Books

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Sony & Rob Goodman Information is divorced from content. This was one of the fundamental insights leading up to Shannon’s work. Information is not about what you send, it’s simply about what you can send, or the set of things you can send. This is kind of amazing to me: developing the technologies that have given us so many platforms for expressing our weirdness and individuality was only possible by ignoring all of that stuff in the first place....

Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper Contrasts the Empiricists (the philosophers that saw truth as something stemming from natural observation) with the rationalists (those that believed truth is something to be found through intellectual intuition) His argument is that both of these camps are not really that different at all. They both believe truth to be something whole that can be obtained in full in one way or the other. “It is plain, just look at these facts!...

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson Introduction That followed Leonardo’s injunction to begin any investigation by going to the source: he who can go to the fountain does not go to the water jar. Themes Iteration and going deeper. The revisiting if the painting’s neck twenty years after the initial painting to correctly render the two sternocleidomastoid muscles after human dissection in 1510. Beginning from foundations. First you must paint the skeleton, then move outward....

Tristes Tropiques' by Claude Levi-Strauss Mankind has opted for monoculture From early in the book, perhaps from the introduction. I don’t recall precisely. Chapter 9 The ground that his observations cover is truly remarkable. In chapter 9, Guanabara, he goes from travelogue to France’s early colonial history in Brazil to urban design over the course of only a few paragraphs. He speaks of the way that places have ceased to shock and surprise in the way they once did before the sustained contact between colonial and native cultures....

TRUISMS (1978-1983) by JENNY HOLZER A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS A MAN CAN’T KNOW WHAT IT IS TO BE A MOTHER A NAME MEANS A LOT JUST BY ITSELF A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MEANS ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD A RELAXED MAN IS NOT NECESSARILY A BETTER MAN A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS A SINCERE EFFORT IS ALL YOU CAN ASK...

Klara and the sun by Kazuo Ishiguro If Klara is super intelligent, why doesn’t she know basic facts about the sum, solar system, planetary motion, etc? There is clearly some sort of some theology. Is it because the sun is all important to their existence that their creators programmed this strange theology in place of basic science? I realize now after having finished the book what an anthropocentric viewpoint the above comment takes....

From Funes, the memories: These things he told me; neither then nor later have I ever placed them in doubt. In those days there were no cinemas or phonographs; nevertheless, it is odd and even incredible that no one ever performed an experiment with Funes. The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things....