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564. The $64 Tomato

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Frank and Lisanne

Author:    William Alexander

Genre:   Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Environment, Food, Nature

304 pages, published March 2, 2007

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Bill Alexander writes about his struggles to create an ideal garden on the acreage that comes with a house he and his wife buy in the Hudson River Valley of New York.  What follows is an adventure rivaling the Perils of Pauline.

Quotes 

“Gardening is, by its very nature, an expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. No matter how bad this year was, there’s always next year. Experience doesn’t count.”

 

“The great, terrifying existentialist question: If you were doomed to live the same life over and over again for eternity, would you choose the life you are living now? The question is interesting enough, but I’ve always thought the point of asking it is really the unspoken, potentially devastating follow-up question. That is, if the answer is no, then why are you living the life you are living now? Stop making excuses , and do something about it.”

 

“Environmentalists blame the farmers for overdosing with pesticides, and the farmers blame the consumers for demanding blemish-free fruit.”

 

 “One event is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, and three a pattern.”

 

“but I had set the precedent of declaring my preference for the solitary pleasures of gardening over social events.”

 

“Well, ah don’t weed; ah cultivate. (As it turns out, ah will cultivate a lot.) Whereas weeding evokes images of backbreaking labor, kneeling under a broad-brimmed hat while hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard, cultivating suggests nurturing, caring for tender shoots, feeding, and raising. All of which you accomplish, of course, by kneeling and hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard.”

 

My Take

The $64 Tomato was a very fun read.  With acerbic and humorous anectdotes, author Bill Alexander brings to life his mighty struggles to create the perfect garden.  This book confirmed my life long aversion to the big garden and made me happy with the few potted herbs and plants that I maintain along with the volunteers who populate our outdoor mountain area.

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561. Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bill Perkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, Personal Finance, Happiness, Self Improvement, Business, Psychology, Economics

240 pages, published July 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The premise of Die with Zero is that too many people save all of their lives for their retirement and that by the time they retire they can’t enjoy their money.  Instead, author Bill Perkins advocates a different approach to spending where you can maximize your enjoyment of your money throughout your life.

Quotes 

“At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85! At the lower end, retirees with less than $200,000 saved up for retirement spent a higher percentage (as you might expect, since they had less to spend overall)—but even this group’s median members had spent down only one-quarter of their assets 18 years after retirement.”

 

“You might think that as people get older, they spend money more freely out of the sheer desire to make the most of it before it’s truly too late. But the opposite tends to happen. In general, spending among American households declines as people age. For example, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that in 2017, average annual spending for households headed by 55-to-64-year-olds was $65,000; average spending fell to $55,000 for those between 65 and 74; and spending fell again to $42,000 for those 75 and older. This overall decline occurred despite a rise in healthcare expenses, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment, were much lower. The decline in spending over time was even more acute for retirees with more than $1 million in assets, according to separate research conducted by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which analyzed data from more than half a million of its customers.”

 

“The insurance companies that create annuities often make them seem like investments,” he wrote in a recent explainer about annuities. “But really they’re more like insurance.” Lieber went on: “Like insurance to stave off financial disaster, an annuity is something you purchase to guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.” In fact, thinking of annuities as insurance makes them a lot more sensible than thinking of them as investments—because as investments they are not good at all. But that’s not their goal—their goal is to insure you against the risk of outliving your money.”

 

“It’s called consumption smoothing. Our incomes might vary from one month or one year to another, but that doesn’t mean our spending should reflect those variations—we would be better off if we evened out those variations. To do that, we need to basically transfer money from years of abundance into the leaner years. That’s one use of savings accounts. But in my case, I had been using my savings account totally backwards—I was taking money away from my starving younger self to give to my future wealthier self! No wonder Joe called me an idiot.”

