Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal – book review

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How the Mighty Fall, Stealing Fire book review

For those people who are bestselling authors, Silicon Valley geniuses, top performing Navy SEALs, and top-level scientists, this book is well worth reading. If you are a regular attendee at Burning Man you will enjoy this book. However, of the seven and a half billion people on this planet, the number of people who would clearly fall into the combined group above is probably less than ten thousand. If we liberalized the definition a bit to those who aspire to those lofty ranks we might get the number up to a hundred thousand. For the rest of humanity, the odds against you being members of this elite are a million to one, and this book Stealing Fire – How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work will probably be counterproductive to your life.

I came away from this book feeling that promoting activities for people that are beyond their abilities will hurt far more people than it helps. Granted there will be people for whom psychedelic drugs will enhance their performance, and for whom taking huge risks will have an enormous payoff, and their odds may be better than a million to one that it will work, but the odds are stacked against them. I would recommend reading Jim Collins’s book, How the Mighty Fall and why some Companies Never Give In before you read Stealing Fire. Collins’s book is about the perils of overreaching. It is an analysis of big companies that failed compared to their competitors that succeeded. The lessons to be learned in that book about companies have a direct correlation to personal strategies for winning. Stealing Fire is about the glories of overreaching and the authors interview those who have succeeded with that approach; however, they don’t dwell on the vast majority that tried that super-risky path and failed.

Of course, there is some good advice in stepping up to those people who have succeeded with your good ideas and brilliant conversation, but if you don’t have great qualities in abundance even those contacts won’t work. If instead, you can spend some time and energy figuring out a way to provide for the common person’s needs in a way that will scale up with a product you can sell to the whole world you are more likely to succeed than by taking mind-altering drugs.

The harder you work on your good ideas the luckier you will become.

 

Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes by Clarke and Eddy

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Book review, Cassandra, R.P. Eddy, Richard A. Clarke, Warnings, Washington insiders

This book makes a convincing case that many things such as artificial intelligence, pandemic disease, sea-level rise, nuclear ice age, Internet of everything, meteor strike and CRISPR gene editing will bring humanity as we know it to an end. Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy is a fun read for people who are accepting of the fact that we live in a dangerous world that might crash at any minute. For everyone else, it will be a spine-tingling thriller that probably portends humanity’s future demise within a few decades if not our personal one in a few months.

Having departed from my young adult occupation as a B-47 H-bomber pilot back in 1960, I have lived under the realization of how easy it would be for those bombs to fall and our civilization to vanish. Consequently, I read Warnings with a cool head and a sanguine heart. I am basically a cheerful person but gloom and doom are not far beneath my pleasant exterior.

In my annual Probaway Person of the Year, which now has ten entries, there are five individuals who are creators of things that would fall into the book’s Warnings list: Albert Einstein and his promoting the creation of the American atomic bomb is one, and Jennifer Doudna and her creation of CRISPR is another.

Without any intent to have it so, I have had strange personal connections with top people in all of the new warning categories in Chapters 10 through 16. But what interested me most was the final chapter on what we could and should be doing to eliminate or at least mitigate the disasters that are already imminent.

Ouch; immediately we, you and I, hit a problem because the authors cut us out of the loop and put the responsibility for action exclusively into the hands of a rarified few people. The authors have been functioning at the White House level for much of their careers, and they limit the people whom they are willing to even consider listening to, to those very few people who are at the absolute pinnacle of their chosen field. The rest of us should go suck our thumbs like a bunch of spoiled children. Such statements as, “The White House, with its decision-making power, is best suited for creating and hosting such a forecasting office,” p. 355. This statement becomes truly chilling when we consider how unwilling our current president is to carefully analyze anything, let alone predicting and responding well before catastrophe strikes.

A few sentences later he mentions how one of the most informed people in Silicon Valley, Bill Joy, got to talk to the Chief of Staff, not the President, and nothing happened. Rock Stars can get interviews with the President, but not people who are really informed on a critical subject. That’s the definition of insane.

