The Gift of the Gab – David Crystal – book review

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David Crystal, Public speeking, The Gift of the Gab, Winston Churchill

I am barely literate in English, compared to David Crystal and to review the acknowledged leading public linguist of England is clearly beyond my pay grade and uppity in the extreme. So I won’t attempt a critique, but just say how much I enjoyed having Debbie read this to me as my bedtime lullaby.

I have near zero experience in speaking to groups of people gathered together on some subject. Some classroom experience, yes, but that is easy and formalized by routine. David Crystal, in The Gift of the Gab, gives advice based on decades of personal experience on how to speak to specific groups and situations: introducing speakers, thanking speakers, presenting awards, receiving awards, toasts, weddings, political, debates, broadcasting, podcasts, impromptu, and more.

My personal group experience is in coffee shops, and that is always a free-for-all, with little formalized control. Now that I think of it, I wish Crystal had given some of his wisdom on how to talk in coffee shops, bars, street corners, at home, at dinner, dinner with friends, and lots of other daily speaking situations. How to butt in when others are talking too long, how to retreat gracefully when wrong about something, how to depart cordially from a venue. How to relate to panhandlers, policemen, café waitresses, and loads of everyday situations. Well, those situations are outside of the scope of this present book, and perhaps if he writes another one, those multitudes of social interactions will be given some consideration.

He illustrated a method of writing and speaking which I had never encountered. It was how Winston Churchill typed out his speeches. For example, his speech ending “If this British Empire and Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour’” is laid out in an indented style that helps clarify the intonation and verbal flow of the words. I liked that so much I wrote it out for yesterday’s blog post. The day before I wrote a short essay called, Just “Who will you be?” in that layout format. Today I read it to five writer-friends. They responded well to the various quips and subtleties that were written into the Churchillized text. Those subtleties are usually missed when reading from normally written text. Subtle intonations and emphasis make a huge difference in spoken presentations. Thank you David Crystal for showing me that technique.

It feels good to have a hearty response to a bit of writing from a group of writers.

“This was their finest hour”. Winston Churchill

Tags

Great speeches, Speech text visual layout, This was their finest hour., Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill’s famous speech was presented as a photocopy of his actual reading document in David Crystal’s book The Gift of the Gab, p. 202. Yesterday I presented my daily blog post laid out in that style. The purpose was to give the spoken text reader some helps for intonations, timing and visual tracking of the document. Here is Churchill’s typed document presented in his format in a text format.

The House will have read the historic
 declaration in which at the desire
  of many Frenchmen,
   and of our own hearts,
    we have proclaimed our willingness
     to conclude at the darkest
      hour in French history,
       a Union of common
        citizenship in their struggle

However matters may go in France,
 or with the French Govt.
  we in this island and in the
   British Empire,
    will never lose our sense of
     comradeship with the French people.

If we are now called upon to endure
 what they have suffered,
  we shall emulate their courage,
   and if final victory rewards our toils,
    they shall share the gain,
     aye, and freedom shall be
       restored to all.

We abate nothing of our just demands.

Czechs, Poles, Norwegians,Dutch, and
 Belgians, who have joined their
  causes with our own.
   All shall be restored.

What General Weygand calls ‘the battle
 of France’ is over.

The battle of Britain is about to begin.

---

Upon this battle depends the
 survival of Christian civilization.

Upon it depends our own British life
 and the long continuity of our
  institutions, and our Empire.

The whole fury and might of the enemy
 must very soon be turned on us.

Hitler knows that he will have to break
 us in this Island, or lose the war.

If we can stand up to him
 all Europe may be freed,
  and the life of the world
   may move forward into the
    broad and sunlit uplands.

But if we fail,
 then the whole world,
  including the United States,
   and all that we have known and
       cared for
    will sink into the abyss of a
     new Dark Age
      made more sinister and
       perhaps more prolonged by
        the lights of perverted
        Science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to
 our duty, and so bear ourselves that
  if the British Empire and
   Commonwealth lasts for a
    thousand years, men will still
     say,

‘This was their finest hour’.

