This book was probably a reference for every neurological/psychological disorder movie that Hollywood has produced.

I see stories similar to Memento, Rain Man, and Awakenings (which this guy also wrote/experienced).

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Hah!

Siddhattha Gotama became the Buddha when he was 29 years old.

That’s my age!

I’d love to be remembered for finding a ‘middle way’.

(Although unlike the Buddha, I’d like to avoid ditching my wife and child to do it)

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I don’t normally count children’s books, but I like the author a lot.

Fantastic Crichton.

It has been fun to say “There’s no such thing as global warming” in front of my friends and see their reaction.

Not as good as Emergence (Steven Johnson’s other book).

I’d like to take the ‘eyes = mind reading’ test that is described in this book.

I’m going through a ‘brain’ phase.

This book,
“the Man who mistook his wife for a hat”,
“Mind Hacks”,
and
“On Intelligence”

There’s a lot to like about the Patriot League. I particularly liked the new coach being shocked to see his players studying before a 6am practice.

“Donald Campbell, one of the leading psychologists in creativity research in the sixties, concluded that persons “who have been uprooted from traditional cultures, or who have been thoroughly exposed to two or more cultures, seem to have the advantage in the range of hypotheses they are apt to consider, and through this means, in the frequency of creative innovation.” The point is not that a person who has been exposed to multiple cultures can simply fall back on two or more different ways of viewing an issue. Rather, it is taht such a person is not wedded to a particular point of view. Simply by being aware that there are multiple ways of approaching a problem, he or she will more likely view any situation from multiple perspectives.”

-pp 47

Ugh.

This book is like a techno-optimist’s response to the Unabomber’s manifesto. My problem is that the future espoused by Kurzweil is only slightly more appealing than the Unabomber’s.

Specifically, I don’t care for his timeline/predictions that humanity will be associating primarily with machines by 2019.

That seems like an inhuman future.

His idea of refinements and how much humanity will accept them also seems overly ambitious.

I would point to video games as an example of the refinements that a computer can “get closer to reality”... Every year, EA Sports’s claim that “It’s in the Game” gets a bit more appropriate.

But I think we’re a long way away from people paying $35.00 to have tickets to see folks play a video game.

If that’s a function of the time it takes humanity to accept computers or inherent limitations in computers, I’m not sure… Either way, his predictions seem off-base.