I came away from this basically good book with a realization that we humans are in deeper trouble than I imagined because of the mentality of the insiders. They talk about listening to Cassandras but then they put their fingers in their ears and their heads in the sand and they leave all of us with our asses sticking in the air.

It’s Nassim Taleb’s complaint in a new department. Only trust people who have skin in the game.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel C. Dennett

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Book Review Dennett, Evolution of minds, From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Do we humans as a species have an inherent limit on our intelligence and thus a limit on how much we can understand? Daniel C. Dennett in this book From Bacteria to Bach and Back on pages following 372 gets into that idea, but he sidetracks the issue with, “As soon as you frame a question that you claim we will never be able to answer, you set in motion the very process that might well prove you wrong: you raise a topic of investigation. … Asking better and better questions is the key to refining our search for solutions to our “mysteries,” and this refinement is utterly beyond the powers of any languageless creature.” (p. 374)

What I would contend, actually quibble, is that we have many very smart people and very refined educational systems to hone those people’s minds, but even those minds elevated to their finest moments are capable of meeting questions that might have answers in their minds but which they can not demonstrate to others even if they presented the answers clearly. But even this isn’t facing the question, because if one mind can answer a question then another one can too if given enough time and opportunity.

With every greater refinement of an obscure question, it becomes possible to tweak it into something else which may bring to everyone’s attention a satisfying answer but which isn’t answering the original question. What inevitably happens is that the community of inquiring minds will get bored with a problem and move on to others. I’ve attended many discussions where people discuss defined questions quite heatedly and bring up a plethora of fancy responses, but in a round-robin summation, each individual presents their understanding in terms that they like and which have only modest overlap with the other people’s opinions. Unless there is a real-world, that is, scientific-type testing of the arguments, these conversations end up in fluffy nebulosities. Everyone leaves these conversations feeling happy and that they are right and in their own minds they are right.

When in these conversations, I try to force people into physically actionable intellectual positions. That is, that they go out and do things that real functioning people can do. Chopping wood, carrying water as the classic sages purportedly did, but with a difference in that their actions were helping humanity.

Perhaps with CRISPR technology, it will be possible to generate bigger and better-organized brains that can answer specific types of questions that our present brains can not answer, but those creatures might not be considered humans anymore. These uber-humans might provide working realities for us ordinary humans to use effectively even though we don’t have a clue as to why these new things work. We routinely flip a light switch and the lights come on, but we don’t have an even rudimentary understanding of why the new light bulbs actually function or how the electricity is generated. So, in many ways, Dennett’s mysteries are already being presented to us every day in a myriad of functioning situations. Dennett wrote, “The interaction of our world culture is presently one that can answer mysteries that are beyond the powers of any languageless creature.” I would add, humans have evolved our power of speech and combined with an evolved capacity to accept other people’s stupidity.”

Read Dennett’s books as a point of departure for your own discoveries to share with the rest of us.

 

3,500 posts on Probaway WordPress

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3500 Probaways, Probaway milestones

For me, this is a celebration day because the automatic post counter provided by WordPress just turned over 3,500 for probaway dot wordpress dot com. Of all the people on Earth, I am the only one to give a hoot. But, hoot, hoot, hoot!

People occasionally ask me what my favorite post was and my standard answer is today’s post. When I look back every post astonishes me! I can’t imagine having that huge number of ideas and that I posted another new one last night.

In the very first post on January 1, 2008, I laid out my general strategy for writing these posts and the direction that these posts would go. I named my blog Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully.

The next day, the first post about a subject rather than strategy, was on Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer. That post is still relevant for demonstrating the way I wanted to go and went. I was lucky to have chosen Cesar Millan of all people for my beginning. His main subject is dogs and their relationship to people but what he does is surf right past all the intellectually profound philosophers, psychologists, historians, scientists and he demonstrates how we as individuals can relate effectively with dogs and people.

I think of Cesar Millan as in the same ranks with Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, Machiavelli, and Jesus, each of whom saw to the core of human relations and presented their ideas in ways that could be used effectively by thinking people in positions of authority over their relevant environments.

The super milestone will be 3,650. Will we live to see it?

