Category Archives: Books

The Quadrants of Discernment

Posted on by
2

Passion is a frequent theme in Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin. He also spends a good bit of time on discernment. The ability to see things they way they really are. Each corner of the illustration below represents a different kind of per and the way he responds to situations at work.

“In the bottom right is the Fundamentalist Zealot. He is attached to the world as he sees it. There is no prajna her, no discernment. Change is a threat. Curiosity is a threat. Competition is a threat. As a result, it’s difficult for him to see the world as it is,because he insists on the the world being the way he imagines it. At the same time, he has huge reservoirs of effort to invest in maintaining his worldview. Fundamentalist zealots always manage to make the world smaller, poorer, and meaner.

The top left belongs to the Bureaucrat. He’s certainly not attached to the outcome of events, and he definitely won’t be exerting any additional effort,regardless. The bureaucrat is a passionless rules follower, indifferent to external events and gliding through the day. The clear at the post office and the exhausted VP at General Motors are both bureaucrats.

The bottom left is the corner for the Whiner. The whiner has no passion, but is extremely attached to the worldview he’s bought into. Living life in fear of change, the whiner can’t muster the effort to make things better,but is extremely focused on wishing that things stay as they are. I’d put most people int he newspaper industry in this corner. They stood by for years, watching the industry crumble while they resolutely did nothing except whine about unfairness. Almost all the positive change in this industry (like The Huffington Post and YouTube) is coming from outsiders.

And that leaves the top right, the quadrant of the Linchpin. The linchpin is enlightened enough to see the world as it is, to understand that this angry customer is not about me, that this change in government policy is not a personal attack,that this job is not guaranteed for life. At the same time, the linchpin brings passion to the job. She knows from experience that the right effort in the right place can change the outcome, and she reserves her effort for doing just that.

Here’s another way to describe the two axes: One asks, Can you see it? The other wonders, Do you care?

Lady Gaga meets Pattern Recognition?

Posted on by

Okay, this post is for William Gibson fans only. Specifically, fans of his novel, Pattern Recognition. Here’s a grossly over-simplified plot summary. Actually it’s not even that, but I had to provide some context, so…

“…a cult-like group of Internet obsessives strives to find meaning and patterns within a mysterious collection of video moments, merely called “the footage,” let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source.”

This morning on his Twitter feed, Gibson posted:

“That putative Lady Gaga virus is as seriously Footage-y as anything I’ve seen on YouTube.”

Curious, I found my way to this video:

UPDATE: There were a couple of videos on YouTube to which I had linked but they’ve been pulled. Very suspicious.

“The true past”

Posted on by
Reply

I read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in high school. I need to read it again but it scared me back then and is sure to be even more frightening today. Nightly news reports on our distant wars in Iraq and Afghanastan feel an awful lot like the “telescreen” updates on the war between “Oceania” and “Eurasia.”

Wikipedia: “At the Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), Winston (Smith) is an editor responsible for the historical revisionism concording the past to the Party’s contemporary official version of the past; thus is the Oceania government omniscient. As such, he perpetually rewrites records and alters photographs, rendering the deleted people as unpersons; the original document is incinerated in a memory hole. Despite enjoying the intellectual challenge of historical revisionism, he is fascinated by the true past, and eagerly tries to learn more about it.”

“…fascinated by the true past.” Me too.

Blog. Book. Book Tour.

Posted on by

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that my friend Henry turned his blog (Health Care Fine Art) into a book. He didn’t try to sell the book but gave it to the best customers of his art. Some call it “vanity press,” Henry calls it marketing.

A year later… Henry has been invited to give a talk about his book in New York. Last week he did a series of presentations in Boston. In a couple of week he’ll be in San Francisco and next month, San Diego.

It’s a beautiful book and nobody know more about this kind of art than Henry.

Welcome to the new normal.

Mark Ramsey interviews Seth Godin

Posted on by
Reply

Mark Ramsey has done another interview with Seth Godin that I highly recommend. Mr. Godin is promoting his new book, “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” I encourage you to listen to the interview. It isn’t long. Here are a few excerpts:

“…school was organized by the powers-that-be to turn the typical student into a compliant, quiet, sit-in-straight-rows, fill-in-little-circles-on-the-SAT, follow-the-path, go-to-the-job-you-get-at-the-placement-office kind of person. And there’s a reason for that: It’s that if you are the organization busy hiring people, the more people you have who want to do the jobs you’ve got, the cheaper you can get away with paying them. As a result, we’ve created a culture where a few people are able to drive the agenda and a lot of people end up working hard to fit in and have a lot of fear about doing anything but that.”

“You read about people who are making $80K, $90K, $200K a year as middle managers for Fortune 500 companies, and then they get laid off and can’t make $15,000 a year working at a 7-11, and the question I’d ask is: Where did the $70,000 worth of value go? Did the person change or just their income?”

“It’s a crisis because all these years that we were watching blue collar people lose their jobs, exported to China or wherever… All these years that we watched machines replace people on assembly lines, we just shook our heads and said that’s really sad but that’s not us, that’s them – good thing it’s not us. And now it’s us, now they’ve come for us.”

