You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all… Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing… (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase and entire life.) – Luis Buñuel

The above quote is from The Lost Mariner, a chapter discussing one of Sacks’ patients, Jimmy G, who – due to Korsakoff’s syndrome – lost both his memories from the previous 35 years, and the ability to create new ones. It’s a touching and sad story where you feel that the only redeeming quality is the fact that this man cannot create new memories; at least then he doesn’t know that he has this problem.
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Six months ago my family-life was ticking along as normal; everything was fine. Then, during a routine operation, my grandmother passed away, leaving my grandfather – a very self-sufficient man approaching 90 – alone in their home of 30 years. While interim accommodation arrangements were being made, my grandfather was found unconscious after suffering a stroke and was admitted to hospital – not even two weeks after his wife’s funeral.

Three months in hospital saw him recover well, and he was eventually placed in a geriatric recovery ward in preparation for release. Whenever I visited him he would get angry at the sports results and moan about the “boring sods” with whom he was sharing a ward with and who refused to go outside for a walk around the hospital’s rather beautiful grounds. This was perfectly normal behaviour.

However I was fearing the worst, and it appears that these fears were well-founded. A month ago he started to develop severe dementia, leading me to make the obvious comparisons between him and Sacks’ patient, Jimmie G, whom I was reading about at the time.

The retrograde loss of memory – and losing the ability to create new memories – is a horrible thing to witness; nothing can really prepare you for it. At the same time it’s difficult to become truly sad at this fact: how can we, when the ‘patient’ themselves is oblivious to the fact – and is seemingly content – due to the fact that the condition itself causes them to lack the ability to comprehend what’s going on?

But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being – matter of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch him, and change him… Neuropsychologicaly, there is little or nothing you can do; but in the realm of the Individual, there may be much you can do. – Alexander Luria in a letter to Sacks regarding Jimmie G.

These sort of medical conditions always raise interesting issues, but when combined with the general (and severe) decline of physical health in an older patient, some more interesting – and controversial – philosophical, moral, and political subjects are brought up. An important one of which is the topic of non-eugenics euthanasia.

Highly regulated, I believe that euthanasia would be a crucial addition to our public health system for a few exceptional and well-defined situations and circumstances. However, as this is unlikely to happen, I believe strongly that the topic of euthanasia is so important that it is at least worth serious consideration and debate – not just by medical professionals, but by both politicians and the public.

Of course, views on this vary wildly by culture, religion, and even within each individual (agreeing in some cases and not in others, even when the actual medical circumstances are the same), and for one moment please don’t think my family and I are planning any mercy killings – it just raised a debate between us and I wanted to spread the love and ignite your internal debating chamber.

In my family, many of us have made it clear that if we were in such an awful physical and psychological state that life were no longer enjoyable and was a chore, that we wouldn’t want to be kept alive. One member has even gone so far as to say (in all seriousness), that if this were the case they would be eternally grateful if we were to assist them in dying. Of course, current legislation makes entertaining this thought pointless.

This was my most recent introduction to Edward de Bono; the father of ‘thinking outside the box’, and the pioneer of ‘lateral thinking‘: a creative problem-solving technique that involves looking at a given situation from unexpected – and often unusual – angles.

I was first introduced to de Bono in university when his theory of ‘thinking hats‘ was introduced to us as a way to acquaint us with parallel thinking to expand the way we look at information systems. It was an interesting 10 minutes, but after that I had completely forgotten about these techniques ’til now, when I happened upon de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats when brainstorming for books to add to my 2008 reading list.

Reading more about de Bono I find that in another of his books – Simplicity – he argues that the subject of simplicity should be taught in schools as a defining characteristic of quality, something I wholeheartedly agree with. Look at the themes running through the design of most of the successful Web 2.0 (and 1.0) companies and you’ll see that simplicity and usability are at the forefront of every design decision. Look at the design of really great ‘real-world’ objects – simple, right?

Of course, simplicity isn’t everything, and it depends somewhat on your definition of the term. To me simplicity is about delivering more from less by focusing on what’s important to the end-user: a simple – yet effective – strategy which appears to be midway between ‘Getting Real‘ and Don Norman‘s idea of user-centered design.

