Harriet The Spy (Louise Fitzhugh)

Wow, a classic. How did i miss this before?

A smart 11-year-old girl tries to come to terms with the awesome/awful power of the written word and the unintelligible world of grown-ups.

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The Craftsman (Prof. Richard Sennett)

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A slow book. An excellent meditation on the relationship of humans, culture and matter (things), through an analysis of craftsmanship.

Quotes:

Making is Thinking.

I make two contentious arguments: first, that all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practices; second, that technical understanding develops through the powers of imagination.

We are more likely to fail as craftsmen, I argue, due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.

Craftsmanship is certainly, from an ethical point of view, ambiguous. Robert Oppenheimer was a committed craftsman; he pushed his technical skills to the limit to make the best bomb he could.

Material culture provides in sum a picture of what human beings are capable of making. This seemingly limitless view is bounded by self-inflicted harm whether occurring innocently, by intent, or by accident. Retreat into spiritual values is unlikely to furnish much help in coping with Pandora. Nature might be a better guide, if we understand our own labors as part of its being.

about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician

"Sing clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaestus famed for skill. With bright-eyed Athena he taught men glorious crafts throughout the world-men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts. But now that they have learned crafts through Hephaestus famous for his art they live a peaceful life in their own houses the whole year round."

Plato observed that although "craftsmen are all poets ... they are not called poets, they have other names."

the experimental rhythm of problem solving and problem finding makes the ancient potter and the modern programmer members of the same tribe.

skill is a trained practice

The medieval craftsman's authority rested on the fact that he was a Christian. Early Christianity had from its origins embraced the dignity of the craftsman. It mattered to theologians and laymen alike that Christ was the son of a carpenter

In terms of practice, there is no art without craft; the idea for a painting is not a painting.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries European children first began to enjoy an abundance of toys.

The recipe for making a steam engine became entirely codifiable by 1823 in documents; the master-and Watt himself behaved like a Stradivari of engineering-no longer had secrets to keep.

In the nineteenth-century steel industry, skilled artisans faced two potential futures because of technological change: deskilling or dismissal.

a kindred problem was faced in 1995 by programmers displaced from working on mainframe machines to personal computers and gaming devices. The norms of the workplace rather than computation formed the difficulty of change.

From the origins of classical civilization, craftsmen have suffered mistreatment. What has kept them going humanly is belief in their work and their involvement with its materials.

The hand is the window on to the mind.

One of the myths that surround technique is that people who develop it to a high level must have unusual bodies to begin with. As concerns the hand, this is not quite true.

The calluses developed by people who use their hands professionally constitute a particular case of localized touch. In principle the thickened layer of skin should deaden touch; in practice, the reverse occurs.

Diminishing the fear of making mistakes is all-important in our art, since the musician on stage can't stop, paralyzed, if she or he makes a mistake.

Still, in chopping food, as in sounding chords, the base line of physical control, the starting point, is the calculation and application of minimum force.

in 1400 knife fights might have been a normal event at a supper party but that by 1600 these eruptions were frowned on

The apprentice is often expected to absorb the master's lesson by osmosis; the master's demonstration shows an act successfully performed, and the apprentice has to figure out what turned the key in the lock. Learning by demonstration puts the burden on the apprentice; it further assumes that direct imitation can occur. To be sure, the process often works, but equally often it fails.

When I've taught writing, I've thus asked my students to rewrite the printed instructions that accompany new software. Perfectly accurate, these nefarious publications are often unintelligible.

To expand her readers' horizons, Julia Child wrote down procedures she learned professionally in Paris as a young woman. She reimagined these procedures for the foreign novice; crossing that cultural divide prompted her to transform the denotative recipe. [...] Child's recipe reads quite differently than Olney's precise direction because her story is structured around empathy for the cook; she focuses on the human protagonist rather than on the bird.

The patience of a craftsman can thus be defined as: the temporary suspension of the desire for closure.

working with resistance is the key to survival

Whereas Corbusier relegated streets to traffic functions, the ground plane represented to Van Eyck the realm in which people "learn" cities. The placement of benches and bollards, the height of stepping-stones, the ill-defined separations of sand, grass, and water are all tools in that learning, an education in ambiguity.

Improvisation occurs in workshops, offices, and laboratories as much as on streets. As in jazz, other forms of improvisation involve skills that can be developed and improved. Anticipation can be strengthened; people can become better at negotiating borders and edges; they can become more selective about the elements they choose to vary.

We share in common and in roughly equal measure the raw abilities that allow us to become good craftsmen; it is the motivation and aspiration for quality that takes people along different paths in their lives. Social conditions shape these motivations.

What most stimulated workers to achieve higher productivity, Mayo found, was simply being noticed as human beings.

the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future

Nothing ever feels good enough to the person measuring who he or she is against who he or she should be.

The craftsman's focus on concrete objects or procedures runs contrary, moreover, to the narcissist's complaint, "If only I could."

The good craftsman understands the importance of the sketch-that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin.

The good craftsman learns when it is time to stop.

