Category: Notes

Gould is a notable researcher in the fields of paleontology and natural history. He also has really good analogies to  describe his arguments. In Full House, Gould discusses how the human form is not evolution’s ultimate goal, but that the goal of evolution is to try every possible variation at least once. He notes that if we track evolving life we see that once a new species is created, it tries a myriad of variations and then stabilizes on an average. Though his arguments sometime get repetitive, he is thorough and sure to cover as many counter arguments that he can think of.

Interesting tidbit: Bacteria, by quantity and and variations, is by far the most dominate life form on earth. Also, the horse (which is often epitomized as the finest example of evolution because of its nearly straight line succession) is actually a bad example of evolution because where the history of the horse resembles a branch most other species look like a bush (think of rodents: where there is one kind of horse, there are dozens of kinds of rodents).

This is a very short (94 pages) and very good book. The premise is that a bunch of friends get together for a reunion and they catch up on each others lives. One of the friends launches into a parable about recognizing and accepting change. The parable is a powerful and catching one that made me stop and think, “how do I handle change?”

I do not know that I read that many books that are incredibly interesting. Actually, even as I write that statement I think, “if a book does not capture your attention in the first ten pages then you put it down, usually forever.” As I think this, such behavior would lead to the reading of mostly interesting book with few exceptions (required reading for a class being one of them). Most importantly than my reading of good books is that I tend to share enough tidbits that I learn from the said books that people keep asking for a reading list. I have wanted for some time to make such a list and then realized it would be best to craft the list in such a way that it could continue to be updated and easily accessible to the world.

With that premise, I have added a new “Reading” tag and will write brief comments about book I have read that are interesting.

I was reading Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways while pondering on my recent Disneyland experience. In his book he talk about a variety of things including the purpose of camouflage. Fletcher describes camouflage as “making the conspicuous inconspicuous or the inconspicuous conspicuous” and that “[t]he objective of camouflage is to mislead rather than conceal.” I was struck at how well Disneyland is able to camouflage their operations, not by trying to make the disappear (a powerful feat that even the best magicians cannot sustain indefinitely) but rather to make them blend in or seem insignificant. This was particularly notable while waiting in line for Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye, a ride that has an incredible long wait time and is entirely underground. The wait time does not seem so bad because we are presented with a vast array of fun (and detailed) things to look at. Even the fact that the entire ride is underground is misled from our mind by having us enter the “temple”. Naturally, in the temple we do little to track our elevation and the gradual decline is further masked by even more intricate details to observe and look at. It is almost like an entire movie set put before us just to keep us distracted from the truth: we waited far too long, mostly underground, for a ride.