Presenting the Beatitudes to my atheist friends.

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Sermon on the Mount, The Beatitudes revealed

I have mentioned this before to my atheist group of friends that Jesus was by some definitions an atheist himself. This would not be accepted by most believers, but if you read with an open mind the beginning of his only recorded sermon, called the Beatitudes, you will understand that it is a possibility. Read lines 7, 8, 9, 10 as a progression to a higher state. Lines 4 thru 7 describe a progression to a more developed state of being, but he doesn’t mention heaven. However, in line 8 we have people who have developed spiritually to the condition he calls pure in heart and they are rewarded by seeing God, but only as spectators. Line 9 – those who are peacemakers are called children of God; that is, the males could be called sons of God and the females daughters of God. What could possibly be higher than being a child of God? To be Gods themselves! And that is the zinger implication in line 10. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The clear implication is that children of God when they behave properly become the Lords of Heaven. What else could the unambiguous phrase mean? – Theirs is the kingdom of heaven!

Matthew 5 King James Version (KJV)

5 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

² And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

³ Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

⁴ Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

⁵ Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

⁶ Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

⁷ Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

¹⁰ Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

When the Beatitudes are read as suggested above, Gods and Heaven become a very different thing than visiting with an old dude sitting on a Golden Throne listening to harps and singing angels forever and listening to a hundred billion dead humans confessing their guilt and lamentations.

Being persecuted for righteousness’ sake is the highest state and it is being punished for doing the right things for other people, meaning humanity as a whole. That it is other people being helped is stated in the previous line where those doing that are called children of God because they are creating peace between contentious people. The higher thing beyond helping individual other people is helping the whole of humanity. That is the highest form of helping and thus the highest reward is granted to them and theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They have become … God.

This approach to Jesus is too practical and real-world for the otherworldly inclined.

My Wednesday’s writing group’s prompt was – Dancer

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Bali Ram, Bend Oregon, Dancing, Kathmandu, Nepal, Tour with Miss India

1:15 PM, 10-minute writing prompt – Dancer

Bali Ram just gave us an introduction to his introduction to dancing.

From his infancy in Kathmandu, Nepal, he was interested in rhythm, and through seemingly magical circumstances he ended up in a dancing school in Manhattan, New York. There he endured endless hours of training in Indian-style dancing, and because he was such a beautiful youth, and such a beautiful dancer, he was linked up with Miss India to go on a promotional tour. That turned out to be so popular that they toured together for several years around the United States and the rest of the world.

That was back in the 1960s, and it is now 2017 and Bali Ram and I are now 82-year-old kids living in Bend, Oregon. Both of us are remarkably youthful looking for our recently acquired geriatric status. He is three months older than I am so I must give him his due as my elder, and listen respectfully as he tells his magnificent stories. Occasionally, he lets me squeeze in a sentence, sometimes two, about the famous people I have met and the astonishing things I have done. But it always seems so pathetic compared to his stories

However, I am presently writing a book which will be a best seller. And I will be famous for saving billions of people’s lives. He can’t say that. At least not yet.

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Bali Ram was with us as we wrote our short stories and he said he really liked this piece about us.

A Most Improbable Journey by Walter Alvarez – book review

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A Most Improbable Journey, Understanding Big History, Walter Alvarez

Back when I lived in Berkeley there were many opportunities to hear important scientists give lectures. Some of the best lectures were by Walter Alvarez and the beauty of living in Berkeley is you occasionally get to meet famous scientists personally. I took advantage of that opportunity several times with Walter in the typical after lecture queue. We all are in awe of his discovery of the Chicxulube crater and his considerable number of proofs that that event some sixty-six million years ago led to the demise of the dinosaurs and permitted the rise of mammals and us humans. Without the event that he exposed I wouldn’t be writing this post and you wouldn’t be reading it.

A Most Improbable Journey by Walter Alvarez is a book for the general public. It covers Big History, all the way from giving us the numbers of how very big our Universe of a home really is, to us. There are roughly a hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy times a hundred billion galaxies, or roughly a number one with twenty-two zeros number of stars. And, as you may have noticed from the published deep space photos taken back toward Earth from afar by space probes, Earth is a tiny place even in the Solar system. This book is about the history of the Universe and how this tiny thing we call our home came to be.