 

 

My Take

Die with Zero met one of my basic criteria for a non-fiction book, e.g. it made me think about things in a new way.  My husband Scot and I retired in 2020 (after several years of tapering off) in our early and mid 50’s and have already adopted a lot of the ideas Perkins advocates.  We are spending a lot of money on travel to experience as much of the world as possible before we are too old and/or infirm to do so.  We also plan to use our money to help our kids while we are still alive and it will have the most benefit. We don’t plan to “die with zero,” but we do plan to maximize our enjoyment of life while we can.

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556. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Pat Walsh

Author:   Martin Luther King, Jr.

Genre:   Non Fiction, Race, History

Summary

Stride Toward Freedom tells the story of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955 led by Martin Luther King, Jr. that changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement.  Written by Dr. King, it includes his letters, speeches and a first hand account of the 50,000 Blacks who incorporated the  principles of nonviolence into their fight for equality.

Quotes 

“[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.”

 

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”

 

“…the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”

 

“There are several specific things that the church can do. First, it should try to get to the ideational roots of race hate, something that the law cannot accomplish. All race prejudice is based upon fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings, usually groundless. The church can be of immeasurable help in giving the popular mind direction here. Through its channels of religious education, the church can point out the irrationality of these beliefs. It can show that the idea of a superior or inferior race is a myth that has been completely refuted by anthropological evidence. It can show that Negroes are not innately inferior in academic, health, and moral standards. It can show that, when given equal opportunities, Negroes can demonstrate equal achievement.”

 

“The mere fact that we live in the United States means that we are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door. The racial problem will be solved in America to the degree that every American considers himself personally confronted with it. Whether one lives in the heart of the Deep South or on the periphery of the North, the problem of injustice is his problem; it is his problem because it is America’s problem.”

 

“God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men, and brown men, and yellow men; God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.”

 

“There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North which is truly liberal, a liberalism that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the Deep South. It is one thing to agree that the goal of integration is morally and legally right; it is another thing to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal of integration—the former is intellectual assent, the latter is actual belief. These are days that demand practices to match professions. This is no day to pay lip service to integration; we must pay life service to it.”

 “Economic insecurity strangles the physical and cultural growth of its victims. Not only are millions deprived of formal education and proper health facilities but our most fundamental social unit—the family—is tortured, corrupted, and weakened by economic insufficiency. When a Negro man is inadequately paid, his wife must work to provide the simple necessities for the children. When a mother has to work she does violence to motherhood by depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection; often they are poorly cared for by others or by none—left to roam the streets unsupervised. It is not the Negro alone who is wronged by a disrupted society; many white families are in similar straits. The Negro mother leaves home to care for—and be a substitute mother for—white children, while the white mother works. In this strange irony lies the promise of future correction.”

 

 “The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.”

 

“Since crime often grows out of a sense of futility and despair, Negro parents must be urged to give their children the love, attention, and sense of belonging that a segregated society deprives them of.”

 

“Casualties of war keep alive post war hate.”

 

“During a crisis period, a desperate attempt is made by the extremists to influence the minds of the liberal forces in the ruling majority. So, for example, in the present transition white Southerners attempt to convince Northern whites that the Negroes are inherently criminal.”

 

“The accusation is made without reference to the true nature of the situation. Environmental problems of delinquency are interpreted as evidence of racial criminality. Crises arising in Northern schools are interpreted as proofs that Negroes are inherently delinquent. The extremists do not recognize that these school problems are symptoms of urban dislocation, rather than expressions of racial deficiency. Criminality and delinquency are not racial; poverty and ignorance breed crime whatever the racial group may be.”

 

“Many white men fear retaliation. The job of the Negro is to show them that they have nothing to fear, that the Negro understands and forgives and is ready to forget the past. He must convince the white man that all he seeks is justice, for both himself and the white man.”

 

“After the opposition had failed to negotiate us into a compromise, it turned to subtler means for blocking the protest; namely, to conquer by dividing. False rumors were spread concerning the leaders of the movement. Negro workers were told by their white employers that their leaders were only concerned with making money out of the movement. Others were told that the Negro leaders rode big cars while they walked. During this period the rumor was spread that I had purchased a brand new Cadillac for myself and a Buick station wagon for my wife. Of course none of this was true.”

