The Study is a real catch-all kind of room for me. It's about non-fiction books, thoughts about things both serious and not. Just a place to sit and muse.
Thoughts on Some Stuff
- Exercise: Our bodies require some maintenance. What are my thoughts on exercise?
- Money: We all need some cash. What do I do about it?
There are some other ideas I'd like to type up some summaries of. Like, when I play a role-playing game, making a cheat sheet to summarize the rules firms up my understanding of the game. Likewise, a "cheat sheet" for other ideas seems like it could increase my faculty with those subjects. There are a bunch of big ideas I think are useful for seeing what is going on in the world that I'd like to be able to clearly and concisely explain. For example:
- Evolution: As introduced to us by Darwin, principles of evolution seem to apply to a number of domains, but also misunderstandings of evolution have led folks down some dodgy avenues as well. Language, Culture, Markets... it seems the lessons of evolution apply in these domains and they can help us understand those domains better.
- Information Theory: Claude Shannon is the main guy that comes to mind, and probably not as broadly applicable as evolution, but I like how it relates to communications technology, but also natural human communication. Compression, signals, noise, etc. "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood" by James Gleick was a nice pop-sci book on this.
- Chaos Theory: My intro to the ideas was through the pop-sci book "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos" by M. Mitchell Waldrop. If you're a High School kid who thinks science is cool but you still cling to some childish ideas about the power of science to work out things deterministically, this is good stuff.
- Human & Cultural Developmental Theories: Pretty broad, but it is an area I was introduced to through initially reading Ken Wilbur's "A Brief History of Everything" then a number of his other books. Then the web site Meaningness, books by Robert Kegan and more. It's hard to summarize, but has done a lot to orient my thinking on a lot of things.
- More: Man, there must be more.