Just “Who will you be?”

Tags

Just who will you be?, Writers group prompt.

Dudley’s writer’s group prompt was just — Who will you be?

Never have I been asked just, “Who will you be?”

I know who I am now, and
  who I will be in a hundred years is obvious.
    I will be dead and long gone and probably long forgotten.

Perhaps something I did or wrote will be remembered, –
  probably not.

I am old, so whoever it is that I am going to become
  will soon be known to me, but
    only when I get there.

That being the probable situation, and I being who I am,
  I will probably still be me. And
    I will still be recognizable to myself.

My personality has been drifting toward getting grumpier but
  I am trying, really attempting to try
    to create the habit of being kinder;
      kinder to other people
        and kinder to myself too.

If I am successful in creating that habit
  in a few years, I will be a noticeably kinder and
    a less grumpy person.

Nowadays when I see people do stupid things,
  I still get grumpy, and
    when I see it’s me thinking stupid thoughts
      I get grumpy with myself.

When I see it’s me that’s doing stupid things
  I get super grumpy.

So  —  “Who will I be?”
  say, in five years?
    A sweet kindly old man?
      Or, an obnoxious geriatric crank?

The way it’s going at the moment
  the most likely “me” will be … uh
    both.

When I am confronted with a situation that I am comfortable with
  I will be the kind, funny old guy, but

When I am involved in a bit of human stupidity
  I will react with the wimpy sarcasm of a feeble old fool.

Sarcasm is a trait I was infamous for in my teens
  so, as I revert through the aging process back into geriatric infancy
    I will probably go through a sarcastic period.

Some of my friends probably already think I’m sarcastic
  but it can get worse, and

If that reversion to childhood continues
  in ten years
    at age ninety-one
      I will become a cute kid, again.

A kid that young mothers will coddle, and
  hopefully, old ladies will feed chocolate chip cookies
      and milk too.

I don’t remember being kind
  as a little kid

I do remember wondering why the other kids were mean
  and my not participating in their meanness, but
    intentionally being kind, by seeing into other people’s problems
      and helping them work through those problems …

Well, that’s a bit advanced for a child.

Perhaps, for a geriatric man, reverting toward old-age infancy
  it may be possible
    to be intentionally kind.

So, perhaps, just perhaps,
  in my last few years on Earth rather than in it
    I will become a kind old man.

And perhaps people will say of me, like Hamlet said of his dead father,

“He was a man.

  Take him complete, with all his flagrant faults exposed,

He was a man!”

Your emotions are telling you something important.

Tags

anger, contempt, disgust, emotions, fear, happiness, Our group discussion, sadness, Surprise

Today I participated in an extensive discussion of emotions. What are emotions good for and what are they bad for? We explored our own recent emotional experiences with our facilitator asking us questions like, “When was the last time you felt the emotion of anger?” We were all sitting in relaxed postures with our eyes closed while we reminisced over our personal experiences. Each of us then spoke briefly about something significant we felt had happened when an emotion had welled up.

We all have experienced Paul Ekman‘s 7 basic emotions: Anger, Contempt, Fear, Disgust, Happiness, Sadness, and Surprise, and today we reviewed occurrences of them in our daily lives. There were several who spoke of trying to avoid negative emotions like anger and to think about the positive sides of their lives. Others worried about worrying. I spoke of the ugly people behind my computer monitor constantly assaulting my time with advertising. Every second of their unwanted intrusion is a theft of potentially the most enjoyable moments of what remains of my life.

We generally agreed that all emotions have a value for helping us live our daily lives better. That all emotions are a signal to our intellectual being that something needs to be attended to. The emotions arise from our primal being, from our primitive being, and probably from our prehuman past. We instinctually fear loud noises and heights, and easily learn to fear others. The emotions are built in, but they may require some training with personal experience to reach their full usefulness. These thoughts were with us as we explored together.