“Well, I think that broadcasters have now embraced the fact that spectrum is finally on its way to being valueless. It was an 80-year run, but there’s no intelligent person I know that says that in 10 or 15 years from now they are going to be glad they own 660 on the AM dial.”

“All those kids who are in school today, who are learning how to do the jobs of 1960 or 1970, they’re in big trouble. All those 40- or 50-year-old executives who are hoping they’re going to wait this thing out, they’re in really big trouble.”

Don’t interfere with the flow

Posted on by

“There is a profound Buddhist doctrine that speaks of a great river that flows through all of reality. Once you have found yourself, there is no more cause for action. The river picks you up and carries you along forever after. In other words, effort from the personal level, the kind of effort all of us are used to in daily life, becomes pointless after a certain point. This includes mental effort. Once you become self-aware, you realize that the flow of life needs no analysis or control, because it’s all you. The great river only seems to pick you up. Actually, you have picked yourself up — not as an isolated person, but as a phenomenon of the cosmos. No one gave you the job of steering the river. You can enjoy the ride and observe the scenery.”

I like that. I found it in a book by Deepak Chopra (“Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul”). I’m not recommending the book (you’ll read it if you’re supposed to). But this is where I jot done some of the lines and passages that I want to remember or find again.

Continue reading →

The Book of Eli

Posted on by
Reply

They did it. The finally made a Denzel Washington movie that completely sucked. The story is Kwai Chang Caine goes to Deadwood with a good dose of Road Warrior.

I can only assume the studio hopes the reps of Denzel and Gary Oldman will pull enough people in the first week or two to make a little money. The film could not have been expensive to shoot.

As for why two fine actors like Washington and Oldman would sign on for this… no idea.

If you’re the type that makes a mental list of “reality errors” in the movie (where do they get gasoline 30 years after the end of the world?), don’t bother. The Book of Eli has too many.

The God Theory

Posted on by
Reply

My interest in quantum theory, time and the relationship between consciousness and reality lead me to a book by Bernard Haisch titled The God Theory. (I’ve included a chunk of Dr. Haisch’s bio below). I include this post for my own reference.

“If you look up at the faint smudge in the night sky that is really the distant, huge Andromeda galaxy, you might see light that, from your point of  view, took two million years to traverse hat vast intergalactic distance before it was absorbed in your retina and registered as an image. For a beam of light itself, however, things look different. Instead of radiating from some star in the Andromeda galaxy and racing through space for two million years, every single photon sees itself, metaphorically speaking, as born and instantaneously absorbed in your eye. It is one simple jump that takes no time at all, according to the theory of special relativity. That’s because, in the reference frame of a particle traveling at the speed of light, all distances shrink to zero and all time collapses to nothing. From its own perspective, the photon of light leaps instantaneously from there to here because distance has no place in its existence. We can almost say that the photon was created because it had someplace to land and, in an instant, it jumped from there to here, even across two million light years of space from our perspective.”

“Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications. He served as a scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal for ten years, and was Principal Investigator on several NASA research projects. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Haisch did postdoctoral research at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. His professional positions include Staff Scientist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory; Deputy Director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley; and Visiting Scientist at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany. He was also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.”

Quantum Enigma

Posted on by

For some years I’ve been fascinated by, and reading about, time. Which pretty quickly gets you into the realm of quantum theory. Recently I’ve come across some wonderful books suitable for folks like me that needed “assistance” getting through college algebra.

Quantum Enigma is co-authored by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, who teach physics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. If you suspect that things are not as they seem, I highly recommend this book.

I bring this up in an effort to understand —and explain— how my last post here was on Christmas Eve, almost 3 days ago, and yet no perceived time has “passed” for me.

UPDATE: The above was first posted on 12/27/09.  I have since finished this book. It was a challenging read and much more about physics than consciousness. Unless otherwise indicated, the quotes below can be attributed to the authors, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner.

“In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it. – Martin Rees

“Space almost instantly expanded, or “inflated,” at a rate much faster than the speed of light. Starting from something vastly smaller than an atom, the entire universe we observe today presumably inflated almost instantaneously to the size of a large grapefruit.”

“The chance  that a livable universe like ours would be created is far less than the chance of randomly picking a particular single atom out of all the atoms in the universe.”

“Consider how improbably you are — the improbability of someone with just your unique DNA being conceived. (Millions of your possible siblings were not conceived. And now go back a few generation.) With those odds, you’re essentially impossible.”

“It is hard to imagine something truly astonishing that we don’t initially rule out as preposterous.”

Books: 2009

Posted on by
Reply

Yes, the list is a little skimpy but this blog will not write itself. I plan to read more fiction in twenty-ten.

  • Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe
  • The Chaos Scenario, Bob Garfield
  • The Ultimate Happiness Prescription: 7 Keeys to Joy and Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra
  • The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
  • Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson
  • Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, Douglas Rushkoff
  • Road Dogs, Elmore Leonard
  • The Increment, David Ignatius
  • Wicked Prey, John Sanford
  • What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis
  • Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, Bart D. Ehrman
  • Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, DonTapscott
  • God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment, Scott Adams