Life-Changing books you should read & why they are life-changing

Interesting thread on Reddit so far.

The Bible.
Not for any religious reason, but because it underpins so much of Western art, culture, and literature.  If you have not read it, you will miss out an awful lot.


1984.
Not necessarily because I believe it will happen (in that exact way), but more because it rings to attention many problems that are appearing/being revealed in modern society.  Specifically, the many ills, laws and other regulations inserted by states in many parts of the Western world.


The Republic by Plato.

It lays down so many of the reasons we have now for why we do things. You just have to read it if you're in anyway interested in any sort of academic pursuit.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

Brilliant, unsettling and impossible to put down.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. 

Both are war related (WWII and Vietnam, respectively) but they are so beautiful, deep, touching and really give a deeper look into war and it's effects on people, especially the soldiers fighting it.

The prose is enthralling, compelling and if you don't cry in at least one part of either book, or at least have it make you contemplate life and humanity, then I don't know what to tell you.

Siddhartha. 

Each time I read it I learn something new or gain a new vantage point. I grew up catholic and before this book, I had NO exposure to the concept of no-self. I literally never had anyone in my life ever even hint about such a concept. Looking back on how much change has entered my life since then, I consider reading that book to be my "opening the wardrobe to Narnia" moment.

How to Win Friends and Influence People.

The reason why this different than your standard fare of self-help book and why it has withstood the test of time is that unlike other self help books, it isn't a simple "read this and it will change your life instantly."

Rather it is a book delineating a regimen for slow, incremental change that requires time to implement, and constant review (the author encourages constant re-reading of chapters.)

But once it is implemented, your life will change, and your social interactions and career will literally change, just not overnight.

Read the full thread here.

Steampunk'd

Steampunk is a genre whose beginnings date back to the '80's and '90's.  Blending Victorian, fantasy, and science fiction elements; Steampunk is simultaneously futuristic and antique.  Movies which help to inspire or were inspired by Steampunk include Rocketeer, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Brothers Grimm.  

It's been a while since I curated a collection on Artfire.  Steampunk has been a favorite aesthetic of mine, so here's a collection featuring some of the lovely pieces from great artists.  See the full collection here.

Weaverton Cliffs

The week that my Father died was part of a slow, inevitable process. We as a family knew he was going, it was just a question of when. Even with that knowledge, his passing that Thursday evening hit like a hammer. None of us had ever lost a close family member.

I had been playing around with the idea of doing an old AT hike that my parents and I had done 20+ years before.  That had been a hike to Weaverton Cliffs which overlooks Harpers Ferry.

This time, I could use the Internets to research the trail and get a map.  I also read trail descriptions, a six hour hike?  Yeah that I could handle, even though I wasn't in the best of shape.  

Turns out I read the hike description wrong; not six miles total - twelve miles over very rocky terrain.  Whoopsie.  

I ran out of steam less than a quarter of a mile from the cliffs.  At that point my knees were tightening up, and I'd had a minor ankle sprain.  Lunch gave me time to prop my ankle up and take a break.  Wisely I decided it was better to focus on the return hike rather than push ahead on what had become the roughest section of the trail.

The return hike became something of a push-my-body-more-than-it's-used-to situation.  I remembered one athlete's description of how he could push himself past his norm on hard hikes; break the hike down into smaller manageable sections.  So I'd look ahead to a particular tree or rock ahead on the trail and set a goal for getting there.  Meanwhile my knees were progressively getting stiffer and more painful with each hill.  Level terrain I could manage almost pain free.  Except for most sections of level terrain I had to navigate over a jumble of rocks.

I had thought that up there on the Appalachian Trail that I could connect with my Father in some way.  Sort of a spiritual ley line.  Understandably, I wasn't thinking of him as much as I had originally imagined. The demands of the hike itself on my out-of-shape body took precedence.  Calling 911 seemed like a looming possibility - especially if I couldn't get back to the trail-head before the sun set.