The pages on how common sand came into being were eerie because that common element silicon required a history of repeated concentrating events before it could come onto the beaches and sand dunes that seem so common to us. The book makes many obscure things clear and even obvious. When spoken by a man who knows what he is talking about, many things become easy for an ordinary person to understand.

Everyone, even experts, should read “A Most Improbable Journey” because it demonstrates how to make difficult subjects comprehensible.

The Great Questions of Tomorrow by David Rothkopf – review

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Book review, David Rothkoph, Overview of modern politics, Rapid growth chaos, The Great Questions of Tomorrow

This is a book about the great movements facing our world civilization. Reading this book is like standing on a hillside during the great 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and watching the tsunami coming ashore. It is about those events that are clearly coming and that will destroy much of what we formerly valued but will probably leave even greater things for the survivors.

The Great Questions of Tomorrow by David Rothkopf is a book for courageous people who are not afraid to look at dismal things and see opportunities rather than mourn over the destruction. It was written by the editor and CEO of Foreign Policy magazine and is as authoritative a description of modern political realities as you are likely to read. Rothkopf comes to us with his political leanings but he does write with a decades-long Washington insider’s authority.

Assuming that you are not in an actual war zone during a battle the future is still going to be very disruptive. The causes are obvious and we must face them and be willing to adapt quickly. If we can do that and avoid being crushed by a giant Monty Python-like foot, things will be wonderful. If we cling to our past and refuse to face our new realities and adapt to them, we will suffer. That’s Rothkopf’s message. However, when it comes to the specifics of how to adapt, the book offers only generalities.

Some simple questions every eighteen-year-old must ask themselves: Is it better to get a college education or stay out of debt? What is an occupation that will offer the greatest long-term benefits and security? Should I go into debt buying a home? If I can’t get into an Ivy League university should I go into debt to get a local Junior College degree? Those are the questions facing a young person today.

Using my analogy of the great Tōhoku earthquake tsunami, “which way I should run to avoid destruction?” Just saying “don’t panic but adapt quickly” doesn’t help much. I like Nassim Taleb‘s book Antifragile because it gives practical advice within his general theory of how to construct one’s life with a structure that will permit probable survival and success no matter what happens.

The Great Question of Tomorrow is … How to survive and prosper in chaos.

The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

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Generating luck, The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

I’ve been exposed to so much overly positive thinking lately that I’ve surfeited of it, and super-positive nonsense has become as cloying to me as trying to eat a whole jar of honey.

Shakespeare – HENRY IV PART 1 – Act 3, scene 2

They surfeited with honey and began

To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little

More than a little is by much too much.

 

Last week one of my conversation groups had The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman for its discussion. There were many things in this book that are worthwhile but it takes the judgment of King Solomon to ferret them out. An abundance of the revealed good sense was standard self-help rhetoric, but some of the new material was based on his own research and analysis.
Wiseman bases his new ideas on some small questionnaires handed out to some preselected groups. A few questions about how lucky you feel broken into three levels of agreement with the questions. Upon the questionable results of this questionable procedure, he builds what felt to me like a house-of-cards theory to use for the reader to build a whole life upon. Let me skip to the summary of the Four Principles.

#1 Maximize your chance opportunities. – That’s reasonable because if you don’t put yourself into situations where possibilities arise and watch for good ones they aren’t likely to find you. Therefore I would say, network with people who are likely to be searching for the things you want to discover. Einstein wasn’t a loner; he was close friends with the top physicists in the world. Likewise with Picasso, Shakespeare, Jefferson, etc..
#2 Listen to your lucky hunches. – This sounds like it might be a good idea, but it takes a person with good sense and some accurate information to make their hunches work. So that idea given to most of the readers would be counterproductive.
#3 Expect good fortune. – This is Pollyanna nonsense if it isn’t based on some solid reality and experience. He didn’t use this quote, but I like, “The harder I work the luckier I get.”
#4 Turn your bad luck into good. – That is a wonderful idea if you have the resources and wisdom to do it. But, those resources aren’t created by following # 2 or #3. Keeping a positive attitude without constructive success is difficult, and if one’s actions are based on nonsense the successes are going to be rare. Not to dwell on your misfortunes makes some sense especially if you follow the last line in the book – sans the part called schooling. Take constructive steps to prevent more bad luck. That is a great idea and obvious and makes the whole book meaningful and worthwhile if you can do it. One of my New Year’s Resolutions back in the 60s was
“My goal this year is not to be smart but to avoid being stupid.”

