Mark Reynolds > Recent Status Updates

Fun book about Maine:

“she cleared them out of the kitchen with instructions to finish getting ready for school. Almost any place else 20 inches of fresh snow would’ve meant canceled classes. Not in Maine where natives consider anything less than 4 feet to be a dusting.”

“Civility is a wonderfully effective tool to enhance the quality of our lives.”

“ … strange attractors are characteristic of chaotic behavior in a dissipative dynamical system with a small number of degrees of freedom."

Minkowski:
Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are due to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. The question now is, what are the circumstances which force this changed conception of space and time upon us? Does it actually never contradict experience?

"Edward III was able to keep the loyalty of his barons because for the most part his tastes were their tastes. Indeed with diet of war, wine, women, good parties and just enough cultural activity to satisfy the more literate of his colleagues, he could hardly go wrong, especially when the wars provided victory and loot."

The final blow came with President Nixon's rapprochement with Beijing in 1972. The Tibetans were no longer of any use to America, and could be discarded, as they had been by the British two decades before.

"The British government sold the Tibetans down the river. I was profoundly ashamed of the government and continued to be ashamed at their unwillingness to recognize that Tibet has a right to self determination." - Hugh Richardson, British representative, renowned for speaking perfect Lhasa Tibetan with a slight Oxford accent

A 1950s UN resolution that China should respect the human rights of the Tibetan people was not supported by Britain on the grounds that its own conduct might be culpable. "Once we concede that the Assembly can discuss and adopt resolutions about observance of human rights in particular territories, we should not have a leg to stand on in the event of attacks on UK policy and activities in Rhodesia and Oman."

"Under the Nazi regime, a German man was not immediately an evil man, he was weak and easily manipulated. And slowly but surely, these weak men lost all their morals, and then their humanity. They became men who could torture others and then still go home and face their wives and children.” Very similar to what’s happening today in the US.

The writing is simplistic, but I enjoy the life stories of these survivors who somehow can’t be bothered to hate.

… He was only 58 when he died, but I had the feeling that during the last years of his life he lived already very much in the past. He spoke mainly about the '30s, the heroic days, when Irène and he did the work that gave them a Nobel prize, the days when the clan of active physicist was so much smaller."

"A cyclotron was built for Irène Joliot-Curie. She came to Eindhoven to discuss details and I had dinner with her on that occasion. Unlike Lise Meitner, who was full of energy at 70, she struck me as rather worn out. She died soon afterwards, on 17 March 1956, before the machine was completed. Her husband took over; he survived his wife by no more than two years. …

"Lowell Thomas reports that he had read Roosevelt's four-volume The Winning of the West - read it again and again."

"One can live upon the Hayward Fault with the right mix of denial, preparation and equanimity."

Looks quite fun and informative.

So far good. The narrator, Jonathan Davis, is good and I’ve listed to his books before. I just don’t remember which ones. Ha!

My first in the “Introducing” series. Looks like some good graphic format.

"Inside a templeat Tashilhunpo, filled with the sweet smell of burning butter lamps, an enormous Maitreya, with almond eyes and long gold cheeks looked down on me passively. Buddhist deities tend to have this reassuring, imperturbable look: watching, turning you back on your own resources, but not judging."

[The historian Jonathan] Spence has characterized Mao Zedong as a "lord of misrule," who enjoyed promoting the upset of stability and order.
...
A love of reversal remained with him throughout his life. As he told his doctor when the Cultural Revolution began, "Everything is turning upside down. I love great upheavals."

Some historical events have a great, looming, epic inevitability about them. Others, like the Cultural Revolution, spring up, alter history, and leave you looking over your shoulder. Even Mao Zedong's closest associates did not foresee it, were bashed and buffed by it, and tried to put it out of their minds when it was over, if they were alive.

"They're really asking for it! Anybody who tries to overthrow the Communist Party deserves death and no burial!" - Wang Zhen, party elder famed for crushing the Muslims of Xinjiang back in 1949. Discussing the Tiananmen Square uprising.

On the difficulty of starting new research programs: "Take whatever topic you like and you will nearly always find that much has already been done, both theoretically and experimentally, and that you have to make a thorough study before you can hope to do something new."