It might take me two weeks or it might take me a month or more to finish a novel, but by the time I close the cover, I know it completely and see it as Neo might the Matrix, as a sparkling string of code that comes together to create an alternate reality. My wife now refuses to crack a book once I’ve read it, because the pages are distractingly blackened with notes.
Sometimes, if a book has a particularly addictive plot, I will force myself to set down the pen. I will read once for the emotional spell the book casts and then I will read it again to study its technique. My wife says I’ve taken the fun out of reading. But really, it’s just a peculiar sort of fun. Maybe more than anything in the world, I delight in stories and language, the way they can be put together and taken apart, the infinite possibilities of these twenty-six letters at our disposal. My mind bristles with forests of sentences, but I no longer feel panicked and lost in the shade of them. I know the way now, slowly.
An interesting taxonomy of readers:
The Hate Reader. Oh, you. You pretend to be curmudgeonly, you do, but you really just devour the reading you do in a different way. You’re loving it nearly as much as you’re hating it, and maybe then some, even as you complain the author can’t put two sentences together properly or that the book is dragging hopelessly in the middle and what kind of plot twist is that, even? […]
The Chronological Reader. Slow and steady wins the race, dear reader. You are the tortoise to the promiscuous reader’s distracted-at-any-turn hare. You buy a book, you read it. You buy another, you read it. Perhaps you borrow a book at the library. You read it, and then you return it, and you get another, which you will read. You may not remember where you began, what the first book that kicked it all off was, and you likely have no idea where you’ll end, but the point is, you will go through each book methodically and reasonably, until it is done. […]
The Book-Buster. Is your home strewn with books scattered about, this way and that, their pages turned, their covers folded over, their backs broken and their limbs splayed out on either side? You are a destroyer of books, but you love them so. Your spirit book character is Lennie of Of Mice and Men. You just want to hug the books, squeeze them tighter and tighter, you adore them so much, you really don’t know you’re hurting them. […]
Delayed Onset Reader #1. You are without a doubt a book lover, and when you walk into a bookstore or any place books are available, you can’t help yourself, you buy one or many. When you get home you put them aside, often reverently, as if they were art, displaying them on a bookshelf or propping them up on your bedside table, pages ready to meet your eyes as soon as you have the moment. But you’re very, very busy, and days, weeks, or months may go by before you actually crack open one of these books. […]
Delayed Onset Reader #2. You are not a book lover. You buy books so you can show them off. If you are wealthy, you may have a mahogany-paneled library for expressly this purpose. Since you don’t waste time on books, we won’t waste time discussing you, but if you ever do pick up a book and read it and love it, you can consider yourself cured. […]
The Bookophile. More than reading, you just love books. Old ones, the way they smell, the crinkles and yellowing of the pages; new ones, the way they smell, too, the crispness, running your hands over a stack of them at the bookstore. […]
The Anti-Reader. You are the book version of the person who claims “I never watch TV! I don’t even own one!” You never read books, because you find them too long. You consider blog posts too long, too, and are always penning comments that say “TLDR” to express how short something can truly be and still be meaningful. Unfortunately, you are the lady or man who doth protest too much, and you may instead have some deep insecurity about reading that led you to this book-flavorless existence. […]
The Cross-Under. You are a grown-up who reads Y.A. or kids books, or a kid who reads adult books, and there is a place for you in society, finally. Your existence acknowledged after so many years, you no longer have to feel shame at your questionable reading habits but can instead bask in the admiration of book blogs and feel a part of the vanguard. You are not ruled by categories; you are a free thinker. […]
The Multi-Tasker. This is the nice way of saying you are a promiscuous reader, but it’s not that you don’t finish reads. Instead, you just have a sort of hippie reading way about you, free love or some such. You might start the day out with a few pages from one novelist, then read something entirely different on the subway, and when you come home from work, another work as well. Your bedtime read, too, might be different, and all in all, when you count up the books, you’ve got quite a lot of irons in the fire all at the same time. […]
The Sleepy Bedtime Reader. Do you feel the only time you have to read is when you’re about to go to sleep? You tote your book into bed with you and it’s so very comfortable and the book is so deliciously good, but you cannot keep your eyes open and end up waking up with a book on your face and your light still on at 3 a.m.? […]
Update: Many More Types of Book Readers: A Diagnostics Addendum:
The Book Snob. You are hard to impress, Little Miss or Mister. You only read books that are well reviewed by critics that you have determined to be of the highest caliber. […]
The Hopelessly Devoted. You stick to the authors you like, and you read them, pretty much exclusively, whatever they write, good or bad, regardless of reviews or the opinions of your friends or family. […]
The Audiobook Listener. So, ya like audiobooks? That’s cool. There’s a place for you, person whose ears are essentially eyes. […]
The Conscientious Reader. It’s nonfiction or nothing for you, reader! It should have a purpose, too, and be meaningful. You should learn something. […]
The Critic. Yes, it is easier for you to hate than to love, but when you love, you love deeply and in the most eloquent of fashions. It’s not a book if you don’t discourse about it, and so, discourse you shall! […]
The Book Swagger. You’re the one wandering around book conventions with that acquisitive gleam in your eye and a pile of ARCs in your tote bag. If it’s free, you’ll take it, and even if it’s not, you’ll try to get it for free. […]
The Easily Influenced Reader. If someone says it, they must be right! You listen to everyone, from your mom to Oprah to the members of your book club to Michiko Kakutani, and you believe them all! There are so many books for you to read, you better get started. […]
The All-the-Timer/Compulsive/Voracious/Anything Goes Reader. Wherever you go, whatever you do, there’s a book with you. It doesn’t matter what it is, really, so long as there are pages with words on them, or an e-reader with words on it. […]
The Sharer. You read something you like and you simply will not stop talking about it; you tell everyone you know, and you will not give up until they read it too. And then you want to talk about it. […]
The Re-Reader. You know what you like, and instead of branching out and possibly finding something new that you don’t like, you focus on what you do. You read the same books over and over again, returning to them as if they’re old friends, which, pretty much, they are. […]
The “It’s Complicated” Reader. You are a combination of many of these things and yet completely different, too. Each book means a new type of reader exists in your soul; you refuse to be defined or categorized. You are a freeform, wild, woolly entity. […]
The Cat. You creep around the house all day and sneak peeks at all those large, paper things that your owner leaves lying about. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, your owner has left one open, and you lie on top of it and let its smooth pages touch your whiskers. […]
Culture thrives on conflict and antagonism, not social harmony - a point made rather memorably by a certain Harry Lime, says philosopher John Gray.
“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
We know that art can flourish under despots, but we’re reluctant to admit it - if creativity and tyranny can co-exist, the value of freedom seems diminished. Welles’s lines seem to express a dangerous truth, one we’d like to forget but can’t banish from our minds.
Culture may not need democracy or peace, but it can’t develop without some measure of freedom - and that requires a diversity of centres of influence, working openly and at times in opposition to one another. Rightly, we’ve learnt to mistrust any directing cultural role for the state. When artists and writers rely solely on government, the result is at best nepotism and mediocrity.
But the processes through which culture is created and renewed are complex and variegated, and it’s just as silly to think that a thriving cultural scene can be produced entirely by market forces. A vital culture comes from competition and rivalry between institutions - state-funded arts councils and libraries, churches and campaigning groups as well as private and corporate sponsors.
This is the kernel of truth in Harry Lime’s famous lines. Culture thrives on contestation and antagonism, not some dreary fantasy of social harmony. Without such creative conflict, we really could end up with nothing but cuckoo clocks.
An interesting idea. Inspiration can emerge in many different circumstances. While it’s more likely to result from restlessness than slothfulness, there shouldn’t be a need to forsake democracy for dictatorship.
An internet troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.
3 key influences
• Anonymity […]
• Invisibility […]
• Lack of eye-contact […]
As with many studies, it’s tricky to pin down the exact reasons behind the results.
But given that a great proportion of our communication is non-verbal, and that we rely heavily on facial recognition to connect with and understand one another, it may be that losing eye-contact online actually cuts out our main avenue for empathetic communication – without which we become emotionally disconnected and more predisposed towards hostile behaviour.
Which neural processes underlie expert sport performance? How do our brains evolve with training? Since the 1990s – known as the decade of the brain – brain imaging (e.g. fMRI, PET scans etc.) has shed light on the neural basis of different psychological disorders.
More recently, rather than simply exploring the pathology of brain, researchers have become concerned with the neural changes that occur with the development of expertise.
From such research, a number of fascinating insights into the neuroscience of ball games have emerged.
