Emma Weine > Recent Status Updates

Best ever description of what DNA is and does! ('Life's Computer', pg. 207)

Thank you Ray Kurzweil; I now understand DNA soooooo much better!! (pg. 207)

Scene: Morning-room in Algernon's flat in Half-Moon Street. The room is luxuriously and artistically furnished. The sound of a piano is heard in the adjoining room. Lane is arranging afternoon tea on the table, and after the music has ceased Algernon enters. ALGERNON: Did you hear what I was playing, Lane? LANE: I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

It's a long read but fascinating. Certainly worth the effort to be informed about all this. I'm reading it slowing and digesting all of it - no speed reading this one.

Yep - I was right; after a bit of hard core maths he launches straight back into the good stuff! Kicking it off with a really good description/definition of the life cycle of a paradigm. Best one I've ever heard ...

I'm really, REALLY enjoying this book - it's utterly fascinating! I just hope beyond all hopes that Ray Kurzweil, the author (who is an inventor and an expert on predicting the future of artificial intelligence) lives long enough to see his predictions realised! Would that Ray is here to experience the Singularity himself!! It wouldn't be the same without him ...

Ok, the first third of this chapter is a bit heavy going in the mathematics for me, but still the subject is interesting enough to warrant struggling through it. I think he gets stuck back into the really juicy stuff in a page or two anyway ...

This is a FANTASTIC and a MUST read!!! Should be read by EVERYONE! Do yourself a massive favour and get yourself a copy of this eye/mind-opening book! If you only read one book this decade, make it this one!

Finally!!! :)

Yuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmm!!!!!!!!

Just reading about Bose-Einstein condensates in biological tissue (Frohlich's pumped system) and how the same condensation among neuron constituents may be the physical basis of consciousness (!) and how wave/particle duality is related to thought/experience processes (!) and IT ALL MAKES SENSE! This book makes it all seem so clear! I have an altogether new understanding of the new physics. I'm LOVING this book!

This book is too dated, and I'll use that to excuse the highly unacceptable sexist, racist, anti-Semite language and attitude of the main, masculine protagonists. 125 pages in and after being reminded that there were 'Gentiles' as well as 'Jews' being enslaved here and therefore we men should do something about it, I must admit defeat; I can't take it anymore! It's horrible! I hate this book!

This is pretty amazing; a very, very interesting read. And she explains quantum mechanics and the new physics in a way I can really relate to; I'm understanding it all on a whole other level now ... Very cool! :)

I can already tell this is one of the most profound things I've ever read in my life.

"Besides containing [cancer causing] additives like nitrites, hot dogs can be made out of ground up lips, snouts, spleens, tongues, throats and other 'variety meats'."

" ... physician error and adverse events from drugs or surgery kill 225,400 people per year. That makes [the U.S.] health care system the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease."

"One of the most well recent article by Barbara Starsfield, MD., stating that physician error, medication error and adverse events from drugs or surgery kill 225,400 people per year. That makes [the U.S.] health care system the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease."

This is absolutely amazing, fascinating and mind blowing! I mean a dormant cancer can be reawakened by bad nutrition. And protein trumps carcinogens every time when it comes to causing cancer!

'The average two-year-old is thirty inches tall and twenty-eight pounds of pure, cerebral appetite determined without plan or guile to snatch up absolutely everything knowable from the world. She or he is, indisputably, the most ravenous, and most successful, learning machine yet devised in the universe.'

I feel so damned lucky to have found this book NOW and not earlier in my love affair with Jeanette Winterson; What a beautiful present to myself - her first collection of short stories really is a celebration of JW and this special book has been kept on ice for me till now. It's delicious!!

I'm absolutely smitten from the very first; 'he was as soft as rain water' ('he' is a new puppy)Her writing so always, always fresh. I have no idea how she does it but I would sell my mother to just be allowed the privilege of being present in her mind as she writes, simply to witness first hand how she makes magic happen, again and again.

Pretty good so far ...

Finally up to rendezvous 5 - Old World Monkeys. Rendezvous 4 had some very interesting postulations as to why we lost out tales; I'm siding with the mutant gene theory, the 'Manx Monkey' ancestor. It's getting deeper and deeper but I'm loving it!

Maybe its the heat addling my brain, but I'm finding it difficult to get a handle on the reverse trees, coalescence points, and how to find the various MRCAs (most recent common ancestors). It's just not making sense to me yet, but not for want of Dawkins's clear direction. Hoping it will all become clear to me sooner rather than later because its a BIG book!

It's SO nice to know I have this whole book yet to read! It arrived in the post today and I immediately dived in. I know it's going to be amazing - Dawkins never disappoints!

This is the second time I have abandoned this book! I don't know if it's because I'm not in the mood for it, or if I just don't like the way she writes. I haven't read anything else by Margaret Atwood so it's hard to tell. Either way I'm putting it back on the shelf for now, again!

This is my 2nd attempt at beginning this book ... Here it goes!

She stopped reading and looked up. Out of the quicksand. She was evolving. So power had changed hands. Meanwhile, with the help of an anecdote, I fell in love. Words, Carravagio. They have power.

It's so luscious, the way he is always "thinkering" with words, "another syllable to suggest collecting a thought as one tinkers with a half-completed bicycle. Words are tricky things, a friend has told him, they're more tricky than violins." One can't help thinking that Ondaatje doesn't find words to be tricky things though; words he gets.