Re: broken schools

On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

>
Hah... wrong church and religion! ;)

>
Lol.  I have been feeling pretty religious lately indeed. :)

;)

I don't actually read that many books on technology. My technology
exposure these days is more through blogs, usenet, and the occasional
networking event. Oh, and work of course, but that is more "organical"
exposure, and not really something I do actively.

>
Yeah.  This probably implies you're getting a lot of screen reading
time.  I like books because I can get off the screen.  And, the book
being good, is usually so much more carefully written than most papers
and blogs.

Too much screen reading if you ask me. But when I'm not working, I read a lot of
regular books, or on my eInk device, which is much kinder to the eyes. Reading
is one of my greatest hobbies. My wife gets annoyed at the enormous number of
books I accumulate. She wants me to throw them away, but it would be like
throwing away my children. I cannot do it! =/

I try to go to the beach every day.  Today, for instance, I biked to the
beach, swam and then drank coconut water and do my reading.  If I'm not

Oh, wonderful! Where do you live?

reading a book, then I go to Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) and I
print out what I find interesting there.  It's so much slow and
pleasurable to read off screen.  At the beach, I cannot just skip too
many texts because I have just a few with me.  And I shouldn't read too
fast because then I have nothing else to read.  So I take a long time on
every word and so the reading is a lot more fun.

Wonderful! Sounds like an excellent idea! I do save online articles and stuff as
pdf:s and do the same thing sometimes, going to a café or when flying. I find
the effect very similar to yours.

I'm even reading non-technical stuff.  Since December, I read
``Hackers'' by Steven Levy (1984) and then I also read the book ``No
Filter'' by Paulina Porizkova (2022), the model. :) She's an excellent
writer.  I enjoy the music from The Cars.  Paulina was Ric Ocasek's
wife.  He died in the pandemic, though not from COVID-19.  She seemed
interesting and I found her book interview-ads while listening to The
Cars songs on YouTube.  I enjoyed the book, but, yeah, I was just
snooping into other people's lives, which perhaps I shouldn't.

I'm currently reading Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling (and other authors). Some
good, classic cyberpunk. I'm also reading various texts by Schopenhauer trying
to figure out if he in fact did independently discover buddhism, as his
proponents are very fond of saying. I'm skeptical. But let's see!