Intriguing lines on the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic

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Hot spots of the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic, Seven Sages of Greece in Naples museum, Seven Sages of Greece mosaic, The complete set of Seven Sages of Greece mosaic lines

The strange alignments on this mosaic must have been done for a purpose.

Why would an artist go to the trouble of having alignments within the picture with gargoyle eyes in the border? It would be unusual to have five key points in perfect alignment, as was done from the upper right gargoyle as I’ve shown with a bold red line. I’ve left line gaps to show the eyes are aligned perfectly. It is intriguing that the line goes from the gargoyle’s eye to a sage’s eye on to another sage’s eye and yet to another sage’s eye and then to another sage’s hand holding something. A parallel red line goes from the gargoyle’s eye on the left center border through a limb point up to the sundial’s point.

All of the border gargoyle’s eyes have alignments with multiple significant points like eyes, fingers, toes, box corners, tree points, and the sundial point. Furthermore, each of the gargoyle eye-based lines have parallel lines that also have hits on significant points.

I’ve drawn in enough of these hit lines to make it obvious that they were intentionally aligned. The question becomes, “Why would a Roman citizen in the few years just before Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD go to the trouble and expense of having this strange mosaic created?”

I made the assumption that since the sages we are discussing are interested in a globe with latitude lines drawn upon it that they would be talking about locations on the Earth. If that were the case then the angle of the lines would indicate the latitude of places significant to the wealthy Roman who paid to have the mosaic created. I then took these lines and sought for parallel lines in the mosaic and they were there in abundance for each of the lines. I then flipped the lines so they would form the same angle but coming from the opposite direction. Whoever created the mosaic had created points of interest at the intersection of these two identical angles. Apparently, the crossing lines were created to assure there was no mistake in their intention to emphasize these lines and points. They set these points on the radiant lines coming from the point of the sundial. The sundial is significant because the sun would have been used to measure the angle above the horizon of the sun on identified days to obtain the latitude of the local site. The places that matched all of these strange criteria were the corners of the Roman Empire in 79 AD. Pompeii, (lat/lon 40.75) where the mosaic was buried until 1899, is marked with a black circle but was not indicated on the mosaic.

This map of The Roman Empire is for 54 AD, 25 years before Mt. Vesuvius erupted with the sites inside of colored coded circles.

1. Kom Ombo latitude 24.5° is marked with red lines on the mosaic and a red circle on the map. It is at the south-eastern corner of the Empire.
2. Alexandria blue circle at 31.2° at the mouth of the Nile River, where the circumference of the Earth was first measured.
3. Antioch magenta circle at 36.2° at the eastern border of the Empire,
4. Apsaros pink circle at 41.6° at the north-eastern edge.
5. Purpuraires purple circle at 31.5° at the south-western border.
6. York yellow circle at 53.8° at the north-western border.
7. Rome green circle at 41.9° at the center of the Roman Empire in 79 AD.

It was the lines above that encouraged me to pursue the vast number of parallel lines to be found between significant points on the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece mosaic.

These are the lines I found on the Seven Sages of Greece to be significant enough to pursue.

 

Here are most of the lines I discovered and drew on the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic. Click for bigger image.

These are the hot spots that had multiple crossings for a given site. Some spots are overlapped and relate to several sites.

The lines and hot spots on the Seven Sages of Greece mosaic are real, but the sanity of the creators and of my pursuit of them is in doubt.