Giovanni
Terrific book, scientifically accurate, full of hope, inspiration, and heartbreak. The story of the CF foundation is a model for other rare disease foundations.
It’s a marvel of adulthood to realize that when you strip away all the years and all the learning, much of who you are was there from the start.
I loved the description of the teenager's excitement and infatuation with coding, its addictive nature well visualized with the slot-machine metaphor. The audiobook made me appreciate professional narrators (which Wheaton is not).
A microscopic examination of a criminal act through multiple prisms, including the victims'. Then, almost as an afterthought, similar acts are described with less and less detail, 'zooming-out' and showing how a one-sentence summary of a crime often can be accurate and – at the same time – a colossal oversimplification. Masterful.
Some take stimulants to keep going, I read biographies of TR, Churchill, Hamilton, and the like. I might have found them obnoxious in real life, but boy they sure spur me into activity! Who else can I add to this list of stimulants?
I also liked Taft, who now seems underappreciated. Their tumultuous friendship reminded me of that between Adams and Jefferson. What are other examples of rollercoaster friendships between public figures?
I have read many self-help books now. Like the others, this one has its share of oversimplifications and platitudes, but I've concluded that if I can learn one thing from each of these books, I will be satisfied. Psycho-Cybernetics passes that bar.
For the first third of this book I remember thinking ‘if I wanted to read meandering prose, I would have re-read Proust', and for the last third: ‘... and now? this seems anticlimactic', but that middle third is harrowing and haunting. This chilling description of the walk to the meeting point will stay with me:
The closer we came to it, the more often did small groups of people carrying and dragging their heavy burdens emerge from the darkness, moving laboriously towards the same place through the snow, which was falling more thickly now, so that gradually a caravan strung out over a long distance formed, and it was with this caravan that we reached the Trade Fair entrance, faintly illuminated by a single electric lightbulb, towards seven in the morning.
Ultimately you realize how it all fits together. Masterful.
I was bracing for a bombastic, self-centered, shallow book. There is a lot of that, but I also found honesty, analysis, weaknesses, and some introspection.
I did have some moments when my resolve faltered, but overall this book met my "made-me-think, would re-read-if-I-had-the-time" criteria for 4⭐️. Chilling descriptions of addiction and depression. Loved the irony/sarcasm, and the prose (albeit often showy). Occasional sexism, racism, ableism etc, not always ascribable to the characters. Erudite, encyclopedic. Learned of many online resources about the book, at least one podcast and an entire community of enthusiasts.
Beautiful ‘cross-sections' of quantum physics history. Not sure it is the best way to learn about this topic for the first time, but delightful if you are already familiar with the topic.
I had to listen to most chapters twice, and to follow on the kindle book, but it was worth it!
Interesting read, but I find it peculiar that Richard Feynman had such a refreshing and honest take on scientific publishing and reporting (i.e. that it should be honest and not a carefully manufactured story in which all the mistakes and false leads are omitted), and then allowed for himself a carefully crafted, self-indulgent (hagiographical I dare say) memoir, with all the big and small successes, but no mistakes, doubts, or regrets.
Great argumentation of a fairly trivial topic/message: you need to be able to change your mind.
Need to get around some sexism, some platitudes, some classism, and some entitled nonsense, but I liked the ‘taxonomy' of sources of unhappiness. Light on the solutions... but let's be fair, was I really expecting to find a recipe for happiness in this book?
I have occasionally thought, while reading, that my time would have been better spent on another non-fiction book about the middle ages, but eventually liked the way human and ‘small' events came to focus together with ‘big' historical events.
paraphrasing Einstein, I declare that time must slow down under the pull of complex physics.
paraphrasing Heisenberg, i hereby declare that you cannot explain complex concepts concisely and clearly at the same time.
Maybe if you know these topics reasonably well you can enjoy a cursory review in a 6-hour stroll (which is what happened to me for the concepts I was already familiar with), but if you want to understand them for the first (or second) time, a ‘brief history' won't do. You end up reading paragraphs like this, shrugging, and moving on:
Four years later, a possible solution, called “supergravity,” was suggested. The idea was to combine the spin-2 particle called the graviton, which carries the gravitational force, with certain other particles of spin 3/2, 1, ½, and 0. In a sense, all these particles could then be regarded as different aspects of the same “superparticle,” thus unifying the matter particles with spin ½ and 3/2 with the force-carrying particles of spin 0, 1, and 2. The virtual particle/antiparticle pairs of spin ½ and 3/2 would have negative energy, and so would tend to cancel out the positive energy of the spin 2, 1, and 0 virtual pairs. This would cause many of the possible infinities to cancel out, but it was suspected that some infinities might still remain.
“Well, what should I read?” you say. I recommend Carroll, Susskind, Great Courses, biographies of Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, Feynman. “But it takes time!” you object. Well, QED
Comprehensive, authoritative, excellent. Although introductory, I would read after Dan Jones' Powers and Thrones, or Susan Wise Bauer's 2 volumes, or Durant's Age of Faith.