Then I did start hearing my Father, or rather what he would be saying if I related the story of this hike to him.  Yeah, I never should have taken on such a hike before working up to it with shorter hikes.  Yeah, I should have dressed warmer.  Yeah, it was a bit silly pushing myself to do a hike in January by myself.

Each thought brought a little smile to my face in spite of the pain and self pity I was going through.  Mentally I was starting to compare my pained shuffle to the Bataan death march.  I could see my Dad in my mind's eye snort with amusement and shake his head.

For a while, I hiked with an older couple until my knees couldn't keep up.  We had a cool conversation about different hikes in Maryland.  I managed not to spill out the story of my Father's passing - that was too fresh and too close to my heart.

By the time I took a rest and declined their kind offer to stay with me, I was less than a half mile away from my car.  I knew I could make it and found a little bit of pride creeping in, ignoring the fact that I had been contemplating the very real possibility of having to call for help not too long before.

It was worth it to spend time with my Father.  What the heck, I'd definitely wanted to do it again - on a shorter hike

Improve Yourself

Collated from various sources, here's a list of ways to
Improve Yourself

• Work out every other day.
• Learn something new every day.
• Give back to the community at least once a week.
• Read a book.
• Make your own meals, no fast food.
• Clean out your living space. Get rid of anything you haven’t used in 1 year.
• Make a list of everything you need to do, now or later. Apply a “next steps” to each one with an estimated time to complete and a date of when you’ll do it. Add these dates to you calendar and tell everyone that you are busy at those times if they try to plan something with you.
• Simplify your life. Don’t buy every new gadget.
• Watch a TED talk.
• Listen to Radiolab and This American Life.
• Get a library card.
• Meditate 15 minutes/day.
• Walk to a place that you would normally drive.
• Read something written from a perspective that you do not agree with, and if you still disagree without being disagreeable.
• Think about somebody who has done you wrong. Then forgive them, truly forgive them in your heart, whether they want your forgiveness or not. Whether they know you’ve forgiven them or not.
• Donate money and/or time.
• Do some pushups, sit-ups, and a stretch before bed.
• Listen to an entire album.
• Give somebody the benefit of the doubt.
• Write down a personal 1, 3, and 5 year plan for yourself. Post copies in places that would be helpful to you.
• Watch a classic movie.
• Watch a classic book.
• Yoga
• Watch http://youtu.be/cRmbwczTC6E
• Forgive someone.

Quantum Mechanics explained like you're five

OffColorCommentary does a brilliant job.

Okay, see this stick? If I swing it, it moves swoosh. If I hit it against something, it stops moving smack. If I let go of it, it falls down clatter. You're not very surprised by this, right? That's because everything in the world uses the same rules. About three hundred years ago, a guy named Isaac Newton wrote down all the rules, and we call them the laws of physics.

Scientists still use his versions of the laws for all sorts of stuff, but there are a couple places they found where things are a little bit different. One of them is for things that are very, very small. So if I break this stick in half crack, both halves work just like they did before, right? swoosh, smack, clatter And if I break one of the halves snap it does too. If you had a tiny saw and a microscope, you could keep making smaller and smaller sticks, and they would all work the same way, right? Well it it turns out that when things get small enough, smaller than things that are too small to see, they start to act a little bit weird.

So imagine this stick is just one of those tiny tiny pieces inside the stick. If I throw it to you and you catch it, then someone uses a stick-finding machine, it might turn out to still be in my hand, or it might be in your hand like it would if it was a normal stick. Yeah, it's weird: scientists were really confused about this when they started seeing it, and a whole lot of them working together took about fifty years to get it right, because it's so strange. Eventually they figured out that the tiny stick, and everything else that small, is actually always in multiple places at once. So even though we think it's in my hand, it's actually also in my other hand, and already on the ground, and still in my hand but just a tiny bit to the side of where we thought it was. Even stranger, the stick is more in some of these places than it is in others: most might be in this one spot in my hand, but less in my other hand, and just a tiny bit on the ground. And it's all still the same stick. This is all really weird, but one thing about it is still perfectly normal: all of the places the stick is in still follow Newton's laws. If I drop the stick from my hand onto the stick on the ground, it'll stop when it hits the ground, and the pieces will add up, so most of the stick will be on the ground.

