26 Sep 2023
More than 15 years ago I wrote a blog post called “how to use 100% of your brain”. It was a bit click-baity as the intention was to illustsrate that we already use 100% all the time, and it included a few references. The intention was mostly to inform people who had grown up with the fables of “we only use a small percentage of our brain, imagine what we could do if we could use all of it?”… I mean, there are even movies on this topic.
Interestingly, it became quite popular, most of my traffic from Google Search went towards that article; I removed it after a while as I hadn’t done proper research on the topic and the information was not very accurate.
I am not a neuroscientist after all, but do you know who is? David Eagleman, author of Livewired.
Note: This book review has some spoilers!
This was a super interesting book to read, quite digestible, with tons of examples.
The premise is that the brain works in a plug-and-play fashion. You can remove sensors, remove body parts, add extra ones, and the brain will adapt… like a general purpose computer. We often talk about plasticity in the brain, but referring to it as livewired makes a lot more sense; it breaks down the traditional myth that “areas of the brain are mapped in a specific way”.
One thing that was a bit of a bummer (in a funny way) was: I had a couple of ideas a few years ago which I was absoluely sure I had invented, and I was just waiting for the right moment to have a few months off some day in the future to work on them, yet here they were in full display on the pages before me, as commercial products I had never heard about.
- My first idea was a sound device for deaf people, using frequencies above 20K Hz, with the idea that even though we can’t process it, the brain might be able to react to those frequencies. The actual product uses lower frequencies (I guess they have verified that higher frequencies had no impact on the cochlea or the vibrations were not ‘converted’ into electrical signals?), yet it works, albeit the sounds are quite audible and for new users it might sound like a wall of sounds. Frequencies and amplitude are used to convey proximity, colours, brightness, etc.
- In the ISS there are sensors built by different countries which not always communicate correctly between each other… In a live-wired system data from sensors and other systems is understood by figuring things out automatically (back-propagation / unsupervised learning>. “Motor” babbling is mentioned (as babbling is the way babies figure out how to communicate, by experimenting out of curiosity). This reminded me of my Curious Actors idea (2015) where AI agents that explore, prod, and learn through curiosity. For example, interacting with APIs or objects in a codebase by performing tasks such as “what happens if I call this function? What happens if I pass this parameter? Does the result change? Are the types constant? What about the structure?”, essentially creating a model of action-reactions to specific events, as well as a dictionary of properties to expect from certain objects (including generalisations as well as specific data for instances of objects). My ultimate idea was that if we could map that virtual world to a real one, the agents would simply collect information from us using an interface, the “objects”, “methods” and “properties” shorthand for interactions with us, physical features and attributes.
A small section of the book read like a sales pitch for one of the products. I feel that was quite unnecessary… a disclosure could have been added instead, or a foreword or afterword with a bit more information on the related commercial interests of the author.
Recap: It is an easy read, not too long, with plenty of examples and illustrations. Some parts dragged on a bit with a few too many examples, but overall a very intriguing book with some really cool concepts! - 8/10
25 Sep 2023
Note: This book review has no spoilers!
This was a great book, I listened to the audio book which, in my opinion, is how this book should be digested. As it is narrated by the voice behind Bob from Bob’s Burgers, the narration style is perfect, the jokes, the sarcasm, the self deprecation, everything carries flawlessly as if listening to Bob on an extended episode.
One of the downside is there is not enough carrying on from one chapter to another, as if isolated small stories, I think more continuity would have helped a bit, however maybe it would have detracted slightly from the comedic narration.
Some chapters were really good, such as those where he tries to get authors to be a part of his book and they give up on him eventually. Also one with the parents in the park where they are judging the other parents and children, and eventually his kid ends up eating excrement.
He narrates everyday situations in such a powerful, excruciating way… taking things that should have ended in a peaceful resolution, dialing it to 11, taking it to the breaking moment, and ending in an explosive climax… sometimes literally. Maybe there were one-too-many ‘shitty’ jokes, at some point I felt myself groveling from my stomach feeling slightly ill.
If you feel like you are failing, reduce your expectations until it no longer feels like that.
I can’t remember if I heard that in the book or if I watched a video where that was mentioned, but I found the quote relatable to this book.
My overall impression was that its a good short book with some very funny moments - 7/10
20 Sep 2023
Note: This book review has no spoilers!
I ordered the paperback edition on Amazon, translated by Constance Garnett. After a few days I noticed it would take a couple of weeks to arrive, so I got the digital version in the meantime, as I didn’t want to be late for our monthly book club.
The introduction was a bit overly complex, too much information about the stories which you haven’t even read. I feel like it should have been an afterword as opposed to a foreword or introduction.
I feel like it was a hard book to get into at first, some chapters are easy but some felt very complicated, the writing style felt a bit heavy sometimes. If words could wear a trenchcoat on a hot humid day, some of the chapters felt that way.
