Matthew Royal > Recent Status Updates

"her doctor told her to take a tablespoon of port wine for medicine. She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath. She always took the wine in a tablespoon, it was always medicine, but after a time she was doing over a quart a day and she was a much more relaxed and happy woman."

He came to the Salinas Valley full-blown and hearty, full of inventions and energy. His eyes were very blue, and when he was tired one of them wandered outward a little.

"...they had to give everything they saw a name. This is the first duty of any explorer--a duty and a privilege. You must name a thing before you can note it on your hand-drawn map."

Colin Powell has lived and worked in the middle of world changing events. His leadership principles are all about hard work and treating people right, and being firm in the right way. Time's flying with this book!

This book would be better titled "End Fractional Reserve Banking." Paul pines for a simpler (fictional) age of apple pie, penny candy, and "real banks" that preserved "true value" of "real money" without relending it. FRB and central banks aren't modern socialist inventions: Wikipedia says they've been around since the 1600s. Still, his developing thesis of FRB leading to government control of capital is interesting.

The food symbolism is becoming a bit over done. Also, I'm not sure I agree with Morrison about the sharp divide she sees between "white things" and "black things." Why are clean and orderly things necessarily "White?" Why does a black person wanting those things that way mean that they want to BE white? It seems that race, class, and culture are all inseparable concepts in this worldview.

Listening to excellently narrated audiobook with Lynne Thigpen and taking notes in the ebook. I feel so futuristic reading this classic!

Toni Morrison has a great way sharing life perspectives, and showing you the world through her eyes. From angry faces bumpy as cauliflower to happiness being "anticipation with certainty." Half this book will be highlighted when I'm finished with it.

With 11% of the book remaining, I'm fascinated to know how you conclude a book that is absolutely true to the nature of things, but not to the actual things.

Charles Stross is the only scifi writer I'm aware of who has so perfectly melded Lovecraft's cosmic horror genre with theoretical computer science. This is a novella featuring Bob the computational demonologist.

Davis is covering a lot of territory the more I read this book. He unexpectedly threw in the alkaline diet. Not sure whether that's hokum or not, but I look forward to getting to the meal plan part of this book to see how he fits it all together.

Very interesting life Mr. Suzuki experienced. He was friends with Albert Einstein and his circle, and was a strong believer in education and environment are the determining factors of talent. This book inspires me to work harder at my own goals, and I love his encouragement to artists who've hit a wall: talent isn't something that comes from within you.

This book is way more interesting than I thought it would be. Its method is entirely predicated on the idea that environment is the primary predictor of later intelligence and skill in a child. Very interesting.

The counter - argument to Davis is that quite a few people eat modern wheat and refined sugars and have no health problems nor obesity. Claiming wheat is always the sole cause of someone's IBS, cancer, ortcetera is not medically responsible. Still, it's an interesting idea that high amounts of carbs wear out the pancreas's insulin-producing capacity over time, and thus can lead to diabetes.

Just because wheat and opioids make the same part of the brain light up doesn't mean wheat is an opioid. Otherwise, we would consider happiness, sex, and running to be opioids.

It's an interesting premise that eating too much (genetically enhanced) wheat is the cause of the American obesity epidemic. I look at Davis's claims of eating GM wheat as the cause of most modern ailments in the same way that I look at people claiming red wine vinegar can cure them, but the central idea merits an open mind.

Started this for book club. So far it's compelling, and the character development starts very early. I like the style when the narrator tells stories from the past: they're overly annotated with what must have been genealogy research and read almost as awkwardly as the narrator's English.

Wow, this book flew by. It's a beautiful portrait of the ni-sen detained in the US during World War II from a child's perspective. The tragedy, judgment, separation, repatriation, and sacrifice feels raw. Watching the mother work tirelessly to preserve the innocence and joy of her children is a powerful testament to the integrity of the family under strain, and the wrongness America permitted.

Steve Krug published this in 2000, and it has not aged well. So much time is spent on tabs and home pages. These were the days before CSS, and DHTML was upheld as a mysterious magic that most designers would avoid. It was recommended by more than one colleague, but I'm beginning to suspect this book is the Citizen Kane of UX books -- influential in an historical sense, but not much interest to people today.