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Our democracy can work only if voters know how the world works, so they are able to make intelligent policy choices and are less apt to fall prey to demagogues, ideological zealots, or conspiracy buffs who may be confusing
“You can boost the production and function of brown fat by walking outside in a T-shirt on a cold winter day, exercising in the cold, or leaving a window open overnight.”
― Summary & Analysis of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To: A Guide to David Sinclair's Book
― Summary & Analysis of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To: A Guide to David Sinclair's Book
“In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that “something within him” discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him—they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.”
― Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
― Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it.”
― The Cry for Myth
― The Cry for Myth
“Non-instrumental, playful behavior thrives on a continuing negotiation with the various forms of discipline, exploitation and spectacle which constitute the contemporary city. Play concentrates attention on practices which have a dialectical relation to the order, fixity and functional and semiotic determinism of built form.”
― The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces
― The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces
“we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.”
― Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
― Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
Johnseelybrown’s 2025 Year in Books
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