Emotions are often thought of as wild things that need to be tamed by our intellect, but it may be just the opposite. Our emotions are in more immediate contact with our personal reality than our minds, and if that is true, we should pay close attention to them. We should let them run their full expression, and not suppress them in any way. Of course, we may find it important to suppress actions that might be counterproductive to our self-interest, but let the emotions themselves surge through us to their fullest.

Emotions are a major part of our lives and we should appreciate them to the fullest.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – A catalog, index, list.

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A catalog of New Epigrams, A list of new epigrams, An alphabetic list of epigrams, Dictionary of New Epigrams, Epigrams

Abundance
Advice
Acceptance
Action
Adaptation
Anxiety
Apathy
Beauty
Choice
Contentment
Death
Desire
Desire 2
Despair
Doubt
Dreams
Energy
Enlightenment
Ethics
Evil
Evolution
Fate
Fear
Fear 2
Forgiveness
Freedom
Genius
Goals
Gratitude
Grief
Growth
Happiness
Happiness 2
Happiness 3
Humility
Ignorance
Imagination
Judgment
Kindness
Lies
Life
Living
Love
Love 2
Maturity
Pain
Participate
Perfection
Pessimism
Possessions
Present
Problems
Reliability
Resilience
Selfishness
Silence
Silence 2
Smile
Smile 2
Spirituality
Success
Suffering
Suicide
Thanksgiving
Thoughts
Tranquility
Truth
Wisdom
Wisdom 2
Work
Worry

7 year sequence of photos of spider bite, squamous cell carcinoma electrodessication, curettage.

Tags

No antibiotics used in surgery, Petroleum jelly wound treatment, Photographs of squamous cell carcinoma progress, Squamous cell carcinoma, Treating a deep skin wound, Weeks of photos of wound healing

Photo sequence from a spider bite to 7 years later a squamous cell carcinoma electrodesiccation, curettage removal, and photos through 4 months later.

This post is created from reposts from Sept 5, 2010, May 21, 2016, and September 18, 2016, with some new material added.

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I caught a spider in my bathroom in El Cerrito, California, on September 5, 2010, and it looks like a recluse type. It may not be the right spider but I haven’t seen another one in my house for over a year so it’s probably the right one. However, the internet spider authorities claim there are no Brown Recluse spiders in the San Francisco Bay Area. Those are the truly dangerous spiders and they are mostly within a couple hundred miles of the lower Mississippi River. Even there they are uncommon. However, there are other types of recluse-like spiders and they may have a similar type of venom, just not so much of it or at least not quite so nasty.

This spider is now living in my home in El Cerrito, California, inside a clear plastic box.

The official Brown Recluse Spider has a violin shape on its back between the shoulders which my spider apparently does not.

An internet photo of a brown recluse spider. It is a little different from my spider but not much.

However, to be sure I took another photo and did a PhotoShop enhancement of the whole picture to make the color and contrast more vivid. That makes the spider’s thorax more visible.

A Recluse-Spider but not a Brown-Recluse because there is no violin on the thorax, but there is a similar design if you look closely.

For more comparisons look at the online photos linked to below but proceed with caution because there are some are really ugly ones, much worse than my photos below which are bad enough – really ugly online spider bite photos –

My spider-bite 8/20/2010; this first photo of my right leg shin was about four days after the bite.

This photo was taken about four days after what my dermatologist thought was a spider bite. I didn’t get an appointment to see her for another week after this picture was taken. However, at the time I did see her I didn’t have the spider anymore because I set it out in the garden, only a somewhat improving wound. It was a bit better than the photo above but not much.

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Spider bites can be fun to watch.

