Memorable Books

A pot was placed under the holes to collect the filtrate—“a liquid charged with soda, potash, and a certain quantity of lime in solution.” This was his lye. When he had enough of it, he added seal oil, and boiled the mixture. It smelled unbelievably foul, but at the end of the process, to the amazement of all, he had soap, real soap!—“which was of inestimable value to us,” for both cleanliness and health.*

Auf diesem ungeheuren Gewässer, das sich von Gibraltar bis zu den Dardanellen und von Tunis bis nach Venedig ausdehnt, glitt eine leichte Yacht von reiner, zierlicher Form in dem ersten Dunste des Abends hin.

a tongue of flame whispered secrets to the whitening ashes.

The naked skin on the head of a vulture is generally looked at as a direct adaptation for wallowing in putridity; and so it may be, or it may possibly be due to the direct action of putrid matter, but we should be very cautious in drawing any such inference, when we see that the skin on the head of the clean-feeding male turkey is likewise naked.

But I do not believe that it will ever be proved that within the recent period continents which are now quite separate, have been continuously, or almost continuously, united with each other, and with the many existing oceanic islands.

Time to get off the social media merry-go-round that goes faster and faster but never gets anywhere. Time to stop hustling and interrupting. Time to stop spamming and pretending you’re welcome. Time to stop making average stuff for average people while hoping you can charge more than a commodity price.

Core Lessons

• Marketing takes longer than you think. You need to consistently show up, for years, with the same message. Take a room in town.
• Ask who you are seeking to change. Start with a very small number of people. Explicitly communicate that what you are making is for them, and not for anybody else. They will not be looking for "perfect", but for "interesting". Reminds me of lack of completeness communicates "we built this for you" (source: [[📰 Situated Software]]).
  • "My product is for people who believe ＿＿＿."
• Reversing that: You cannot and should not try to build a product for everyone.
• You will want to speak to the early adopters. People who are willing to change.
• Get explicit permission to market (=permission marketing).
• Tell a story. Be something. Have a flag.
• You aim to change something. You sell a new emotional state.
• Consider status, and how your product interact with it. Understand domination and affiliation.
• Ask what people would tell their friends when they buy your stuff (B2C) or their boss (B2B).
• The price tag was invented by the Quakers, because they believe that if everyone is created equal everyone should get the same price.

She watches the river, cautious, quiet, for seven months

A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest.

and there’s nothing for them to do but sit there and kind of hope for a big fire where maybe they can run into a burning building in front of everybody and run out with a baby in their arms.

Das Wasser steht uns bald unsymbolisch bis zum Hals.

Mo zeigt Rebekka etwas in der Ferne. Ich hoffe, es ist etwas geographisch Intelligentes.

Die EU lehnte Mars dankend ab und fuhr erschüttert zurück in die EU.

Dabei sah Vater Polle auf seinen Sohn runter wie bei Metzger Krone auf die Mittagstisch-Tafel, wenn zwei von drei Gerichten durchgestrichen sind, und es gibt nur noch etwas, das man mit einem Löffel essen muss.

“I suggest that someone has just breached the wall of your building with an explosive charge,” Colonel Napier said, perfectly calm. “If you would be so good as to terminate the scenario now and release me, I shall try to make myself useful in whatever is to follow.”

Do you want to know what you're doing wrong?" "Um—" "You're not writing anything down." "Um—" "This is not a mystical adventure. You are not the protagonist. You're seeing and doing things which are having profound emotional effects on you. You're being irrational. You're not thinking things through, you're not working things out. You're going on mental arithmetic instead of paper arithmetic and you're going on gut instinct instead of worked, peer-reviewed results. This is not good science."

the greatest human artist could never hope to match what nature did with a single flower.

the way we approach cultural objects is often both violent and approximate

it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly valueless

We have before us a perfect example of what is conventionally called a dialogue of the deaf.

Communications can be precise and exacting while still being tragically wrong. This happens all too frequently when we communicate with computers

In September 1997, while conducting fleet maneuvers in the Atlantic, the USS Yorktown, one of the Navy's new Aegis guided-missile cruisers, stopped dead in the water. A Navy technician, while calibrating an on-board fuel valve, entered a zero into one of the shipboard management computers, a Pentium Pro running Windows NT. The program attempted to divide another number by that zero—a mathematically undefined operation—which resulted in a complete crash of the entire shipboard control system.

Inuit survival skills were, as always, impressive. Lacking wood or animal bones, as the case might be, they could make a sledge entirely out of frozen salmon. If necessary, they could make one out of nothing but ice. Igloos went up generally in less than an hour. An igloo is a remarkably warm, snug protection against the elements, but building them was an art English explorers never bothered to master, even though they watched Inuit erect them countless times.