Yet after reading about 100 pages of the digital version (which had around 500) I received the actual book… and I hadn’t noticed it was translated by Constance Garnett, while the ebook was translated by Richard Freeborn!
They were translated and written in such different styles that when I started reading the physical book I found it unreadable. It was such a shock as the style and expression were too different; I was finding the writing style of the digital edition slightly humorous in some ways, which felt lacking in the version by Constance Garnett, the tone is that of a very serious work, with more complicated sentence structures and grammar.
So for the rest of the book I alternated between the digital version and the physical book, depending on where I was. It was a rather interesting experience, as it felt like the author had split personalities… a quite novel way to digesting a book!
I found this paragraph utterly stunning, with a vivid visual quality that I find lacking in most modern literature:
Imagine to yourself a man of about forty-five, tall and lean, with a
long delicate nose, a narrow forehead, little grey eyes, dishevelled
hair and wide, scornful lips. This man used to go about winter and
summer in a yellowish nankeen coat of German cut, but belted with
a sash; he wore wide blue trousers and a cap edged with astrakhan
which had been given him, on a jovial occasion, by a bankrupt
landowner
I feel like a lot of modern literature attempts to embelish the visual qualities of a character by overly utilising adjectives, when sometimes you need to think outside the box a bit. Or it could just be the complexity of the character dictates how one should describe them. Maybe I’m overthinking this.
The biggest 4 takeaways I got from the book:
- The treatment of women and children in general, and the class structure and discrimination are horrible
- It gives a very intense recollection of scenes and moments in a period of time, and from the perspective of hunters which is something that would have never crossed my mind before to research or listen about… the lifestyle, sometimes ending up here or there, without much thought about time or place, is just so different from modern times with 9 to 5 jobs
- English has such a vast vocabulary, and given that there are such incredibly massive ways of arranging them to construct beautiful depictions of scenes saddens me, as the author obviously has a knack for creating such visual descriptions which I can only admire and wish I had but a tenth of their ability
- The literary style and complexity, but also the constant references to wealth versus poverty, and french popping up everywhere, reminded me so much of War and Peace, which I never fully read unfortunately
I find this review / article to be much more fulfilling and better researched than my own subjective opinion, so if you’d like a broader context of the book and environment in which it was written, I’d recommend having a read through that brief article - 7.5/10
19 Sep 2023
I watch from the end of the hallway the window panes in the kitchen, the glowing light like an orange candle at play, or a bronze saucepan in the glistening sun of a hot noon in May.
The colours, warm with all sorts of shades, from bronze, to gold, to rust, to clay.
As I got up from bed, on the other side of the house, I couldn’t yet see the light, yet as I walked out into the hallway it mesmerised me, what a captivating sight.
I paused to contemplate, to think about the day that would promptly begin: The meetings to come, the mornings and goodbyes, the notifications, the coming and going, the emails and questions, the half-truths and lies.
The flow of questions and 1-on-1s, the emails, clicks, and calls. Yet in this moment, standing here, I gaze, this is but mine.
The mental haze, it dissipates, and right now all is fine. I make my way to the kitchen, all around, pure silence, I listen.
Past the door, to the coffee maker, I look outside, finally, as I waver.
In this moment, I hate her! The sun… the sky… the day baiter! All along it was but the street lights!
Dawn will come around, a bit later.
08 Sep 2023
Both physically and on the internet.
Physically I went to Ireland for 6 months which was quite an interesting experience. I lived in the beautiful little town of Carrick-on-Shannon, about 2/3 of the way between Dublin and Sligo.
The thing that will stay with me the most was the absolute lack of running infrastructure when leaving any town, the roads are built for cars, not for bikes nor for runners. I’ll discuss this soon in a video on YouTube however, as I’d like to dive a bit deeper on the matter of goals, curiosity, and long-term health benefits.
Other than that, it was really nice to disconnect for a while from being in a larger city. Living next to a river, with beautiful
green rolling hills nearby, gives you a sense of freedom, and each breath feels cleaner, more fulfilling.
That said, I moved back to Belgium a few months ago, new place, new mindset. It is weird moving from a house to an apartment; you lose the sense of “I can yell at any time and it’s all going to be fine” and replace it with “I should probably lower my voice, the neighbors might get mad”; yet at times you are surprised with another fierce sensation of “Will you stop it with the noise already?” as well as the every-so-slightly-infuriating “where is that smell coming from?!?”.
Challenges, everywhere we go.
Incidentally, on the internet I also moved. After having this blog hosted for nearly 2 decades on Startlogic; they tried to bump the price yet again after being acquired by web.com, in the past few years it went from around 120 USD/year, to 220, and now about 300 after taxes. In a world where you can host static websites for free, it makes no sense. Thus I foray into the world of Jekyll on Github Pages.
In any case, I plan on posting here every now and then; I’ve been very lax with keeping this blog up to date. But as it is now in Markdown, and a git push away, it makes things slightly easier to maintain.