So, Six Thinking Hats and The Design/Psychology of Everyday Things are on my to-read list (I’ve only read extensive excerpts of the latter) – if I hadn’t already read all of it, Getting Real would be too. I guess all that’s left to ask now is; what does Simplicity/Usability mean to you, and could Marmite bring peace to the Middle Yeast? It’s definitely food for though. (Puns – unfortunately – intended. Sorry.)

The expected result, of course, is that there would be an even spread of deaths and birthdays throughout the year with no real correlation between them: 25% of the deceased dying within 3 months of their last birthday.

Surprisingly, however, the results showed that 46% of of those surveyed died within a three month period following their birthday. Furthermore, more than 3 out of every 4 deaths occurred within the half-year following their birthday, with a measly 8% passing away during the three month period prior to another birthday. In Innumeracy, Paulos goes on to show us that the probability of theorising that 46 or more percent would die within this time period can be computed to be so tiny it may as well be considered zero.

Thus we are shown that a person’s mental state plays a large part in their death, and that the desire for (or shock of) a final cultural milestone may be all that’s keeping many aged from their death.

Why am I worrying writing about this now? This Sunday sees me visiting my grandfather (and final grandparent) in hospital on his 89th birthday; after reading that, wouldn’t you be thinking the worst for the coming months? I’ve had my fair share of grievances over the past 6 months, I don’t particularly want more.

To cut a long story short, I have now pencilled-in a trip to Shrewsbury for the weekend following next year’s anniversary as not only is Shrewsbury Darwin’s birth place, but it’s also the location of an annual, month-long celebration of his life and work, and also where my father currently lives. Two birds, one stone, and all that jazz.

On a slightly different note, all this talk of hard science is making me want to mention the book I’m currently reading: John Allen Paulos’ Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. Initially sceptical that it would be written for the maths-newcomer, I became impressed as Paulos describes with gusto the common – and frankly dangerous – pitfalls that everyone faces when living in an innumerate country. Encouraging his readers to view the world in a more quantitative way, I found myself grasping for paper and pencil a few times as he succinctly describes potential consequences of innumeracy:

• Inaccurate reporting of news stories and insufficient scepticism in assessing these stories
• Financial mismanagement and accumulation of consumer debt, specifically related to misunderstanding of compound interest
• Loss of money on gambling, in particular caused by belief in the gambler’s fallacy
• Belief in pseudoscience: “Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence.“
• Poor assessment of risk, for example, refusing to fly by aeroplane (a relatively safe form of transport) while taking unnecessary risks in a car (where an accident is more likely)

It’s a book I definitely recommend for both the innumerate and the mathematically proficient. The former will learn a lot and hopefully gain a renewed sense of wanting to brush up on those GCSE maths skills, while the latter will get introduced to some interesting topics – a couple of which I covered in my previous post on mathematical ‘paradoxes’.

Off on another slightly related tangent, I recently came across an interesting article Prof. Paulos wrote for ABC News: 12 Irreligious Questions to the Candidates (via kottke):

Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?

Ah to hell with it, have another tenuously-linked topic… The above book (Innumeracy) has renewed my interest in performing mental math and better thinking – a personal development subject I first started working on about 12 months ago with the help of the Mentat Wiki – an interesting website from the author of Mind Performance Hacks. Providing you with new memory ‘systems’, you can use these to perform some useful (and not-so-useful) memory feats and improve your maths, all without the use of a calculator or other aid.

Yeah, that’s right baby: squaring and cubing large numbers… in my head! Hell yeah, that’s how I roll!

And seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day, have some VD cards you can send to your ‘loved’ one. Perfect. (Bitter? Me?  No.)

When you really think about that question it’s actually not as easy to answer as it first seems. Like most things, as soon as you scrape the surface it becomes more complex and confusing than you thought. Of course there’s a lot I want to know, but what do I want to know that I can learn on my own, is interesting enough to become a viable long-term/permanent fixture of my life, and – more importantly – what can I make the most use of right now and in the future?

Then the signs came.

First was Scott H Young on Lifehack claiming that “it only takes reading 10-20 books on a subject until you know more on that topic than most of the population. Read 200-300 books on a subject and you’re an expert.” Next came a BBC article quoting a governmental study where “half of men aged 16-24 haven’t read a single book in the past 12 months with some claiming to have never read a book in their life.”