Five days ago a rash on my right leg became interesting enough to take a photo of it. Too bad there wasn’t an earlier picture so there would be a better progression of this series. I called my dermatologist but that appointment isn’t for another six days so I went into the VA drop-in clinic yesterday and saw a GP. I should have spent some more time searching this on the web because it would have been helpful for a non-specialist doctor to have some informed suggestions. Being a young doctor he may never have seen a spider bite before. I found this one after looking for quite a while.

This spider-bite looked a lot like mine.

He didn’t think I had an infection and since it didn’t itch there was little likelihood it was poison oak. It did look like poison oak at first because there had been a little blistering when I first noticed it, but there was more of a mild burning sensation and only a little itching. So, I ignored it with the expectation that it would go away in a couple of days. No such luck, it just got worse and I was still in the stage of denial that anything was wrong. Finally, I took this picture.

Spider bite 8/20/2010 the first photo about 4 days after the bite.

When I first noticed this it looked very similar to poison oak so in an attempt to rinse away the poison I daubed my finger tip in some Tide detergent and gently rubbed it on for about ten seconds and then thoroughly rinsed if off. I did that two times a day for two days but stopped when it didn’t appear to be helping. I suspect the detergent is what caused the skin to peel, although since it did peel around the red areas, it was having some specific effect.

8/22 Spider bite about 2 days after the first photograph with Tide-caused peeling of skin.

As ugly as this looks it didn’t itch, like Poison Oak, and it didn’t hurt like an open wound and although it was red it didn’t feel warm to the touch like it was fevered with an infection. There was a mild burning sensation better described as warmth which was easily ignored.

8/24 Spider bite two days later has developed long tendrils and isolated patches.

8/25 Spider bite the next day has developed a tiny dark grey spot at the center.

After searching the web for skin rashes and finding the photo at the top it became apparent that this was a spider bite. After a google search of spider bite treatment, I found Spider & Bug Bites Treatment Self Help Guide. This site and others like it are what make the web wonderful. It gives visual images of various insect bites followed by the typical symptoms with a seven question diagnosis chart followed with short descriptions which help to determine the source of the bite and then a clear and simple procedure for coping with the problem. Now with a clear diagnosis of the problem it becomes easier to find personal experiences on the web and develop a reasonable coping strategy.

Wikipedia has a good article on Spider Bites.

Although this bite looks bad, it appears that the best treatment is to clean the wound as early as possible with soap and water, which I did, and then an application of iodine or some similar disinfectant, which I didn’t, and then as the ugliness develops just keep it as clean as possible, which I have done, and then to avoid spiders in the future, which I most certainly will do.

Perhaps it was while picking wild blackberries that I encountered my little friend and if I had avoided threatening him by squeezing him against my leg with my pants, where he was just visiting, he probably wouldn’t have bothered me.

Saying nice things about Mother Nature isn’t as effective as playing by her rules.

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[Update 2010-09-13] This non-Brown-Recluse spider has been professionally identified as Theridiidae Steatoda grossa which has a medically significant spider bite. If this non-brown recluse spider caused the nasty wound seen above it becomes imperative to avoid the really nasty ones.

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Six years later it appears I have a squamous cell carcinoma.

The squamous cell carcinoma on my right shin looked like this before the surgery. [The photos were added to the original post on the dates noted.]

Squamous Cell Carcinoma February 10, 2016 , when I first showed it to the VA doctors.

Below is the first photo taken of my right shin 20 hours after the surgery.

May 8, 2016, 20 hours after electrodesiccation and curettage.

The curettage cut marks are clearly visible as stripes across the wound area. Around the wound are needle marks where the numbing agents were injected. These pinpricks were the only pain I felt before, during and for the weeks after the operation.

Squamous Cell Carcinoma May 12, 2016, 5 days after the surgery.

Squamous cell carcinoma on May 18, 12 days after the surgery.

Squamous Cell Carcinoma May 20, 2016, 2 weeks after surgery.

Squamous cell carcinoma May 27, 2016, 3 weeks after surgery.