 

 “Even where the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference to this obligation of citizenship. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.”

 

“As he continued, one could see obvious disappointment on the faces of the white committee members. By trying to convince the Negroes that I was the main obstacle to a solution they had hoped to divide us among ourselves. But Ralph’s statement left no doubt. From this moment on the white group saw the futility of attempting to negotiate us into a compromise.”

 

“Many of them had predicted violence, and such predictions are always a conscious or unconscious invitation to action. When people, especially in public office, talk about bloodshed as a concomitant of integration, they stir and arouse the hoodlums to acts of destruction, and often work under cover to bring them about. In Montgomery several public officials had predicted violence, and violence there had to be if they were to save face.”

 

“I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

 

“Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for “the least of these.”

 

“One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.”

 

“The American racial revolution has been a revolution to “get in” rather than to overthrow. We want a share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. This goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent. If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down, the factory. If one needs more adequate education, shooting the principal will not help. If housing is the goal, only building and construction will produce that end. To destroy anything, person or property, cannot bring us closer to the goal that we seek.”

 

“It seems to me that this is the method that must guide the actions of the Negro in the present crisis in race relations. Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system. The Negro must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as a citizen, but he must not use inferior methods to gain it. He must never come to terms with falsehood, malice, hate, or destruction.”

 

“…Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely ‘neighbor-regarding concern for others,’ which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets. Therefore, Agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both. If one loves an individual merely on account of his friendliness, he loves him for the sake of the benefits to be gained from the friendship, rather than for the friend’s own sake. Consequently, the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.”

 

My Take

While a short book, Strive Toward Freedom packs a lot of punch.  I learned a lot about the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s moral philosophy, strategy and tactics.  I came away with an increased respect (from an already high level) for this extraordinary man and the movement he championed.

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555. Seeing Further: Ideas, Endeavours, Discoveries and Disputes — The Story of Science Through 350 Years of the Royal Society

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Art Drake

Author:    Bill Bryson (Editor, Introduction), James Gleick (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Henry Petroski (Contributor), Georgina Ferrey (Contributor), Steve Jones (Contributor), Philip Ball (Contributor), Paul C.W. Davies (Contributor), Ian Stewart (Contributor), John D. Barrow (Contributor), Oliver Morton (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Maggie Gee (Contributor), Stephen H. Schneider (Contributor), Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Gregory Benford (Contributor), Martin J. Rees (Contributor), Margaret Wertheim (Contributor), Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Rebecca Goldstein (Contributor), Simon Schaffer (Contributor), Richard Holmes (Contributor), Richard Fortey (Contributor), Richard Dawkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Essays, Science, Nature

490 pages, published 2010

Reading Format:   e-book on Hoopla

Summary

Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, and with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey, Seeing Further was compiled to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society.  The Society was started after a small audience listened to a lecture by  twenty-eight year old Christopher Wren on astronomy with the intention of promoting the accumulation of useful knowledge.  Since its inception, the

Royal Society has fostered scientific exploration and discovery and includes Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Bayes, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, and Alexander Fleming as fellows.  Members of the Royal Society have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. In short, it is has played an enormous role in the creation of modern science.

Quotes 

“We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.”

 

 “Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.”

 

“Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.”

 

“Human memories are short and inaccurate.”

 

“Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).”

 

 “The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.”

 

“The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.”

 

“The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.”

“The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”

 

“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong”

 

 “To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s

 

“A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).”

 

“And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.”

 

“Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.”

 

“There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours.”

 

“As the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.”

 

“Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’.”

 

“It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial.”

 

“For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.”

 

“It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and enjoyed several books by Bill Bryson, I was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, Bryson only serves as the Editor and contributes a brief introduction.  Each chapter is written by a different scientific or literary luminary and focuses on some aspect of life related to the Royal Society.  Some are very interesting and some are incredibly dense, causing my eyes to glaze over.  If you are interested in science, you may like this book but I recommend an ala carte approach.