Let’s put these astonishing yet dubious statistics aside for now – after all, it’s not the stats that are important here: it’s the thinking behind them. And what is that? That reading gives you information and we should all be doing it. Sounds fair enough to me.

Through reading you are helping yourself communicate with every single person you come across, every single day: by reading new words in context you expand your vocabulary; by being ‘well read’ in many diverse topics you can engage more people in interesting conversation; having read ‘classic’ works you can understand what people mean when they reference them, quote them, or compare them to contemporary topics; you can, for once, answer that perennial modern question – Was the book really better than the film?; the list goes on. Let’s face it: absolutely nothing bad can come from reading a book – give or take a handful of paper-cuts in your entire life – so reading is a completely net-positive activity: for the logicians out there, this should surely be enough.

So by now I’m sure you’ve guessed it: I want to read more and write about it, right? Well, sort of. Above all I plan on changing my current reading habits: I have decided to try my hand at Intelligence by Osmosis.

Huh, what?

It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Honest. It’s just a sound-bite/buzz-word I concocted to make myself sound special when all I’ve done is make a decision to read more books written by intellectuals, whoever they may be. Generally I mean people who are well renowned in their field, rather than pretentious buggers who should know better.

I plan on reading a lot more non-fiction (or philosophical fiction) in order to learn more about specific topics, rather than spend the majority of my reading-time devouring novels – as is the norm for me. Why ‘osmosis‘? Well you see, I’m not going to read textbooks with the sole purpose of learning facts – I don’t want to actively seek knowledge; mainly because I don’t think that’ll be fun. Instead I plan to read more ‘pop-non-fiction‘: books authored by experts; on their topic of expertise; written in an engaging, interesting, and intelligent style, hopefully leading me to learn about these topics in a more enjoyable and passive manner. Hence Intelligence by Osmosis. Get it? Clever, huh? Oh OK, forget it!

The usual suspects of ‘popular science’ will be here: Noam Chomsky for linguistics, Steven Pinker and Edward Bernays for psychology, Sacks in neuroscience, Sachs in Economics (and Friedman, natch), Dawkins for Evolutionary Biology, and – of course – Hawking, Dyson, and even possibly Feynman, in theoretical physics. You get the idea.

Reading list to come soon. If you have any suggestions please, please, PLEASE let me know them – it’s not an easy list to come up with. Design, architecture, mediaevalism… anything… let me know.

“What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.”

And thus begins Robert Pirsig’s magnum opus, the ever-quotable Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM).

To me, ZMM is three books in one: Pirsig’s philosophical musings (on his Weltanschauung of Quality as a relationship between classical and romantic philosophies); a haunting account of a man trying to find himself whilst being tormented by his former self (Phædrus – all but lost after years of ‘shock therapy’); and finally a touching (and ultimately tragic) account of a father and son undertaking a cross-country journey of self-discovery.

The first of these – Pirsig’s so-called chautauqua – is the philosophical part of this book and the reason why it is said to be “the most widely read philosophy book, ever”. It discusses Quality as a new way of looking at the world, a theory of reality where instead of viewing the world (and life itself) as object and subject, it is viewed in terms of its Quality.

This may sound complicated but it’s really not. Pirsig himself says Quality is undefinable; that it “cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual constructions. It is the ‘knife-edge’ of experience, known to all.” As Plato said: “What distinguishes good and bad writing?” It’s Quality and you already know what ‘it‘ is.

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”

I find the discussion of Quality as a philosophical view interesting, but feel the presentation could be improved upon. In the first half of the book all of the above ‘stories’ are in harmony; sharing page space and complementing each other. However, as I ventured into the second half of ZMM the density of Pirsig’s philosophising took me by surprise and it took me a good few chapters to become re-immersed into the book.

If you’re expecting a novel, be wary – it sometimes feels like a full on philosophy text and you need to be prepared for it. If you are, you will find the chautauqua both absorbing and extremely thought-provoking; if not, you may find yourself wanting to put the book down.

“It’s paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest.”

The last of these ‘books’ – the one in which Pirsig and his son, Chris, journey together across America to discover both themselves and new places – is a powerful story that anyone can associate with, be they a traveller or not. The often tumultuous relationship between them is always held together by their love and a shared mental state bubbling beneath the surface.