These photos make this procedure look a lot worse than it felt. The only discomfort I have felt is in bed when my legs happen to get crossed over the wound. The wound is slow to heal, but the doctors were confident that there would be no trouble, because this type of carcinoma is confined to the surface of the skin, and all of that has been removed.

I have been cleaning the wound every day as instructed. Immediately after removing the old bandage I get into the shower, which has been preheated to mouth temperature, and soap the wound and rub it gently with my palm for a few seconds, and then rinse and repeat three times. After stepping out of the shower, within seconds, even before drying anywhere, I smoothly smear a pea size glob of petroleum jelly over the whole wound and immediately put a bandage over the mess. Then I towel dry the rest of my body.

That procedure is intended to prevent infection because everything is kept very clean, and the natural body moisture beneath the petroleum jelly is ideal for healing. When using this procedure a scab doesn’t form because the healing skin is kept moist, and the doctors told me the new flesh forms more smoothly.

The doctors say that squamous cell carcinoma is the least dangerous form of cancer; all the same, it is probably best to have it removed before it grows larger.

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Here below is new material, two 1/2 months later.

Squamous cell carcinoma July 12, 2016, 2 1/2 months after surgery.

The surgery site still looks discolored, but the skin is now smooth with only a small lump where the flesh was removed. That lump seems to be receding each day. I have been bathing the site every day and instantly covering it with Vaseline mineral oil and then bandaging it with non-stick bandages.

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Today for the first time, I didn’t put the non-stick bandage on, but after smearing the petroleum jelly on I put an adhesive bandage directly over the wound.  It has never become infected, and there has never been any pain. There have developed some swollen red streaks outside of the bandage which haven’t gone away. I put various things on these streaks for several days: antibiotic ointment, Tinactin antifungal cream, A+D anti-inflammation cream, but nothing seemed to make any difference. However, they seem to be going away.

A friend of mine had major facial surgery two weeks after my surgery, but they used modern micro-stitching techniques for putting his face back together. The next few days he was very bruised-looking but a week later looked normal and now it is impossible to see anything abnormal. He says he still has some tight feeling in the skin and some pain, but those problems are soothed with pills.

I wouldn’t hesitate to go through this electrodesiccation, curettage procedure again to remove even a benign carcinoma, but one must be ready for about ten minutes of fussing around every day for a couple of months with the clean up and re-bandaging of the wound.

With medical problems just get good advice and do the right things.

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Squamous cell carcinoma four months after removal from my shin by electrodesiccation, curettage.

Four months after the cancer was removed from my shin by electrodesiccation, curettage the skin is still discolored but it is smooth, strong and can be ignored.

If ever I do a similar procedure again I will insist the doctors swab down the area around the surgery with antiseptics to kill any bacteria transferring from their bodies. These doctors are dermatologists and they are exposed to all sorts of skin diseases, and no matter how clean they are there will be microbes lurking around them. On getting home I will take off my clothes, toss them in the washing machine and take a shower to totally clean my body of hospital bacteria. After the shower, I will put on totally clean clothes. The next day, after my external biota has returned to normal, from sleeping in my own bed and living in my own house, I will rub my hands on the sides of my stomach and then all around the surgery area. That will transfer my natural biota to the area that has been traumatized.

Help your skin protect the inner you from the assaults of the world.

Unprecedented by David Ray Griffin – book review

Tags

CO2 crisis, David Ray Griffin, Solutions to CO2 problems, Unprecedented

Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis?, by David Ray Griffin, is filled with important and well-documented information. The arguments are compelling and convincing to those already convinced. The blizzard of facts will be ignored by those who don’t want to admit that global warming is happening, or that human-introduced CO2 has any part in any problems. The physical problems are what the scientists are revealing in compelling ways, but the economic, social and personal problems are what make even modest solutions difficult and long-term human solutions impossible.