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549. Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Jason Riley

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Economics, Politics, Public Policy

301 pages, published May 25, 2021

Reading Format:   E-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Maverick is a biography by the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley of conservative economist and prolific author Thomas Sowell.  Growing up without a mother or father, barely subsisting in Harlem during his teenage years, and belatedly attending college in his late 20’s, Sowell did not have an easy path.  However, he made the most of his opportunities and forged a brilliant path, transferring from Howard to Harvard, receiving a master’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from the University of Chicago (where he studied under Milton Friedman) and then teaching at Cornell and UCLA before landing at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.  Unafraid and dedicated to empiricism, Sowell’s critiques of liberal tenets such as affirmative action has often infuriated those on the left, especially those who think of black conservatives as race traitors.  During his storied career, Sowell has published over 30 books covering topics from economic history and social inequality to political theory, race, and culture and is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics and political science.

Quotes 

Having previously read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell and having seen several interviews with him, I was already aware of his intriguing, well reasoned and empirically supported ideas about economics and race.  That understanding was enhanced and deepened after reading this thoroughly engaging and well researched biography by the talented Jason Riley who I always enjoy seeing on The Journal Editorial Report.  The world has benefitted greatly from the life of Thomas Sowell and I look forward to reading more of the books in his canon.

 

My Take

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543. Greenlights

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Heather Ringoen

Author:   Matthew McConaughey

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

308 pages, published October 20, 2020

Reading Format:   e-book

Summary

In Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey tells his life story in an unconventional manner and includes poems, drawings, photos and other material from his 35 years of diaries.  His theme is that life gives you green lights, yellow lights and red lights and that you need to pay attention to the signal you are receiving and act on it or work to change it.

Quotes 

“We all step in shit from time to time. We hit roadblocks, we fuck up, we get fucked, we get sick, we don’t get what we want, we cross thousands of “could have done better”s and “wish that wouldn’t have happened”s in life. Stepping in shit is inevitable, so let’s either see it as good luck, or figure out how to do it less often.”

 

 “Don’t walk into a place like you wanna buy it, walk in like you own it.”

 

“We cannot fully appreciate the light without the shadows. We have to be thrown off balance to find our footing. It’s better to jump than fall. And here I am.”

 

“I believe the truth is only offensive when we’re lying.”

 

 

“When we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we create a fictitious ceiling. A restriction over the expectations that we have over our own performance in that moment. We get tense. We focus on the outcome instead of the activity and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t and it isn’t. And it’s not our right to believe it does or is.

Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great idea, the love of our life, euphoric bliss… Who are we to think we don’t deserve these fortunes when they’re in our grasp? Who are we to think we haven’t earned them?

If we stay and process within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we’re not thinking of the finish line. We’re not looking at the clock. We’re not watching ourselves on the Jumbotron performing. We are performing in real time where the approach is the destination.”

 

“The question we need to ask ourselves is: what is success to us? More money? That’s fine. A healthy family? A happy marriage? Helping others? To be famous? Spiritually sound? To express ourselves? To create art? To leave the world a better place than we found it?

What is success to me? Continue to ask yourself that question. How are you prosperous? What is your relevance?

Your answer may change over time and that’s fine but do yourself this favor – whatever your answer is, don’t choose anything that would jeopardize your soul. Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don’t spend time with anything that antagonizes your character. Don’t depend on drinking the Kool-Aid – it’s popular, tastes sweet today, but it will give you cavities tomorrow.

 

Life is not a popularity contest. Be brave, take the hill. But first answer the question.”

 

“I’m not perfect; no, I step in shit all the time and recognize it when I do. I’ve just learned how to scrape it off my boots and carry on.”

 

“We all have scars, we gonna have more. Rather than struggle against time and waste it, let’s dance with time and redeem it. Cause we don’t live longer when we try not to die. We live longer when we are too busy living.”

