Category Archives for Erudition

I constantly challenge myself to read and self-educate. The erudition section of this blog is my attempt to chronicle my challenge and galvanize a lifetime of curiosity and learning. If you have read any of these books before, or happen to pick one up and find it interesting, I’d love to hear your thoughts too.

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean — Sometimes You Just Can’t Help

I’m smack in the middle of a personal challenge to read at least one book every week. The erudition section of this blog is my attempt to chronicle my challenge and galvanize a lifetime of curiosity and learning. If you have read any of these books before, or happen to pick one up and find it interesting, I’d love to hear your thoughts too.

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

Every once in a while you find a book that speaks to you in a way you don’t understand. The story in itself ebbs and flows like the tide of water on a beach of characters that teach you more about yourself than you can consciously comprehend. The elegant prose so enraptures you in its profundity that you find yourself questioning whether you are remembering a part of the book or a first-hand experience—or that you have imaginary dialogues with the characters, as if they entrusted to you a part of themselves that intimately found its way into your conscience—and the winding narrative contains in it a symbolism that intrigues in a uniquely unorthodox, enigmatic fashion.

I’ve found very few of those kind of books.

A River Runs Through It is one of those books.

Continue reading →

Lucky or Smart by Bo Peabody — “Smart Enough to Realize I Was Getting Lucky”

I’m smack in the middle of a personal challenge to read at least one book every week. The erudition section of this blog is my attempt to chronicle my challenge and galvanize a lifetime of curiosity and learning. If you have read any of these books before, or happen to pick one up and find it interesting, I’d love to hear your thoughts too.

Lucky or Smart by Bo Peabody

Remember Tripod.com? You know, back in the dinosaur age of the internets, when only the über-smart and curious intellectuals (read: nerds) were the ones who ventured into the land of dial-up? Yeah, I was there, and I’m pretty sure I had a “homepage” on Tripod.

Well the guy behind Tripod, it turns out, was a kid—Bo Peabody. After nursing Tripod as a pet project through college, he hired hippie programmers to wrangle the code that he himself didn’t know how to write. Supervised by his economics professor, Tripod.com began as a how-to site for-and-by college students. As soon as he unleashed the code monkeys, however, they transformed it into a publishing platform, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to create their own personal homepage.

Fast forward six years. Peabody sells his company to Lycos for a reported $58 million in stock. Rock on.

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The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco — See the Process Behind the Product

I’m smack in the middle of a personal challenge to read at least one book every week. The erudition section of this blog is my attempt to chronicle my challenge and galvanize a lifetime of curiosity and learning. If you have read any of these books before, or happen to pick one up and find it interesting, I’d love to hear your thoughts too.

The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco

First, the bad: MJ DeMarco isn’t an elegant writer, nor is he particularly scholarly in the way some business-minded people are. Just take a look at his blog where he posts videos of himself sitting poolside in his mansion, wearing a backwards ball cap, and seriously discussing the parallels of a supermarket conveyor belt and business strategies.

DeMarco also seems to be a lucky dot-com millionaire. He started and sold a limousine chartering website for both limo rental companies and individuals looking for limos. Now that’s a pretty good gig, considering how most people looking for limos are also either looking to spend a bunch of money on a special occasion, or have a bunch of money to spend regardless. Continue reading →

My Anti-library

My Anti-libraryPictured above is part of my anti-library. The first bottom row are unread or partly-read books. The back row and shelf are either read or reference books.

What’s an anti-library? In The Black Swan, Taleb talks about Umberto Eco’s collection of 30,000 unread books. These books represent Eco’s anti-library, the reservoir of information that Eco doesn’t yet possess. This unknown knowledge is of greater importance than what Eco does know because it represents the blind spots, the uncertainty, and the relative frailty of his knowledge. It also serves to humble and remind him of how much he really doesn’t know.

Awareness of one’s anti-library and the unknown information it holds is critical to any right-minded individual.

So, I am posting here my anti-library as of today, the 6th of August, 2011. A tip of the hat goes out to the inimitable James Steele II for posting his anti-library and giving me this idea. In about six months I’ll check back in with new books to read.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho — Follow Your Personal Legend

I’m smack in the middle of a personal challenge to read at least one book every week. Because of school and work, I’m currently 13 books behind and playing catch-up. The erudition section of this blog is my attempt to chronicle my challenge and galvanize a lifetime of curiosity and learning. If you have read any of these books before, or happen to pick one up and find it interesting, I’d love to hear your thoughts too.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

For a long time I didn’t read fiction, even after some of my favorite authors and idols insisted that it helped them become better writers. I always believed that, aside from a few superstar novels, fiction couldn’t teach me anything I couldn’t learn from real-life.

I now see that as an extremely myopic view of fiction. When you read a book, you shouldn’t just read the book. Look deeper and try and get inside the author’s head. Why would she phrase a sentence this way, or why would he reveal such-and-such about this character at this point in the book? You don’t learn just from the words that are written on the page, but from which words are written, the way they are written, and the structure and story of the book in whole.

That said, The Alchemist is… Continue reading →

Christianity and Alcohol

“—Christianity, alcohol, the two great means of corruption.”
The Portable Nietzsche, page 652

“Every kind of faith is itself an expression of self-abnegation, of self-alienation.”
The Portable Nietzsche, page 639

The analogy of Christianity to alcohol is interesting to me. The chemistry of alcohol: ethanol is a carbohydrate, the metabolism of which leads to the inhibition of the enzyme phosphofructokinase (slowing and directing cell metabolism to store instead of burn fat) and is converted to triglycerides in the liver (storing more fat); ethanol binds to the GABA-A receptor which increases effects of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA (effectively slowing nervous system reactions), and of course increases liver cirrhosis. (A bit oversimplified, and disregarding the hormetic effect of alcohol, but the point remains.)

The chemistry of Christianity: faith rests on convictions, convictions inhibit the believer from independence so that he “cannot posit himself as an end” and in fact requires someone else—a priest or deity—to posit any end at all, and so he becomes a means to others’ end—a slave—in which case his freedom and sense of self continually deteriorate. Just like alcohol, this pathway dulls the senses and robs men of the vivid sense of life that accompanies self-overcoming or self-actualization.

I’m not sure how much Nietzsche knew about biochemistry, but in any case he has here a deeply accurate analogy.