Monday, 19 December 2016

book log #2

finished
the Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi 
Farang, laowai, gaijin, foreigner, ... this book reminded me that we're all foreigners on this planet. Fans of westworld, the future, ... subtle AI, hints of transhumanism, evolution and mankind meet the end of the world through manmade catastrophies and global warming, great read. Unexpectedly dramatic and realistic.

 “We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.”
Oscar et la Dame Rose, Eric Emmanuel Schmitt  
Broke my heart a little bit. Beautiful book, consists of a collection of letters of a young boy writing to God as he's dying. Read it in French as a step to improve said language. Not too difficult, reminded me of le Petit Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery).

 "There's no solution for life except for living it."
"I think we make the same mistake in life. We forget that it's fragile and ephemeral. We make everything seem like we're immortal."
"Life, it's deadly."

“Il n'y a pas de solution à la vie sinon vivre.” 
in process
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“Je crois qu'on fait la même erreur pour la vie. Nous oublions que la vie est fragile,friable, éphémère. Nous faisons tous semblant d'être immortels.” 
"La vie, c'est fatale"
How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil
Physics, biology and neuroscience for beginners. Great thought experiments on how the brain works. Given the difficulty of the subjects that are touched on, it's remarkable that Kurzweil can still manage to make it all understandable.

 Women, Charles Bukowski
To balance out Kurzweil

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Wednesday, 14 December 2016

interesting #2

But Singapore’s paternalism has not gone away. Earlier this month the government announced that only ethnic Malays will be permitted to run for president next year. The constitution will be amended to mandate that presidential elections be reserved for members of a certain ethnic group if nobody from that group has served as president for the past five terms.

Living in China, this article was very enlightening.
China today is extraordinarily homogenous. It sustains that by remaining almost entirely closed to new entrants except by birth. Unless someone is the child of a Chinese national, no matter how long they live there, how much money they make or tax they pay, it is virtually impossible to become a citizen. Someone who marries a Chinese person can theoretically gain citizenship; in practice few do. As a result, the most populous nation on Earth has only 1,448 naturalised Chinese in total, according to the 2010 census. Even Japan, better known for hostility to immigration, naturalises around 10,000 new citizens each year; in America the figure is some 700,000 (see chart).

Bumped into this while trying to untangle myself the knot of the conflicts going on in Syria. Complicated but this video gives it a very good shot.

Humans deem themselves superior to animals. What about AI and robots?  


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Monday, 12 December 2016

Hollywood


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Sunday, 11 December 2016

interesting #1



see picture

"I was already puzzled by the evolution of large brains in cephalopods, and this discovery made the questions more acute. What is the point of building a complex brain like that if your life is over in a year or two? Why invest in a process of learning about the world if there is no time to put that information to use? An octopus’s or cuttlefish’s life is rich in experience, but it is incredibly compressed.

The particular puzzle of octopus life span opens up a more general one. Why do animals age? And why do they age so differently? A scruffy-looking fish that inhabits the same patch of sea as my cephalopods has relatives who live to 200 years of age. This seems extraordinarily unfair: A dull-looking fish lives for centuries while the cuttlefish, in their chromatic splendor, and the octopuses, in their inquisitive intelligence, are dead before they are 2? There are monkeys the size of a mouse that can live for 15 years, and hummingbirds that can live for over 10. Nautiluses (who are also cephalopods) can live for 20 years. A recent Nature paper reported that despite continuing medical advances, humans appear to have reached a rough plateau at around 115 years, though a few people will edge beyond it. The life spans of animals seem to lack all rhyme or reason.

We tend to think about aging as a matter of bodies wearing out, as automobiles do. But the analogy is not a good one. An automobile’s original parts will indeed wear out, but an adult human is not operating with his or her original parts. Like all animals, we are made of cells that are continually taking in nutrients and dividing, replacing old parts with new ones. If you keep replacing the parts of an automobile with new ones, there is no reason it should ever stop running."


"In no other country that participated in the PISA survey is the difference in test results between immigrant students and non-immigrant students so flagrant as in Flanders, Belgium." 

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Book log #1: December 2016




finished

sociological insights and observations on the nature of humanity by an Auschwitz survivor albeit not a tale of survival. A horror of the kind that makes you want to cry while you read it, partly because it's so beautifully written. Some chapters still haunt me.

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”
incredibly inspiring and shows an array of different perspectives on the man
collection of short stories. The Girl with the Blackened Eye is one of them, about a girl who reflects on when she got abducted by a man when she was fifteen years old.



in process 
set in 23rd-century Thailand, global warming has ruined the planet and big corporations are essentially using bioterrorism to gain control of the world.  I'm about halfway through, great so far. Side note: I'm going to Thailand soon and I like the small observations some of the protagonists make into Thai culture.
"sequel" to If This is a Man, written 20 years after the events set in the first book
up next 
At the Existentialist Cafe
The Omnivores Dilemma
Women by Charles Bukowski
Moonwalking with Einstein
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