. I am not sure either of them is right in that respect.)

And since there is no longer a God needed to explain the origin of the complexity of life, God in Adams’ definition becomes the explanation of the complexity itself.

“I suspect that as we move farther and farther into the field of digital or artificial life, we will find more and more unexpected properties begin
to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn’t an actual God, there is an artificial God, and we should probably bear that in mind.”

Adams realizes his vulnerable position as an atheist and as a person discussing the existence or even necessity of god. His friend Richard Dawkins was heavily criticized at the time about his opinions on religion (this was years before The God Delusion). And he finds this incomprehensible.

“So we are used to not challenging religious ideas, but it’s very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally, there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.”

Hence he ends his reasoning on this typic in typical Douglas Adams style.

“That is my debating point, and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!”

Progress in Europe – Labyrint Europa

Got up early to get a head start on my collegues.

But Nooteboom’s Labyrint Europa came in between.

The story about the recession in the 1970s should be a awareness starter for all swayed-by-the-issues-of-the-day politicians. Especially an interesting analysis of Enoch Powell’s affairs. Very relevant today, this more intelligent and eloquent British predecessor of our Geert Wilders.

Interestingly, Nooteboom in the book contemplates when he would be able to travel through Europe without having to change money and with a European passport in his pocket. In a wheel chair, he assumes.

He wrote this in 1977, and we can say things have been achieved in Europe  after all.

Keep Buggering On – or – The Obstacle is the Way

The Obstacle is the Way

I predict Ryan Holiday will break the world record for writing the most quotable texts.

His The Obstacle Is The Way is a book about stoicism, which has a lot in common with Buddhism (I just finished Buddhism for Dummies).

Marcus Aurelius is Holiday’s big example, the book’s name-giver, and its core idea.

“And from what we know, he truly saw each and every one of these obstacles as an opportunity to practice some virtue: patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity.”

And he himself quotes non-obvious but remarkable people.

He quotes Henry Rollins. Yes, Henry Rollins from Black Flag – the last person I had expected in this book.

Henry Rollins
Henry Rollins

I searched and found where this quote came from. Here is the Henry Rollins quote on being. Or rather his definition being a hero.

“People are getting a little desperate. People might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being   person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.”

Montaigne
Montaigne

Holiday quotes Montaigne.

I did not know that Montaigne had a near-death experience that became a turning point in his life. I found interesting but not very consistent stories on this here in the Guardian, on NPR and here.

The book maintains a strong, compelling tone.

I made a shitload of notes, as Tim Ferriss would say. All of them make you think. Some make me feel like a lame and lazy sod.

“We’re dissatisfied with our jobs, our relationships, our place in the world. We’re trying to get somewhere, but something stands in the way. So we do nothing. “

I plead guilty.

Aurelius so inspires Ryan Holiday that he has divided this book into three parts based on Aurelius’s summary of what is needed.

“It’s three interdependent, interconnected, and fluidly contingent disciplines: Perception, Action, and the Will.”

On perception.

The way a person handles his emotions and is aware of them is a key to mastering all situations.

“Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness – these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel  this way; we choose to give in to such  feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to. And he provides clear guidance to how to go about keeping your nerves under control and stay calm.”

“To be objective, To control emotions and keep an even keel,  To choose to see the good in a situation, To steady our nerves, To ignore what disturbs or limits others, To place things in perspective, To revert to the present moment, To focus on what can be controlled. This is how you see the opportunity within the obstacle. It does not happen on its own. It is a process — one that results from self-discipline and logic. “

He warns us that when we aim high, unpleasant things will haunt us, and this is where self-control is your only way to stay up.

“When we aim high, pressure and stress obligingly come along for the ride. Stuff is going to happen that catches us off guard, threatens or scares us. Surprises (unpleasant ones, mostly) are almost guaranteed. The risk of being overwhelmed is always there. In these situations, talent is not the most sought-after characteristic.”

According to Holiday, The First Duke of Marlborough attributed his success to:

“tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.”

But who is this guy John Churchill? His name is really John Churchill, son of Sir Winston Churchill, sic! But this Winston lived from 1620 to 1688. And yes, our 20th-century Winston Churchill is a descendant.

John Churchill - The First Duke of Marlborough
John Churchill – The First Duke of Marlborough

I love these details.

“Remaining calm is one of the most important skills to be learned to manage fear. And it can be trained.”

“Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It’s a release valve.”

“The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It’s the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions.”

“Or try Marcus’s question: Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness?”

Now, clearly, that all sounds great in theory, but there are tools that help you achieve this coolness.

“Perspective is everything. That is, when you can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over you.”

“So what if you focused on what you can change? That’s where you can make a difference.”

Ryan Holiday quotes Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Who?

Another fascinating detail, to me. I found she is a 19th century writer. Most known by the Little House series of books on which the television series The Little House on the Prairie was based. She had really lived a LittleHouseOnThePrairie life, as a settler in Kansas.

But here is why Ryan Holiday quotes her:

“As Laura Ingalls Wilder put it: “There is good in everything, if only we look for it.””

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Laura Ingalls Wilder

Or some unattributed quote:

““That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is not a cliché but fact.”

On Action. Waiting for things to happen will not move things in your desired direction. Making things happen does.

“If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.”

“And again, it is in the act and persistence , not so much in the talent you have.”

He elaborates on this point that talent is often overrated.

“Too many people think that great victories like Grant’s and Edison’s came from a flash of insight. That they cracked the problem with pure genius. In fact, it was the slow pressure, repeated from many different angles, the elimination of so many other more promising options, that slowly and surely churned the solution to the top of the pile. Their genius was unity of purpose, deafness to doubt, and the desire to stay at it.”

Destiny is not the goal; it is the process of achieving that goal, and you should focus on the process if you want to move forward.

“Okay, you’ve got to do something very difficult. Don’t focus on that. Instead break it down into pieces. Simply do what you need to do right now. And do it well. And then move on to the next thing. Follow the process and not the prize. “

“The process is about doing the right things, right now.”

And get your boots dirty.

“Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.”

Bang!

“Think progress, not perfection. Under this kind of force, obstacles break apart. They have no choice. Since you’re going around them or making them irrelevant, there is nothing for them to resist.”

On will.

If your have the right mindset, you are taking actions. Now it is the time to get going.

“To be great at something takes practice. Obstacles and adversity are no different.”

Anticipate hardships.

“Always prepared for disruption, always working that disruption into our plans. Fitted, as they say, for defeat or victory. And let’s be honest, a pleasant surprise is a lot better than an unpleasant one.”

About persistence and perseverance.

“Persistence. Everything directed at one problem, until it breaks.”

“Persistence is an action. Perseverance is a matter of will. One is energy. The other, endurance.”

And determination.

Determination, if you think about it, is invincible Nothing other than death can prevent us from following Churchill’s old acronym: KBO. Keep Buggering On.

And then we have arrived at Churchill we know, Sir Winston …

Bryson’s Shakespeare: of genius and confabulations

The Dutch subtitle of Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare is “Een biografie” (A Biography). I read the book and found this subtitle misplaced.

The subtitle of the english original is “The World as a Stage”.  How does that translate to “Een biografie”?bryson shakespeare nl

Bryson writes right in the beginning of the book that very little is known about Shakespeare. So little, that you realistically can not expect more from a book about Shakespeare than the description of a handful of meagre facts, augmented with assumptions, phantasies and preliminary conclusions about the life and times Shakespeare.

Bryson even admits this is the reason the book has such a modest modest size.shakespears_bryson-en

Austin Kleon and Johnny Rotten: a desire to constantly evolve

I hate self-promotion.

To start with the same introduction that Austin Kleon uses at the beginning of his book Show Your Work.

I just read Walden by Henry David Thoreau, a book that I had to let go of. I could not consume these elaborations on his simplified way of life any longer. However, I found his worldview interesting. I also liked the way he exchanges philosophical elaborations with down-to-earth statistics and lists of stuff he bought and sold for his house or from his gardening.

But Show Your Work reads very well. It is practical and motivational.

And the conclusion: Do The Work. This keeps coming back so often. Pressfield wrote a book about it. Get the fuck out of their chair. Start typing.

Kleon takes the myth out of most things. Everything is basically common sense. Don’t bullshit. Find an easy way of sharing work.

Do not do networking, but let the network do the work while you add value to your network.