 

“Me? I haven’t made all A’s in the art of living. But I give a damn. And I’ll take an experienced C over an ignorant A any day.”

 

“I’d rather lose money havin fun than make money being bored,”

 

“A denied expectation hurts more than a denied hope, while a fulfilled hope makes us happier than a fulfilled expectation.”

 

“All destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure. In this life or the next, what goes down will come up. It’s a matter of how we see the challenge in front of us and how we engage with it. Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.”

 

“I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy.”

 

“Sometimes which choice you make is not as important as making a choice and commiting to it.”

 

“No longer chasing butterflies, Camila and I planted our garden so they could come to us.”

 

“Life is our resume. It is our story to tell, and the choices we make write the chapters. Can we live in a way where we look forward to looking back?”

 

 “Guilt and regret kill many a man before their time.”

 

“Make my life my favorite movie. Live my favorite character. Write my own script. Direct my own story. Be my biography. Make my own documentary on me. Non-fiction, live, not recorded. Time to catch that hero I’ve been chasing. See if the sun will melt the wax that holds my wings or if the heat is just a mirage. Live my legacy now. Quit acting like me. Be me.”

 

“Catching greenlights is about skill: intent, context, consideration, endurance, anticipation, resilience, speed, and discipline. We can catch more greenlights by simply identifying where the red lights are in our life, and then change course to hit fewer of them.”

 

 “To lose the power of confrontation is to lose the power of unity.”

 

 “Great leaders are not always in front, they also know who to follow.”

 

“The inevitability of a situation is not relative; when we accept the outcome of a given situation as inevitable, then how we choose to deal with it is relative.”

 

“because we quit early or we didn’t take the necessary risk to get it. The more boots we put in the back side of our if onlys, the more we will get what we want. Don’t walk the it’s too late it’s too soon tightrope until you die.”

 

“Now you can shut that door on me or we can walk through it together.”

 

“We want lovers, friends, recruits, soldiers, and affiliations that support who we are. People, individuals, believe in themselves, want to survive, and on a Darwinistic level at least, want to have more, of ourselves. Initially, this is a visual choice. The where, what, when, and who…to our why. Upon closer inspection, which is the upfall of the politically correct culture of today, we learn to measure people on the competence of their values that we most value. When we do this, the politics of gender, race, and slanderous slang take a back seat to the importance of the values we share. The more we travel, the more we realize how similar our human needs are. We want to be loved, have a family, community, have something to look forward to. These basic needs are present in all socioeconomic and cultural civilizations. I have seen many tribes in the deserts of Northern Africa who, with nine children and no electricity, had more joy, love, honor, and laughter than the majority of the most materially rich people I’ve ever met. We have the choice to love, befriend, recruit, call to arms, associate, and support who we believe in, and more importantly, who, we believe, believes in us.”

 

My Take

“All right, all right, all right.”  Greenlights was a really fun and thought provoking read.  Matthew McConaughey has led a fascinating life and has some wonderful and often hilarious stories to tell.  He has also done a lot of thinking about taking risks and provides some worthwhile advice on how to live your best life in this well written and easy to read memoir.

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542. Making Sense

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sam Harris

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Religion, Politics, Race

444 pages, published 2013

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Sam Harris (neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author) is a very smart guy who has been studying some of the most important questions confronting humanity.  In Making Sense, we hear his interviews with a dozen of the best known world experts and deep thinkers (including Daniel Kahneman, Timothy Snyder, Nick Bostrom, and Glen Loury) on a variety of fascinating issues.

Quotes 

 

My Take

While there were plenty of fascinating things in this book, there were also some parts that really lagged.  It really depends on who is being interviewed by Sam Harris.  My favorites were Daniel Kahneman and Glen Loury.

