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Jon Gauthier
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"People say a good part of Nietzsche's fans are <25-year-old males. Guess I should give him a chance before it's too late. (But really—why haven't I red this yet??)" — Feb 12, 2018 06:36PM
"People say a good part of Nietzsche's fans are <25-year-old males. Guess I should give him a chance before it's too late. (But really—why haven't I red this yet??)" — Feb 12, 2018 06:36PM
Jon Gauthier
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"Dan J is interested in this, so maybe I should be, too. Scheduled for consumption this weekend. (This will be yet another return to a classic I haven't thought about in a long time. Should be fun!)" — Oct 06, 2017 06:06AM
"Dan J is interested in this, so maybe I should be, too. Scheduled for consumption this weekend. (This will be yet another return to a classic I haven't thought about in a long time. Should be fun!)" — Oct 06, 2017 06:06AM
Cloud Atlas
by
Learn from this, Sixsmith. When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first-or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.
“I will say that in the course of my work ... I began to suspect that the "letter from the stars" was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test. For as a subject, believing he sees in the colored blotches angels or birds of ill omen, in reality fills in the vagueness of the thing shown with what is "on his mind," so did we attempt, behind the veil of incomprehensible signs, to discern the presence of what lay, first and foremost, within ourselves.”
― His Master's Voice
― His Master's Voice
“What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to entertain ourselves.”
―
―
“So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.”
― Herzog
― Herzog
“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”
― A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
― A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
“If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos.”
― The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
― The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
Linguistics
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Would you like to talk about language? Do you like reading about language? Then this is your group :)
Goodreads Librarians Group
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Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
EconTalk
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Group for the discussion and listing of the books promoted in the excellent EconTalk podcast.
Stanford Symbolic Systems
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Members of the Stanford Symbolic Systems community — undergraduate and graduate students in cognitive science, AI, linguistics, philosophy, psychology ...more
Jon’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jon’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
2,085 books
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86 books
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12 friends
1,693 books
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149 friends
1,733 books
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598 friends
277 books
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30 friends
59 books
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381 friends
133 books
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38 friends
102 books
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130 friends
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