Recent Quotes 📖

• [This weirdly is exactly my experience both as a high school XC runner and then also trying to run again a 39 year old]
  
  A.J. had run cross-country on his high school’s team and then at Princeton. He picked up the sport mainly because he had no skill for any other sport aside from the close reading of texts. He never really considered running cross-country to be much of a talent. His high school coach had romantically referred to him as a reliable middleman, meaning that A.J. could be counted on to finish in the upper middle of any pack. Now that he hasn’t run for a while, he has to concede that it had been a talent. In his current condition, he can’t make it more than two miles without stopping.

  an excerpt from The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, written by Gabrielle Zevin in 2014

• Almost no prerequisite to a new invention was invented with that invention in mind.

  an excerpt from Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, written by Kenneth O. Stanley in 2015

• [From the Instruction of Ptahhotep]
  
  Don’t be proud of your knowledge;
  Consult the ignorant and the wise,
  The limits of art are not reached;
  No artist’s skills are perfect.

  an excerpt from Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume I, written by Miriam Lichtheim in -2500

Recent Notes 📓

• I'm working on a project with a really ambitious client group, who are trying to rethink all kinds of things about identity and work on the internet. I do keep referring to ideas from this book and I've been biting my tongue trying not to give them a plot summary.
  
  But highlights: a pretty human-scaled explanation of 'holography' as identity management in the future: I don't have user passwords anymore, there are just AIs out there that can piece together a unique footprint from my activity - face scanning, how I type, analyzing my gait, what sort of language I use, etc. The systems just know it's me.
  
  Also the big events in the book are about scanning brains and bodies and uploading those to a cloud - what would that life be like? In what sense are those scans, those 'processes', alive? How would it start? What would its limits be? What kind of visibility to it does How would society change if we knew there was an afterlife (and you REALLY wanted your brain and body to be in good shape when you die?)? etc.

  an note about Fall, written by Neal Stephenson in 2019

• Is this a good book? No. Is it a fun book? I'd say about half of it.

  an note about Fall, written by Neal Stephenson in 2019

• Picked it up because I loved Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

  an note about The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, written by Gabrielle Zevin in 2014

Looking for more recent books? Check out the Personal Timeline.