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536. Humankind: A Hopeful History

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Rutger Bregman

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Public Policy

462 pages, published June 2, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

In Humankind, author Rutger Bregman rejects the widely accepted idea that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested and instead presents and supports his thesis that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the key factor to their success.  After giving the reader a 200,000 year history, Bregman demonstrates that we are evolutionarily adapted for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.  He also debunks commonly believed understandings of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, the Kitty Genovese “bystander effect,” and shows that a real life shipwreck of boys on a remote island resulted in cooperation and teamwork rather than a Lord of the Flies style degeneration.

Quotes 

“So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”

 

“Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization’……That drug is the news.”

 

“Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes.”

 

“An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’

 

“Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.”

 

“It’s when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.”

 

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”

 

“If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.’ George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)”

 

“Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.”

 

“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

 

 “For centuries, even millennia, generals and governors, artists and poets had taken it for granted that soldiers fight. That if there’s one thing that brings out the hunter in us, it’s war. War is when we humans get to do what we’re so good at. War is when we shoot to kill. But as Colonel Samuel Marshall continued to interview groups of servicemen, in the Pacific and later in the European theatre, he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.14 The situation on Makin that night had been do-or-die, when you would expect everyone to fight for their lives. But in his battalion of more than three hundred soldiers, Marshall could identify only thirty-six who actually pulled the trigger. Was it a lack of experience? Nope. There didn’t seem to be any difference between new recruits and experienced pros when it came to willingness to shoot. And many of the men who didn’t fire had been crack shots in training. Maybe they just chickened out? Hardly. Soldiers who didn’t fire stayed at their posts, which meant they ran as much of a risk. To a man, they were courageous, loyal patriots, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their comrades. And yet, when it came down to it, they shirked their duty. They failed to shoot.”

 

 “To understand where things went wrong, we have to go back 15,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Up until then, the planet had been sparsely populated and people banded together to stave off the cold. Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.22 Then the climate changed, turning the area between the Nile in the west and the Tigris in the east into a land of milk and honey. Here, survival no longer depended on banding together against the elements. With food in such plentiful supply, it made sense to stay put.  Huts and temples were built, towns and villages took shape and the population grew.  More importantly, people’s possessions grew. What was it Rousseau had to say about this? ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”’–that’s where it all started to go wrong. It couldn’t have been easy to convince people that land or animals–or even other human beings–could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.24 And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow. When someone died, their possessions even got passed on to the next generation. Once this kind of inheritance came into play, the gap between rich and poor opened wide.”

 

“Reading through the 1300 pages of interviews … it’s patently obvious that Eichman was no brainless bureaucrat, He was a fanatic. He acted not out of indifference, but out of conviction. Like [Stanley] Milgram’s experimental subjects, he did evil because he believed he was doing good.”

 

“The emergence of the first large settlements triggered a seismic shift in religious life. Seeking to explain the catastrophes suddenly befalling us, we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done. A whole clerical class was put in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry. Had we eaten something forbidden? Said something wrong? Had an illicit thought?37 For the first time in history, we developed a notion of sin. And we began looking to priests to prescribe how we should do penance. Sometimes it was enough to pray or complete a strict set of rituals, but often we had to sacrifice cherished possessions–food or animals or even people.”

 

 “In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’  He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.  And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her. ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”

 

 

 “One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.”

 

My Take

In the same vein as Factfulness, Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks, I found the optimism of author Rutger Bregman in Humankind to be a hopeful and encouraging look at human nature and our future together on this planet.  A nice antidote to all the doomsayers out there.

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532. False Black Power?

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Jason Riley

Genre:  Non Fiction, Race, History, Politics, Public Policy

129 pages, published May 30, 2017

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In False Black Power, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member Jason Riley challenges the identity politics and Critical Race Theory advocated by Black civil rights leaders as a dead end for Black Americans.  Riley demonstrates that the strategy of integrating political institutions, i.e. if more Blacks hold elective office then the lives of Blacks will be improved, has not worked.  In fact, Blacks are qualitatively worse off in cities controlled by Black elected officials (see Detroit).  The book also includes critiques by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury along with responses from Riley.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I found False Black Power well researched and documented critique of the failure of left wing policies to uplift Black America.  Riley proposes solutions that empower Blacks, rather than promote an embrace of victim status, such as increased school-choice vouchers and reducing social safety nets (making them a more temporary form of welfare rather than the multigenerational welfare system).  In the same vien as White Guilt and Shame by Shelby Steele and Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell, Riley thoughtfully contributes to our national conversation about race in America.