However, for those ‘in the know’ this part of the story has a tragic twist: five years after the book’s publication, outside the San Francisco ‘Zen Centre’, Chris was murdered. That morning he had bought a plane ticket to visit, and had sent a letter to, his father in England – a letter received just days after his funeral stating “I never thought I would ever live to see my 23rd birthday.” It was to be his birthday two weeks later.

“Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.”

Recommended for all and sundry.

As you can imagine, this principle has far reaching implications when it is applied to such disciplines as marketing (20% of ads produce 80% of enquiries/sales), IT (80% of resources are used up by 20% of the code) and even business streamlining (80% of income is drawn from 20% of the customers; 80% of an employee’s time is taken up with 20% of the results)… but how many people have applied this principle to their personal lives?

When you realise that in your personal life you use only 20% of your belongings 80% of the time (clothes, music, etc.), and that when it comes to your own work (as a self-employed entrepreneur, an employee, or even as a student) you spend 20% of your time producing 80% of your output, you can start to take dramatic steps to alter your lifestyle.

And thus starts Tim Ferriss’ epiphany in his new book, “The 4-Hour Workweek” – the newest book to storm the tech and geek communities since David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD).

After realising that Pareto’s principle applied to almost every aspect of his life, he went from an over-worked, 16-hour day, start-up founder in Silicon Valley to an ‘ultravagabond’ – working 4 hours a week from any destination as he travelled the world on ‘mini-retirements’. As a Guinness world record-holder in Tango and a national kickboxing champion earning $40,000+ a month, Tim is living the good life – and in his book he promises to show us the secret to his success. The only question is, does he succeed?

Like many other books in the ‘personal/lifestyle development’ genre, The 4-Hour Workweek is crammed with tips and strategies on how you can – in this book’s case – be more efficient in order to free up more time and make more money so that you can do what you really want. The only problem is, I don’t want pages upon pages of tips or a set of rigid rules that I need to follow; I need an adaptable and expandable framework or principle that I can apply to my situation… I don’t want to be told exactly what to do, because the chances are it won’t apply directly to my circumstances, and as such is useless. Luckily, the book has a few of these too.

From helping you realise that the 80/20 principle can be used in you daily life, giving you a base structure on how to create a more efficient company and giving a useful structure on how to avoid work-day interruptions, the book is (on the whole) a useful read. Read with scepticism and with an analytic eye, you can garner some useful information from this book, but I would hesitate to take anything from it at face value. I’m still left pondering: ‘What can I do with this information, and what else in my life can be made more efficient with Pareto’s principle?

Ramit Sethi’s review is worthy of note, along with a few from Amazon.co.uk. John Chow is also giving away a signed copy!

[Enter stage left: Glyn Hughes] “That’s where ‘Squashed Philosophers’ comes in! The books which defined the way The West thinks now… in their own words… but condensed and abridged into something like readable.”

I apologise for the dramatics, but Glyn Hughes’ website, Squashed Philosophers, is one of the best websites I’ve Stumble’d Upon in quite a while, and the idea behind it is so simple: take a long, complex text and create a new, condensed version of it without sacrificing the original words or important facts and/or ideas.

With 51 books so far and the 52nd in progress, I was most impressed to see that the philosophers chosen for the ‘project’ also include non-classical figures in western culture and thinking. For example, Freud’s ‘Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis’ is present, condensed to 6,847 words (13%) and has an estimated reading time of 27 minutes. Included in this is a further piece of text (also present in all the other abridged texts): ‘The Very Squashed Version’, weighing in at 466 words!

Others of note include Alan Turing (the ‘Father of Computing’), Hitler, Darwin and the usual suspects such as Aristotle, Sartre and Descartes.

That’s not all though… on the same website Squashed Writers is a list of (currently) 246 books – fiction and non-fiction – that have had the ‘Squashed’ treatment. In Glyn’s own words:

“All the books you think you ought to have read… in their own words… but magically Squashed into half-hour short stories.”

Magic or not, that’s not the issue – what we have here is a great selection of abridged texts that are the perfect accompaniments to the original to aid understanding or, if you really don’t have much time, as a replacement! I just wish they were released under a Creative Commons license (maybe ‘by-nc-nd‘ or ‘by-nc-sa‘ – non-commercial as the book is sold on Amazon).