Perhaps the greatest difference between Loos and Wittgenstein was that Adolph Loos possessed a work story; each building project was like a chapter in his life. Wittgenstein lacked a narrative of that sort; when his all-or-nothing gamble disappointed, he never built another house.

In old English a "career" meant a well-laid road, whereas a "job" meant simply a lump of coal or pile of wood that could be moved around at will.

people are meant to deploy a portfolio of skills rather than nurture a single ability in the course of their working histories; this succession of projects or tasks erodes belief that one is meant to do just one thing well

I've kept for the end of this book its most controversial proposal: that nearly anyone can become a good craftsman.

No one could deny that people are born or become unequal. But inequality is not the most important fact about human beings. Our species' ability to make things reveals more what we share.

when utility rules, adults lose something essential in the capacity to think; they lose the free curiosity that occurs in the open, felt-fingering space of play

The innate abilities on which craftsmanship is based are not exceptional; they are shared in common by the large majority of human beings and in roughly equal measure. [...] Three basic abilities are the foundation of craftsmanship. These are the ability to localize, to question, and to open up.

The person with an IQ score of 100 is not much different in ability than the person with a score of 115, but the 115 is much more likely to attract notice. There's a devil's answer to this question: inflating small differences in degree into large differences in kind legitimates the system of privilege.

The capacity to work well is shared fairly equally among human beings; it appears first in play, is elaborated in the capacities to localize, question, and open up problems at work. The Enlightenment hoped that learning to do good work would make human beings more capable of self-governance.

"Both work and play are equally free and intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend to make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into uncongenial labor for the poor. Work is psychologically simply an activity which consciously includes regard for consequences as part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the consequences are outside of the activity, as an end to which activity is merely a means. Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art." (Dewey)

Good craftsmanship implies socialism.

Arendt's reproach to democracy is that it demands too much of ordinary human beings; it might be better said of modern democracy that it demands too little. Its institutions and tools of communication do not draw on and develop the competences that most people can evince in work.

Confessions of a Slacker Mom (Muffy Mead-Ferro)

This was a slower read than i had expected, but still, it's funny and easy to agree with. Equal parts of common-sense and here's-how-we-did-it-at-the-cow-farm-ery.

It takes a village to raise a child. Don't have a village? Hire one!
The world is not childproof.
Love your children and trust your instincts.
The main reason children are not disciplined, is because it's inconvenient.

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Quotes:

I do hope it'll give you enough to mull over that the next time you hear from some magazine, TV show, friend or in-law about the latest thing that you, as a parent, are supposed to do or buy, you'll pause. And if you hear your inner voice saying something like "yuck," you'll listen.

Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives (David Eagleman)

I started reading this on a recommendation i found in Derek Sivers' blog. It's really not about the "afterlife", but a series of meditations on what makes our lives worth, through the device of imaginary "afterlives". Each chapter then is a sketch, or story idea, which could have been developed into a book. Some of them are brilliant, others not quite so, but overall, the effect is kaleidoscopic.

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Quotes:

The missing crowds make you lonely.

The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don't want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they're stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote. So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they're all in Hell.

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives

you discover that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein

He tried to make good things come to good people, and bad to bad, but He didn't have the technology to implement it.

Both sides were supplied with weapons ranging from sarcasm to tanks.

They don't guess that we have no answers for them. They don't guess that our main priority is to answer these questions for ourselves.

“It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”

“The Company offered you no evidence that it would work; why did you believe them?” Although He doesn't say it, everyone knows what He's thinking when He retires to His bed at night: that one of His best gifts—the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter—has backfired.

Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.

In truth, God lives a life very much like ours—we were created not only in His image but in His social situation as well.

At the beginning of the computer era, people died with passwords in their heads and no one could access their files. When access to these files was critical, companies could grind to a halt. That's when programmers invented death switches.

they come to realize that the name that existed on Earth, the you that moved serially through these different identities, was like a bundle of sticks from different trees. They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth.

There is always disputed territory. It is the interaction within this substantial administration that determines the random walk of the world: everything interesting happens at the borders between domains of power.

This is how the world will close, not with a bang but a yawn: sleepy and contented, our own falling eyelids serving as the curtain for the play's end.

He realizes that everyone is knocking over dominoes willy-nilly: no one knows where it leads.

In the afterlife, in the warm company of His accidental subjects, God now settles in comfortably, like a grandfather who looks down the long holiday table at his progeny, feeling proud, somehow responsible, and a little surprised.

In the afterlife you meet God. To your surprise and delight, She is like no god that humans have conceived. She shares qualities with all religions’ descriptions, but commands a deific grandeur that was captured in the net of none. She is the elephant described by blind men: all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole.

If you assumed that God is fond of those who hold loyally to their religions, you were right—but probably for the wrong reasons. She likes them only because they are intellectually nonadven-turous and will be sure to get the answer just a bit wrong.

This Isn't What It Looks Like (Pseudonymous Bosch)

This felt like a long book and the payoff was small and slow coming, but i guess it's par for the course. It's mostly a prelude to the last book of the series, which now we know will have to be about the sense of touch. Damn you Pseudonymous Bosch! Now we have to wait another long year!