This book is refusing to face the real issue, the one that most of the pro-ecology books choose to ignore. That is, there are far too many people for the planet Earth to support for very long at the current rate of resource consumption. If humans were living and consuming Earth’s resources as they did back in 1825, we could continue as a species for a very long time. Back then there were only a billion people, living with only a little fossil fuel consumption. Now there are seven and a half billion of us, with many consuming vast amounts of fossil fuels both directly in our daily lives and indirectly in the consumption of things created with fossil fuels.

The unfortunate bias in the book is demonstrated by the fact that the words population and overpopulation don’t appear in the index. Human population was never discussed even though it is the present multitudes of humans that create the CO2 problem. But, there would be no problem if there were only a hundred million humans, and that’s a lot of individuals compared to the numbers of individuals of other species of our physical size. A hundred million is the global population about the time of the Classic Greek civilization, and they were getting along quite well, but it’s one-seventy-fifth of our current population.

The processes of nature will play out in the end and will bring us into alignment with that reality. Only time will tell what that will be, but stir in tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs in the control of contending humans, and the intervening events are obvious. This book ends on a positive note that coal, oil and gas as energy sources will soon be replaced by solar and wind, and that China and the US are beginning to move in that direction.

There is hope for humans for a few more years.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Happiness

Tags

Approaching happiness, Avoiding unhappiness, Contentment, Epigrams, happiness, Unhappiness

Dictionary of New Epigrams

Happiness

The continual happiness of a sage is made possible by his habit of relishing everything.

A happy person experiences many happy hours and few unhappy ones.

The happiness of most people isn’t ruined by disasters, but by bad habits.

To avoid unhappiness, cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of your influence.

Happiness is found in the active pursuit of worthwhile goals, and contentment is found in the sustained achieving of them.

Happy people are those producing something that helps them achieve a worthwhile goal.

A man is happy when he has a worthwhile goal and the resources to pursue it.

Doing a multitude of small tasks often will bring you more happiness than doing a few big ones occasionally.

Learn to seek out and enjoy the little things—there are so many of them, and enjoy the big ones as they randomly happen—there are so few of them.

The easiest way to soften your few personal problems is to ease other people’s multitudes of problems.

A delicate pleasure is had when giving pleasure to others, but it takes a mature personality to know how to practice this simple activity.

You will find some happiness if you can find a way to help anyone live better.

A normal man needs only to seek moderation to find happiness.

Unhappiness is felt in the difference between our expectations and our accomplishments; between what we want and what we get.

No one can live happily who regards himself alone, and who attempts to turn everything to his own advantage. You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself. (and for humanity if you have a sage like desire.)

When people are unhappy they can’t see their options, but when they are happy their mind is more flexible and they can see their options and exploit them.

Happiness and unhappiness are alike in that the more we practice them the more skilled we get at living that way.

I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong – book review

Tags

Advances in health science., C. diff, C. difficile, Ed Yong, Fecal Microbiota Transplant, FMT, I Contain Multitudes

Clostridium difficile is the culprit in this book, but it is an antihero. It is blamed for causing misery to many people recently because it reestablishes itself more quickly in the human intestinal tract than other microbes. That causes deadly problems because it takes a community of many different microbes to digest our food and make the breakdown products of these microbes available to us as nourishment. Its popular short name is C diff, and I personally know three people who have had horrible experiences with it. The cause is taking heavy-duty antibiotic treatments for some disease which kills their intestinal flora while killing the disease bacteria. The ultimate effect of a C. diff infection can be as bad as the traditional deadly diarrhea diseases like cholera, that is, a high percentage of the victims die.

I published the obvious solution to this problem in  C. difficile shit and spit treatment is what works, and How your appendix may be helping you live longer. Many people have a problem with talking about fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), but it clearly saves lives.