(I think now would be a good point to mention that yes, a real conversation with a 4 year old wouldn't go like this. You'd have to stop and answer questions and re-explain pieces of it. I'm just proof-of-concepting this.) Okay, so remember when I said the stick could be in more than one place? It can also be going more than one speed! So some of the stick could be on the ground and not moving, and some could be in the middle of falling down, and some could be just starting to fall out of my hand so it's still moving slowly. Another very smart man, this one is named Werner Heisenberg, figured out that the more different places the stick is in, the less speeds it is moving in, and the more speeds it has, the less different places its in.

(PS: grammar Nazis, it's really "less," not "fewer." Can you figure out why?)

So if all the tiny parts of everything are acting this strange, how is everything so normal when you get back to big things like us? Well, there is one more odd thing about tiny tiny things that I haven't told you yet. Say I have TWO tiny tiny sticks. You know how one can be in a whole bunch of places at once? Well it turns out that sometimes you have to take both sticks together to figure out how much is in any place. So maybe for most of the tiny sticks, stick one is in my hand and stick two is on the ground, and there's also some where stick two is in my hand, and stick one is on the ground. But, there's no sticks where both are in my hand at all, even though both sticks by themselves are at least a little in my hand.

(This is where the kid will have the most questions, and also probably where anyone reading this is going to have questions, so ask away. Though tell me whether I'm allowed to use grown-up words like "particle" or I have to keep saying "tiny stick.")

When how much of one tiny tiny thing is in one spot depends on how much of another tiny tiny thing is in another spot, scientists call those two things "entangled." That makes it sound like it's a special, weird case, but it's really the other way around. Scientists go through lots of trouble to get tiny things that aren't entangled so they can study them, but just about everything is entangled most of the time. All the tiny tiny pieces of stick in this actual stick are very entangled with eachother. That's how big things like us and this stick don't seem like they're in more than one place at a time. The pieces of stick are all in a few places at once, but every different group of tiny sticks adds up to the big stick in my hand, even if the tiny pieces could be swapped around a little.

(As a final note, I've always heard the phrase as "if you can't explain it to a particularly bright 4 year old, you don't understand it yourself." I think we lost the dim one in the second paragraph.)

Dealing with grief

Dealing with grief. It sounds so melodramatic to me. I've always felt cut off from such emotions having never experienced the loss of anyone close. Until recently.

Now my days vary; I can be be-bopping along doing my thing one minute, sobbing my eyes out the next. It's hard to share, these feelings. It's hard not to feel that the more public I am with my feelings, the more I cheapen the memory of my father. Yet at the same time, the grief is still there.

So what to do? Go on just like this? Does it get better? Because some days it feels like the depression is a very big black hole. Maybe counseling? Yeah that's sooooo appealing. Shit I don't know.

It's that time of year again

It's that time of year again. I'm flipping through various seed catalogs, stalking potential seed swaps, and planning out this year's gardening calendar. Cold January days bring out the hunger for a garden bursting with green. Last year's successes inspire plans an even larger harvest this year. Finally, mistakes from last year will not be repeated this growing season - instead I shall make brand new mistakes!

Things I learned:
1. Don’t plant tomatoes within 2 feet of my fence.
2. Make my fence higher.
3. Deer like tomato blossoms.
4. Wait. Start tomato seeds indoors in March, not early February.
5. Grow extra seedlings and share them around the community garden again.

I have white sage seeds planted that will (hopefully) be sprouting any day. Next up, starting a new indoor herb garden of chervil, chives, and various basil.