Perhaps the most important one is that expert players typically show less brain activation, but greater cortical efficiency, than novice counterparts. For example, whereas expert baseball hitters tend to activate mainly the supplementary motor areas of the brain when they imagine hitting, novice players tend to activate the limbic regions (e.g. the amygdala and basal forebrain complex) which generally regulate emotions such as fear and anxiety.
This activation of the limbic region suggests that novice players have a difficulty in filtering out irrelevant information as they prepare to execute their swings.
Studies with both golf and diving showed that there are differences in the diffusion of activity between experts and novices during simulation of their activities.
Currently, we are on the crest of the wave of neuroscience and this domain will illuminate our understanding of expert sports performance in the future.
If you’re a U.S. worker, there’s a 10 percent chance that you work from home at least once a week, and a 4.3 percent chance that you work from home most of the time. And if you’re one of those working from home, you’re likely a more productive worker, at least according to a study recently published by Stanford.
During the 9-month study they found:
• A 12 percent increase in productivity for the at-home workers. Of that increase, 8.5 percent came from working more hours (due to shorter breaks and fewer sick days) and 3.5 percent came from more performance per minute. The researchers speculate this was due to quieter working conditions.
• No negative spill-overs to the control group stuck in the office even though they had communicated that they wanted to work from home.
• A 50 percent decrease in attrition among the work-from-home group.
• Substantially higher work satisfaction as measured by a survey among the home group.
The results might not map perfectly to other types of knowledge work. Call centers not only provide an easy way to monitor productivity, but a steady flow of tasks. More fluid or self-directed forms of work, such as software development, are more difficult to measure and may present more opportunities for distraction.
From personal experience, doing software development at home has several benefits:
- more control of working environment, especially background noise;
- no meetings can be scheduled to interrupt flow;
- no office politics to deal with;
- greater flexibility regarding work hours.
On the other hand, minuses include:
- as suggested in the article, there is a greater range of distractions available;
- lack of physical contact with colleagues increases sense of isolation.
We’re releasing a completely new platform that targets people with no programming knowledge and gives them an engaging and fun environment to learn in.
Over everything else we wanted to emphasize creativity and exploration and make it approachable for people of all ages, including young kids.
Earlier this year, a meme started suggesting everyone should learn to code. The hype and criticism have probably died down by now, but given the appropriate environment, I think there is some value in giving people an taste of what is involved in building the software and websites they use every day.
The Khan Academy Computer Science project looks like a neat way for non-programmers to dip their metaphorical toes into the coding waters.
In an exasperated outburst, just before he left the presidency of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet complained that, “as a policymaker during the crisis, I found the available [economic and financial] models of limited help. In fact, I would go further: in the face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by conventional tools.”
Many conference participants agreed that the study of economics should be set in a broader political context, with greater emphasis on the role of institutions. Students should also be taught some humility. The models to which they are still exposed have some explanatory value, but within constrained parameters. And painful experience tells us that economic agents may not behave as the models suppose they will.
But it is not clear that a majority of the profession yet accepts even these modest proposals. The so-called “Chicago School” has mounted a robust defense of its rational expectations-based approach, rejecting the notion that a rethink is required. The Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas has argued that the crisis was not predicted because economic theory predicts that such events cannot be predicted. So all is well.
Fortunately, others in the profession do aspire to relevance, and they have been chastened by the events of the last five years, when price movements that the models predicted should occur once in a million years were observed several times a week. They are working hard to understand why, and to develop new approaches to measuring and monitoring risk, which is the main current concern of many banks.
These efforts are arguably as important as the specific and detailed regulatory changes about which we hear much more. Our approach to regulation in the past was based on the assumption that financial markets could to a large extent be left to themselves, and that financial institutions and their boards were best placed to control risk and defend their firms.
These assumptions took a hard hit in the crisis, causing an abrupt shift to far more intrusive regulation. Finding a new and stable relationship between the financial authorities and private firms will depend crucially on a reworking of our intellectual models. So the Bank of England is right to issue a call to arms. Economists would be right to heed it.
Here’s a list of books recommended by Barking up the wrong tree if you want to teach yourself to become an expert:
- Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
- Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To
- Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries
- The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills
- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
- Nine Things Successful People Do Differently
- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
- Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
- The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How
Alternatively, if you don’t like reading:
The documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is one of the best reviewed films of the past year and gives an excellent portrayal of the (extreme) expert mindset.