Writing It Down for You

LifeHacker has an interesting post full of books that have changed peoples lives. Readers of the blog nominated books and LifeHacker tallied the votes. No surprise that The Bible is number one, of coarse more praise then it should receive. Interestingly, at a very close second was the works of Ayn Rand’s. As an Ayn Rand follower, its good to see others are reading her but I always find it interesting that everyone has read her books though rarely anyone practices her philosophy. Other books include The Stranger by Camus, works by George Orwell, and two books by the biologist and quite possibly the smartest scientist since Darwin, Richard Dawkins. His books The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion both made the list and I would agree that they are excellent reads.

I say if you are going to use what little time you have to read a book, you might as well read something that will make you think. This list has a good amount that will stimulate your mind intellectually and do as the title of the post states. Unfortunately books like the Hobbit and Dune made the top list with Harry Potter not far behind. I do not see how these books can really influence you to change your life. They are great books but only for entertainment sake; none are on par with The Stranger when it comes to life changing reads. I can not see how a bunch of wizards pretending to do magic can change the world.

When the last Harry Potter book came out last year everyone on the street was reading it. Every time I was on the subway I could count 4-6 people with their noses in the book. I thought to myself, “at least they are reading,” but then I realized that just reading alone is not what makes a person better. Its like the term we use in design, “garbage in, garbage out.” If a client gives me low quality assets, he is going to get low quality creatives. I cant make gold out of garbage. If people are not reading gold how are they going to better themselves. Its one thing to read The Hobbit or Harry Potter to entertain yourself but to consider them works that changed your life is something others should be concerned about. One should pay attention to what we read and why we are reading it.

Finally. I was afraid that I was the only one. Nicholas Carr wrote an interesting piece in the Atlantic Monthly, stating that his ever increasing dependance of the quick speedy information highway is making him stupid. Mainly it is chipping away at his capacity for concentration and contemplation and that it may have an affect on our future society.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”

Sadly I have to agree with him. I barely made it through his five page article. These days I have trouble digging deep into a book, thinking that in my mind I can just hit command+F and do a search for what I am looking for then be done with it. Unfortuantly I can’t and it took me a semester of school to actually make myself concentrate, read every word and dig out the meaning of the book.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

I started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche this week. I decided to share that little snippet with you.

I added some features to the blog:

• 1. In the footer you will see that I added my and Amy’s Netflix queue. Now you can see all our current movies.
• 2. I installed iFlickr onto my iPhone. It allows me to send pictures that I take directly to my Flickr account. Hopefully I will be able to give you guys more to look at.