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

when i was a kid:KOEI historical games - got me into using hex editors to change the stats :D

the games exposed me to sun tzu art of war

local book about python and unix - i used python around 2004 and beat the courses assignments ('beating the avg' reminds me of those days) ... later pg's great hacker on slashdot and then lisp - settled with newlisp now

iBookG4 exposed me to unix, designs, hardwares and most importantly, woz and jobs ... later my ibook was broken. I am very happy with OpenBSD now

chemistry (and later internet recipes): now i bath using soda ash and citric acid at very low conc - eliminate the need to restore soap and shampoo (great time and $ saving for me) ... i also make my own fertilizer for aquarium use

among other things: open source, MIT+BSD license statistics, design of experiments, bayes, simulation wikipedia and generic drugs low calorie for longevity vegetarian dog, vegan, glycemic index no television vim, jquery pg essays esp how to make wealth and the other road ahead Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives "The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."

perhaps these things teach me that having great control at raw level (source code, chemical, generic drug etc) gives me power to go vertically (own hardware, os, language) as well as horizontally (own tweaks, foss libraries) without much dependencies

dhamma.org is also interesting from business model point of view.. the system will not accept pay from newbies; you can only pay after you pay your dues (sit down and shut up for 10 days straight).. you might think b) people would game the system for free room/board or a) this can't scale.. but the facts prove otherwise:

from a little center started in lates 60's, in india, now there are hundreds of centers around the world.. when i got to mexico in late 2005, there was one center, now there are three.. the system is growing.. people tend to pay after they get the goods, because it feels good and right..

The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

Lila: An Inquiry into Morals - Robert M. Pirsig

The Open Society and its Enemies - Karl. R. Popper

The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks

Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." from "The Road not Taken" by Robert Frost

Without a doubt, Heidegger's explanation of readiness-to-hand in Being and Time has done more for my usability and process inefficiency evaluating skills than even Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things or any HCI book I've ever read. While Norman's book comes in a strong second, the benefit of the first few chapters of Being and Time is the incredibly low-level cognitive access it gives you to the work your brain does when engaged in a task. (If you're interested and don't mind slogging through some tough writing, pick up the hardcover version and Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World and read them together. Reading a Wikipedia article or some other summary fails to deliver the same degree of low-level access.)

I'll also mention Ayn Rand as someone who wrote inspiringly about the entrepreneur as a (potentially) heroic figure, but hasten to add that her sociology of looters and movers is way too simplistic to ground some of her views on ethics.

John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" was my first assigned reading in a political philosophy class, and remains my favorite.

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals prompted me to question whether the values I had always held were really all that valuable.

Eleanor Rosch's work on basic categories and prototype theory (without which Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things--not to mention Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous--would likely not have been written) is fantastic, debunking empirically the Aristotelian theory of categories as being defined by necessary and sufficient conditions (they can be, where we intentionally define them to be from a top-down point of view, as in geometry, but bottom-up the construction of categories is much looser and based on family resemblances with one or several prototypes serving as the central point of comparison: hence, when I say "bird" you're more likely to think of a bluebird-type bird than a penguin or an ostrich). Knowing this does a lot to help loosen up your understanding of things, which can become rigidified by traditional mathematical, scientific, and analytic philosophical education.

Several others worth mentioning, but I've got to get back to work!