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Nighty-Nightmare (James Howe)

I think this was the funniest book in the "Bunniculla" series, so far, even though Bunniculla is once more absent. I guess there is only so much you can do with a mute rabbit, right? But the overt and covert references to Bram Stoker's Dracula are plentiful, and Howie's abominable puns are relentless. Chester is crazier than ever, there is a dog named Dawg and, as usual, things are not what they seem.

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Quotes:

Chester, being a cat, needs to have his reality checked from time to time, the way car owners have their oil checked.

Anathem (Neal Stephenson)

I really liked this. It takes a while to really get going, but once it reaches that point, it's very hard to put down. I have no idea how this is going to end, but it's a very cool fictional world similar to ours where Mathematics developed into a quasi-religious (but non-Theistic) monasticism. Religion exists too (and people who believe in God exist on both sides and are called "deolaters"). Part of the reason this book is so cool is the way the author developed a whole vocabulary that is parallel to ours yet slightly askew. The word "anathem" relates both to "anthem" (song) and "anathema" (curse). Also very cool to me is the way the people in the story are used to deal with vast expanses of time. The world in the story reminds me more than a little of "The Glass Bead Game" (Magister Ludi), which was one of my favorite books about a century ago when i read it.

This was my first Neal Stephenson book.

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Quotes:

You can get a lot done in ten millennia if you put your mind to it

For in truth I was looking at a collection of ancient machines that had no meaning: all syntax, no semantics. I was claiming I saw a meaning in it. But this meaning had no reality, outside of my mind.

Cord had been growingly exasperated by something, and now, finally, she let it out: “This just isn’t the way to do it!” “Do what?” “Build a clock that’s supposed to keep going for thousands of years!”
“Some of the other Millennium Clocks are more like what you have in mind: designed so that they can run for millennia with no maintenance at all. It just depends on what sort of statement the designer wanted to make.”

We don’t think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not washing. But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.

“It’s frustrating, talking to you. Every idea my little mind can come up with has already been come up with by some Saunt two thousand years ago, and talked to death.”

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.” (Orolo)

I knew that this was how the Saunts had done it. They judged theorical proofs not logically but aesthetically.

Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said.

It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt-talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them.

Three fraas and two suurs sang a five-part motet while twelve others milled around in front of them. Actually they weren’t milling; it just looked that way from where we sat. Each one of them represented an upper or lower index in a theorical equation involving certain tensors and a metric. As they moved to and fro, crossing over one another’s paths and exchanging places while traversing in front of the high table, they were acting out a calculation on the curvature of a four-dimensional manifold, involving various steps of symmetrization, antisymmetrization, and raising and lowering of indices. Seen from above by someone who didn’t know any theorics, it would have looked like a country dance.

"I am throwing the Book at you."

There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance.

I could now see that this business of being the leader was going to be a pain in the neck because people would always be trying to get me to do the wrong things or get rid of me altogether.

“But your way isn’t just that set of rules,” Cord said. “It’s who you are—you follow that way for bigger reasons. And as long as you stay true to that, the confusion you’re talking about will sort itself out eventually.”

To Cord, this was just Selection Number 37. To me it was just about the most powerful piece of music we had. We sang it only once a year, at the end of a week spent fasting and reciting the names of the dead and the titles of the books burned.

she could talk about alloys the way some girls talked about shoes

The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.

“If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.” “Asamocra?” “Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction.

In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass—never mind—and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation.

The world that I lived in with Jesry and Lio and Arsibalt, Orolo and Jad, Ala and Tulia and Cord and all the others, was the very world that was being created from day to day in the mind of the Condemned Man in that courtroom. Sooner or later it would all end in a final judgment by the Magistrate. If that—if our—world seemed, on balance, like a decent place to him, he would let the Condemned Man live and our world would go on existing in his mind. If the world, as a whole, only reflected the Condemned Man’s depravity, the Magistrate would have him executed and our world would cease to exist. We could help keep the Condemned Man alive and thus preserve the existence of ourselves and our world by striving at all times to make it a better place.

He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice.

“Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.”

They came to Laterre fifty years after the death of Gödel.

“In Ita talk,” I said, “when you call something ‘low-level,’ you mean it’s really important, right?”

“Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. “Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it.

“Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

“Conservation of momentum,” he announced, “it’s not just a good idea—it’s the law!”

‘All right, already! I get it! The Hylaean Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across worldtracks!’ But where is the payoff? There’s got to be more to it than this big ship roaming from cosmos to cosmos collecting sample populations and embalming them in steel spheres.

The Celery Stalks at Midnight (James Howe)

     

Yikes! Vampire vegetables! Is Bunnicula changing onions into minions? When destiny calls, can Chester, Harold and Howie -- armed only with courage and toothpicks -- prevent the hordes of vegetable undead from taking over the city?

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Quotes:

When the moon is up and the night creatures begin to stir, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of lettuce?

Woman's Optimal Pelvic Health with Mercier Therapy (Jennifer Mercier)

In her first book, our friend and midwife Jennifer Mercier presents a series of vignettes from her clinical work which employs massage as a critical component of fertility treatment.

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Quotes:

Knowledge is power.