Chapter 9, “Microbes A La Carte” of I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong discusses at length the science and recent progress with FMT. The problem is that this idea seems so new that most of the successful results have been based on trial and error, and this  type of result is called anecdotal, and it isn’t until double-blind tests are performed that the results can be called scientific and thus widely applied. However, even in the small tests, the results are remarkably effective in curing C. diff. On page 231 an experiment was reported where they experimented on forty-two patients with that deadly disease. 94 percent of FMT treated patients quickly recovered, and of the standard treatment with vancomycin only 27 percent were cured. They stopped the experiment early because it was considered unethical not to give the sick people a treatment that was curing the other subjects of the disease. Another factor was the frequent recurrence of the disease with the antibiotic treatments.

With the remarkably high success rates using FMT with C. diff, other diseases are being explored with FMT treatments. This method of treating disease is very new, at least as a science-based method. It has been apocryphally reported for centuries, but there is a problem with giving FMT derived from people infected with other diseases. Therefore, there is a great effort to find for fecal donors people who have never had antibiotic treatments, and who haven’t had a serious disease. The many species of bacteria from these healthy people are cultured in sterile laboratory settings and then mixed back together to form a complete community of living bacteria. These communities are then introduced into the intestines, either orally or anally where they are then fed with food that will help them establish themselves as colonies.

I had a complaint with this book, but it wasn’t with the author, it was with the research community. It appeared the scientific FMT experiments were too narrowly defined. It was as if they were assuming that everyone’s intestinal biota was the same. It is obvious that every one of the seven billion human beings has a personal biota, and it varies a little constantly. There will be a great deal of overlap of biota between people, but there will be a great deal of uniqueness too. We all have a functioning balance of our biota, but we will need to do vast numbers of experiments before the perfect balance for each individual can be found. Probably there will be discovered methods for coping with specific disease problems and after the disease is in remission a different biome will be used to reach an even healthier physical and mental condition too. A person needs a happy stomach to be a happy person.

Research science will probably discover amazing intestinal biota treatments in the next few years leading to better public health and greater life expectancy.

Blink – by Malcolm Gladwell – book review

Tags

Blink, Book review, Malcolm Gladwell, Pop psychology

Malcolm Gladwell is a great writer, in that he combines clear writing with emotional feeling, depth of background experience and, unusual for any writer, his own personal creative thinking about his subjects. There are many scientific-style experiments discussed in the book in such a way that you understand them and their significance. For example: what effect do the thoughts you are exposed to before being tested have on your ability to answer academic-style questions? Would thinking about the personal qualities of a professor of a particular subject for a minute give you more ability to answer questions on those subjects than thinking about the qualities of, say, a truck driver? These kinds of experiments have become known as priming experiments in psychology.

Blink is claimed to be one of the most influential books of the last decade. It says so right on the cover, but that is based on Gladwell making other people’s work more accessible to the public. His career wasn’t in doing science himself but in being a science reporter at the Washington Post. In this book, he is doing his own creative thinking, and exploring over the edge into speculation. Here he becomes less evidence-based and more into putting two and two together and getting twenty-two instead of the usual four. This kind of speculation I enjoy, and no doubt the reading public enjoys it too, but the premise of the book that quick decisions are sometimes better than thoughtful ones needs some guidelines.

What are the conditions under which a quick decision is better than a plodding one, where all aspects of a problem are considered, and not just one’s first quick impression? His opening and closing arguments concern artistic decisions, and those are probably more amenable to quick human decisions because they are founded on a totality of an individual’s learning and experience. A counterexample would be for astronomers to make quick blink-like statements from their first photographic views of Pluto last year. That would probably result in lots of backpedaling later. Understanding the whole planetary environment at super-cold temperatures with chemicals very different from those we humans use in our daily life experiences would require a lot of mental readjustments.

With that equivocation said, I did find the book useful in that it makes me more confident to say what I think when I think it. However, I do notice that most people already say what they think when they think it, and that often leaves something to be desired. Something called forethought, and that is the quality that makes human beings into the most formidable species ever.

The thoughtless decisions recommended in Blink revert us to being prehuman animals, unless we’ve developed a well-informed unconscious.