The amateur is king: the amateur is not afraid to do things a new way, another way than the established professionals.

Naivety = openness to new things.

“Watching amateurs at work can also inspire us to attempt the work ourselves. “I saw the Sex Pistols,” said New Order frontman Bernard Sumner. ‘They were terrible. . . . I wanted to get up and be terrible with them.’ Raw enthusiasm is contagious.”

Interesting, as Johnny Rotten/Lydon has always referred to punk as a similar notion:

“Punk is a state of mind open to new ideas, with a desire to constantly evolve, to find the next step, not only in music but also in the world around us.”

Full article (and the french original article): Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten On The Real Meaning Of Punk

“I constantly try to deliver this message: “Admire someone’s work, but don’t imitate it, don’t lose your personality.”

Kleon is a Buddhist, I think. He writes:

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

Some time go I read Buddhism for Dummies, Jonathan Landaw, Stephan Bodian, and Gudrun Bühnemann:

“Buddhism has always considered death to be one of the most powerful teachers, but this doesn’t make it a joyless or life-denying religion. Buddhism simply acknowledges that death has an unparalleled capacity to force you to look deeply into your own heart and mind and recognize what really matters.”

Kleon later on expresses:

“The experience of shaping the work is what matters”

Klein does bother about sharing his knowledge and experience with competitors. He knows his value. He even put it stronger as a competitive advantage:

“Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it.”

The rich mindset, the idea muscle and on-the-side-business

the rich employee

A whole book in James Altucher’s typical style. 

Packed. Informative. Entertaining. A little chaotic. Jumping quickly between styles, digressing, then getting back on track. Interlaced with stories illustrating his points.

Do expect the “rich” in the title to be taken literally. Although the book offers monetary advice, the “rich” mostly relates to a mindset.

And it is not just aimed at employees either.

Typical James. Very commercially smart title to broaden the audience for the book. It suggests richness is also achievable for the employees. And of course there are many more employees than non-employees (probably implying entrepreneurs). And these employees are craving to be rich. In many ways.

antifragile

I am thinking how you would summarize his main idea. Independence comes to mind. Make yourself independent from your employer. Make your value independent from where you work. Make sure you have plan B and C. Prepare for disaster.
Become antifragile, comes to mind (Nassim Taleb).

Even become independent of your own streams of thought, I mean do not let them dominate you. Get on top of them.
That is probably a very buddhist idea

If you have read James’ post you may have seen a lot of the content already.

Start a business on the side.

Influence - cialdini

Refers to Cialdini a couple of times. Read that one some time ago. Influence. Recommend that too.

Read about this idea muscle, how important it is to train it. And then how lazy i am writing down the stuff racing through my mind during the day. Ideas I then forget because I don not write them down. I think starting to even write down ideas you have even how stupid they may sound is a great idea.

One of these is an idea for an internet media company. Any media but video. Well, also video, but not just. Podcasts, radio, whatever.
I do not understand why cable companies do not heavily invest in this. The carrier is commodity. Content is king. That is what they said in 2000 about the internet, refering to web sites, when the carier was still important (or rather: limited. It was important because badnwidth was so scarce). And today it is even more true, now all deregulation of cables has been realised. Sorry, I mean with the disappearance of the big state owned telephone / cable companies.
That was one of my ideas today.
It probably exists already, but I am too lazy to go find out now.

Another idea, for Amazon kindle. You can put books purchased elsewhere on your Kindle (using Calibre for that great stuff), but notes will not be sync-ed with your kindle.amazon.com. Provide it. I guess it is a stupid measure to make sure you purchase your books on amazon. Is there already a service extracting notes from your kindle? O I googled and found Calibre might be able to. Will check that out.

Another one: be able to search books and add to wishlist from Kindle.

Another one: integration with Evernote (typing this in evernote).

James tosses the idea of choose yourself meetups. Chooseyourself.me. AA type gatherings. Might work, but definitely not for me. Nor James I am sure. Too shy.

References in the back great: to Fedora training creation – O now I have a new business idea for courses. I can turn any business problem from my job, generalise it and create a (micro) course out of it. In the media company too? Was just talking to my wife last night how out of date the current system for higher education is, with all the new media courses (for free) coming online.

That’s it.

Nice read.