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528. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ray Kurzweil

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Public Policy

652 pages, published September 26, 2006

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Written by acclaimed futurist Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near explores the role of technology in our post human future.  Kurzweil discusses what he believes will be the next step in our  evolutionary process, the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

Quotes 

“Play is just another version of work”

 

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER”

 

“How Smart Is a Rock? To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat, consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 1025 (ten trillion trillion) atoms in a kilogram of matter are actually extremely active. Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized. We’ve already shown that atoms can store information at a density of greater than one bit per atom, such as in computing systems built from nuclear magnetic-resonance devices. University of Oklahoma researchers stored 1,024 bits in the magnetic interactions of the protons of a single molecule containing nineteen hydrogen atoms.  Thus, the state of the rock at any one moment represents at least 1027 bits of memory.”

 

“as long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations. This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.”

 

“One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.”

 

“But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it works but what it does when it’s stuck. —MARVIN MINSKY”

 

“By the end of this decade, computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality.”

 

“Increasing complexity” on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.”

 

“The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis”;”

 

“Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …”

 

“There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.”

 

“A thousand-bit quantum computer would vastly outperform any conceivable DNA computer, or for that matter any conceivable nonquantum computer.”

 

 “Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be “achieved through science and technology steered by human values.”

 

“Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today’s rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We’ll make another twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.”

 

“If we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)”

 

“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. This is because, if something goes wrong, you get stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. This is why, when someone learns “by rote,” we say that they don’t really understand. However, if you have several different representations then, when one approach fails you can try another. Of course, making too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking! —MARVIN MINSKY213”

 

“Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?”

 

“(As Einstein said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.”)”

 

“If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.”

 

“Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won’t have to stay so small.”

 

“These chunks represent patterns (such as faces) as well as specific knowledge. For example, a world-class chess master is estimated to have mastered about 100,000 board positions. Shakespeare used 29,000 words but close to 100,000 meanings of those words. Development of expert systems in medicine indicate that humans can master about 100,000 concepts in a domain. If we estimate that this “professional” knowledge represents as little as 1 percent of the overall pattern and knowledge store of a human, we arrive at an estimate of 107 chunks.”

 

“In accordance with the law of accelerating returns, paradigm shift (also called innovation) turns the S-curve of any specific paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm, such as three-dimensional circuits, takes over when the old paradigm approaches its natural limit, which has already happened at least four times in the history of computation. In such nonhuman species as apes, the mastery of a toolmaking or -using skill by each animal is characterized by an S-shaped learning curve that ends abruptly; human-created technology, in contrast, has followed an exponential pattern of growth and acceleration since its inception.”

 

“do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. —NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT”

 

“We come from goldfish, essentially, but that [doesn’t] mean we turned around and killed all the goldfish. Maybe [the AIs] will feed us once a week…. If you had a machine with a 10 to the 18th power IQ over humans, wouldn’t you want it to govern, or at least control your economy? —SETH SHOSTAK”

 

“Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today’s world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information.”

 

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, “MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS,”

 

My Take

Twenty years ago I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines and was deeply impacted by the many predictions of amazing technological breakthroughs.  The Singularity is Near was not as shocking as The Age of Spiritual Machines, but is still a fascinating read.  Although The Singularity is Near was published in 2006, I read it fifteen years later in 2021.  As such, I could see for myself whether at least some of Kurzweil’s 2006 predictions materialized.  Many have not, but we are still making incredible technological progress, just at a slower rate.  Kurzweil still makes a strong case that in the long term, life on earth will be changing fundamentally as machines bypass human beings in intelligence.

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