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Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life

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21–30 of 58 posts

Re: Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life

#21
Ideas/books/concepts of George Lakoff and his colleagues. In the same way, Jeff Hawkins. Their approach to cognition as a problem that is comprehensible is incredibly far-reaching.

In a similar vein, the writing and blog of Scott Adams:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/

The vast majority of it is humor, and the inspiring pieces are subtle, but they're like a honey bunch of oats in your cereal (except more rare (and with better metaphors than this)).

Re: Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life

#22
post #9

When I was a kid, the documentary series Connections . It was the first time I'd ever seen someone follow vectors through history instead of recounting it one period at a time, like most books and classes do. Discovering Lisp was a big one. This was in 1983, when the default programming language was Pascal. Lisp seemed (and in retrospect was) startlingly better. There was no one single book or quotation, but I rememb…

For those interested, A Mathematician's Apology is available online here:

http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mss/misc/A%20Mathematician's%20...

YouTube links to the first episode of the series "Connections 1" (from 1978):

1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTbCNycm0nQ

2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlKykc6ipY4

3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIVnaq0spdE

4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNPL92tvqhY

5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnRZ18GpOhg

The rest are on YouTube also, as well as bittorent:

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4039213/BBC_-_Connections_-__Com...

Depending on whether or not you think paying ~$500 for them would serve "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", you might be legally obliged to buy them on Amazon.

Re: Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life

#24

I'm not sure if "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" changed my life, but it reassured me I was on the right track in starting a business. It reads very well today and I'd recommend it to any professional. I was particularly struck by this quote: "I really don't know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in grey flannel suits rushing a…

This is a really outstanding quote. I had read William Whyte's "The Organization Man" which deconstructs the same situation from a sociological perspective, but I had overlooked this novel: sometimes there is more truth in fiction.

Re: Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life

#25
No specific book or article, but for me it's been what I've read about Memetics and Evolutionary Psychology. It's not only enabled me to understand human behavior, including my own, but has influence the way I think about everything from career to diet.

Re: Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life

#27
post #9

When I was a kid, the documentary series Connections . It was the first time I'd ever seen someone follow vectors through history instead of recounting it one period at a time, like most books and classes do. Discovering Lisp was a big one. This was in 1983, when the default programming language was Pascal. Lisp seemed (and in retrospect was) startlingly better. There was no one single book or quotation, but I rememb…

maybe "Let Our Options Go!" or "The American Semiconductor Industry: Winner or Whiners?" or "An Entrepreneur's View of American Competitiveness"

Re: Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life

#28
post #9

When I was a kid, the documentary series Connections . It was the first time I'd ever seen someone follow vectors through history instead of recounting it one period at a time, like most books and classes do. Discovering Lisp was a big one. This was in 1983, when the default programming language was Pascal. Lisp seemed (and in retrospect was) startlingly better. There was no one single book or quotation, but I rememb…

maybe "Let Our Options Go!" or "The American Semiconductor Industry: Winner or Whiners?" or "An Entrepreneur's View of American Competitiveness"

You might be able to find it by searching for "tobacco" because one point I remember was that the US government spent money on both subsidies for tobacco growers and anti-smoking campaigns.
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