[Exit stage right: Glyn Hughes]

[Standing ovation]

In late 2005 the UK music scene was to get a radical awakening when, on Monday 17th October, a relatively unknown band released their debut single. Without any marketing or advertising whatsoever, this single shot straight to the number one spot in the charts, selling almost 40,000 copies in 6 days – one copy for every 1,500 people in Britain. A few months later, after a string of top 10 hits, the band’s debut album was released, quickly becoming the fastest selling debut album in British chart history.

This led many in the music industry to debate whether this was a signal for change – a change in how bands are ‘found’, marketed and sold, and how they gain their recognition.

To really see where this started though, go back a year further to 2005 when the band started recording songs. Without a record label, they could not afford to release them so uploaded their songs to their website and started touring small ‘indie’ venues. A couple of months later, after signing to Domino Records, they were invited to play in one of London’s biggest venues – the Astoria. The venue sold-out in record-time and on the night of the gig the crowd were singing along to songs that had never been released and had only been performed live a handful of times. Through P2P networks, social networking websites and bootlegged songs, the band was a hit. This band was The Arctic Monkeys.

Now I don’t like The Arctic Monkey’s, but they epitomise the idea that you can make money from giving away something for free; “free as advertising”, as Rob Manuel, of b3ta said on the eve of releasing his Bumper B3ta Book of Sick Jokes as a free pdf download, a wiki (Sickipedia) and in bookstores around the country simultaneously.

In December,Carl wrote concerning books that are freely available online. I had already read a few on this list, but saw one that I had meant to read in the past, but had forgotten about.

This morning I bought that book; Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture – available for free on the official website. Why did I buy it? I love it – this book is important and I want to own it. I would like to re-read it in a form that doesn’t make my eyes hurt and that’s easier to manage than 350 pages of A4.

Why am I telling you these two stories? I believe that the future of successful marketing for entertainment products is going to be in giving away a product for free. Music, movies, books and more besides, can all benefit from giving away their product and concentrating on other revenue streams such as advertising – or using the free distribution itself as advertising for a paid-for version of the product.

Just like Ruckus, if you can discover your market, and believe in your product, you can make a viable income from advertising. Cory Doctorow released his debut novel free online and in bookstores simultaneously. To quote from my newly purchased book (Free Culture, remember):

His (and his publisher’s) thinking was that the on-line distribution would be a great advertisement for the “real” book. People would read part on-line, and then decide whether they liked the book or not. If they liked it, they would be more likely to buy it.

[If more people bought the book after seeing it online than people who would buy it, but didn’t, because it was available for free, then the strategy would be successful.]

The book’s first printing was sold-out months before the publisher had expected and Cory is now a well-respected writer and journalist.

Free works.

The first, ‘Universal Exec. – Say Goodbye to the Old Record Co.’ starts with:

An RIAA board member and executive from the world’s biggest record company has said the old way of doing business has gone forever now.

Kenswil today said labels could no longer “count units” but had to license rights; “We can’t think of it as counting unit sales anymore we have to license … and think like the publishers.”

An interested read.

Next on the list came ‘Abortion or Broken Windows – How Can the US Be Safer?’ – an interesting article comparing Freakonomics and The Tipping Point; both books which The Register says…

…have quite a lot in common, including catchy titles, bestseller status and the allure of turning very plebeian readers into pseudo-intellectuals.

The article discusses the differing viewpoints the books have on crime reduction in New York with an added infusion of irony (as in the quotes below, so take them lightly in this context):

Few could be so blunt and get away with it. Levitt and Dubner turned the harsh logic into a bestseller read with pride by hundreds of thousands.

Their success hinges on the solid looking evidence behind the assertion that wiping out potential criminals in the womb wipes our crime.

The number of “at risk” youth dwindled as poor, single teenagers turned to legal, affordable abortions, so the authors argue. That’s in large part because poverty and single-parent homes “are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future.”

In addition to discussing the big problems of jumping to conclusions and coming to outrageous cause-effect deductions, the article is also littered with classic ‘El Reg’ humour:

Crime – you are to understand – is an epidemic just like syphilis, the New Kids on the Block or over-hyped bestsellers. And so crime obeys all of Gladwell’s major catch-phrases such as “the law of the few” and “connectors.”

Thanks to The Register.