Their expeditions failed for similar reasons: because they would not learn the ways of natives who had spent their lives in the ice; because they refused to use dogs, thinking it nobler to pull the sledges themselves; because they were English gentlemen and Royal Navy officers and all too conscious of their own superiority. For them it was a kind of warfare, man against nature, waged in a wilderness of ice and cold and all the more glorious for it.

Many social scientists have commented that depersonalizing the poor is an effective way to disengage from them and hence deny responsibility for helping them. If one relates to the homeless man on the sidewalk as a shapeless lump, the theory goes, one can easily pass by without much psychological cost. Suzie points to a related phenomenon: people’s tendency to focus their attention on crises far from home, such as famine in Africa, rather than on the problems in their own communities.

'In the words of the founder of philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession﹕ Will I get paid for this?''

— Dr. Lawn

But the deeper problem is that agreements on self-denying measures—such as shorter working time, or a deliberately inefficient technology, both of which require people to forgo immediate advantage—are hard to sustain. Everyone who stays within the limit, forgoing the opportunity to be more competitive, is a potential sucker.

When you live in a world that isn’t built for you, it’s probably easier to envisage how it can be improved.

But there, they had their wagon, their boundary against the world. Here, listening to the rain fall, watching the light vanish, Dex began to understand why the concept of inside had been invented in the first place.

Mosscap nodded slowly. “So, the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.” “Other than fear.” “Other than fear, which is a feeling you want to avoid or stop at all costs.”

My life has been permeated and held together by one idea and one goal [...] namely, to penetrate into the secret of the personality

The wind was even literally fair. My ‘trick’ at the wheel was now up, and it was 5 p.m. I had stood at the helm since eleven o’clock the morning before, or thirty hours.

the concept of layered human-computer interaction:

He had a competency in math; he could use the top- and second-level Qeng Ho program interfaces.

The dimension of dread — lack of control, high fatalities and catastrophic potential, inequitable distribution of risks and benefits, and the sense that these risks are increasing and cannot be easily reduced by technological fixes—clearly was the best predictor of perceived risk.

[normal accidents] is an expression of an integral characteristic of the system, not a statement of frequency. It is normal for us to die, but we only do it once. System accidents are uncommon, even rare; yet this is not all that reassuring, if they can produce catastrophes.

since the system is safe, or I wouldn’t be here, it must be a minor problem, or the lesser of two possible evils.

was just good

If this book raised more questions than it answered, fantastic.

Sverdrup and his men had no adventures; they sought no heroics. With ease, although not without effort, they covered the same country that had meant horror and disaster to others before them.

It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.

But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable.

> Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains.

Then I shall tell you: It is no more than a bubble world 20 billion light years in radius

the way we approach cultural objects is often both violent and approximate

it wasn’t the English who did this to us but ourselves, that convicts flogged convicts & pissed on blackfellas & spied on each other, that blackfellas sold black women for dogs & speared escaping convicts, that white sealers killed & raped black women, & black women killed the children that resulted.

*But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all. The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, ‘Are we safe?’ and we were really replying, ‘No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.’ *

SO IT CAME to be on that winter’s morning that was to prove fateful but at the time merely seemed freezing

seemed to concur with the known facts only long enough to enter with them into an argument.

swindling requires not delivering lies but confirming preconceptions

‘Why do you paint?’ asked he, & before I could point out that it beats being gang-buggered behind a blackwood, but only just, answered he his own question

“No,” Rustem said. “I don’t watch many streams. No time.” “Oh, one of those…” Altyn rolled her eyes. “No,” Aynur said, “I really think he doesn’t have the time. He has some crazy job. Cracking neural networks.”

also that quote about salt water

Galileo snorted. “Mozi’s way of thinking was still Eastern. He was nothing more than a mystic dressed as a scientist. He never took his own observation data seriously, and he constructed his model based on subjective speculation. Ridiculous! I feel sorry for his refined equipment.

Yes, I know that someone studying math should know about a master like Poincaré, but I didn’t worship masters and I didn’t want to become one, so I didn’t know his work

Of course, in higher dimensional space at such micro scales, the form that intelligence or civilization may take is beyond our imagination. They’re something else entirely. And such destruction has probably occurred many times before.” “Oh?” “In the long history of scientific progress, how many protons have been smashed apart in accelerators by physicists? How many neutrons and electrons? Probably no fewer than a hundred million. Every collision was probably the end of the civilizations and intelligences in a microcosmos.

Forty years ago, the Persian Shah Tahmasp, who was the archenemy of the Ottomans as well as the world’s greatest patron-king of the art of painting, began to grow senile and lost his enthusiasm for wine, music, poetry and painting; furthermore, he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.

The reason we don’t like anything innovative is that there is truly nothing new worth liking.

“We take a long journey after death, so I’m not afraid of dying. What I fear is dying before I finish Our Sultan’s book.”

men have become the tools of their tools.

The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

On October 25, a calm, clear day, we saw the sun for the last time in 1909

[...] the mall was bordered by an example of America's most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot