100 Books To Read – Part 1/2

I feel like I’m getting more and more stupid by the day so I just decided to make this list of books I want to read and actually keep track of progress. A bit of a long-term goal but maybe it’s worth it. Oh yeah, and owning a copy is a must. It’s subject to a lot of change till 100 so if you feel like I’ve missed some out please share!

 1. Luke Sullivan – Hey Whipple, Squeeze This
2. Dai Sijie – Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
2. Max Frisch – I’m Not Stiller
3. William Faulkner – The Sound and The Fury
4. Jack Kerouac – On The Road
5. George Orwell – 1984
6. Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
7. Vladimir Nabokov – Ada or Ardor
8. Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita
9. Lauren Weisberger – The Devil Wears Prada
10. Douglas Adams – The Hithchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
11. Edgar Allan Poe – Selected Tales
12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude
13. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Living to Tell the Tale
14. Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club
15. Milan Kundera – Slowness
16. Milan Kundera – Identity
17. Milan Kundera – Book of Laughter and Forgetting
18. C.S. Lewis – Chronicles of Narnia
19. Lewis Caroll – Alice in Wonderland
20. John Fowles – The Magus
21. David Lodge – How Far Can You Go?
22. Jon Steel – Truth, Lies and Advertising : The Art of Account Planning
23. Vladimir Nabokov – Masenka
24. Raymond Carver – Will You Please Shut Up, Please?
25. Louis Sachar – Holes
26. Alexandre Dumas – The Three Musketeers
27. Sophie Kinsella – Confessions of a Shopaholic
28. Sophie Kinsella – Shopaholic and Sister
29. Sophie Kinsella – Shopaholic Ties the Knot
30. Sophie Kinsella – Shopaholic takes Manhattan
31. J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in The Rye
32. David Ogilvy – Ogilvy on Advertising
33. Wally Ollins – BRAND
34. Thomas Hardy – Far From the Madding Crowd
35. Yukio Mishima – After the Banquet
36. Yukio Mishima – Confessions of a Mask
37. Roger Zelazny – A Night in the Lonesome October
38. Eiji Yoshikawa – Musashi
39. Marian Keyes – Anybody Out There? : A Novel
40. Jennifer Weiner – Good in Bed
41. Henry Miller – Tropic of Cancer
42. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev – Fathers and Sons
43. William Makepeace Thackeray – Vanity Fair
44. F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
45. Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and The Sea
46. John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men
47. William S. Burroughs – Naked Lunch
48. Henry Miller – Sexus
49. Gustav Meyrink – Golem
50. Nick Hornby – High Fidelity
51. Nick Hornby – Fever Pitch
52. Nedjma – The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman
53. John Irving – Until I Find You
54. Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex
55. Carolyn Mackler – The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things
56. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

A380 Airliner

(Slivester Chua, Wikipedia.org)

Taking planes to a new level, Airbus’ A380 made its first comercial flight from Singapore to Sydney this Thursday, 25th of October. Do you see the 25th of October as a date that will remain in history?

“Do you think the day the Concorde had its first flight was a memorable day?“

You’re probably thinking ‘Umm it must have been’ or if you’ve piloted it then hell yes, it is a memorable day and then realise hey, the Concorde changed the way we saw transportation around the globe but you can’t really remember when it had its first flight. It wasn’t something like landing on the moon (1969 btw) but it was big! Holy shit, so big, being able to get from London or Paris to the other side of the globe in less than a work day but no one can remember if someone asks you on the street. It was in 1976 when it actually started flying and ended its career in 2003. That’s only four years ago and it seemed like something very natural when people were actually flying them. Some people will look at me and say ‘WHAT? The Concorde isn’t flying anymore?’. Sadly no, about 30 years was enough for it.

So now we get the Airbus A380 Airliner. It’s a bigass, double decker plane that can take up to 853 people if it flew only with economy class customers, around 500 otherwise. Think about it, almost 1000 people crammed on a plane if needed. That’s about the number of students enrolled on a university course in one year. Airbus’ triumph over Boeing saying neh-neh you, we made the bigger plane this time!

Then comes this interesting bit:

“I have never been in anything like this in the air before in my life,” said Australian Tony Elwood, reclining with his wife, Julie, on the double bed in their private first-class suite. It is going to make everything else after this simply awful,” he said, sipping Dom Perignon rose after a lunch of marinated lobster and double boiled chicken soup. He paid $50,000 for the two places.

Now there are people who like planes and people who LOVE planes. These two people probably don’t love planes, they just love the luxury of paying a shitload of money for something that isn’t really worth their while. Whereas this guy:

Also among the passengers was Swedish electronics engineer Ralf Danielsson, 58, who took the first Concorde flight in 1979. “Twenty-eight years later, I thought it would be fun to do something like that again,” he said.

Now that’s a plane enthusiast. From Sweden to Singapore only to get on a plane and experience, this guy is an early innovator. He’s my personal hero today, he probably waited his whole life to experience something like that again.

Back to our friend Tony. He’s probably thinking hey, I earn so much money, I can afford this eccentricity, let me take my wife on a Singapore to Sydney ride while eating lobster and sipping expensive champagne on the plane. Later we can meet our friends who are just as filthy rich as we are and discuss our appreciation of the A380. Oh yes.

Don’t get me wrong I do encourage fine cuisine and refinment behind cooking but paying a ludicrous amount of money for something that will become a daily, maybe weekly flight for everyone else is just a waste if you have no idea why you’re there. But as long as bleeding $50,000 for plane tickets, sure, although you could have bought your own plane and flown across the World instead, Richard Branson style. Or just have your own airline maybe.

$50,000 and he didn’t get fish and chips…Yorkshire airlines is a lot better anyway. Doesn’t matter if it only flies from Leeds International to Leeds International, if it’s outside Yorkshire it bloody well ain’t worth going.

The Wisdom of Crowds

‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘

The title speaks a bit for itself – it’s a book written by James ‘the consumer’ Surowiecki, columnist for ‘The New Yorker‘.

His book, ‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘ comes as a tribute to a 1841 book written by Charles Mackay – ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds‘. See, probably I’m the only person weird enough to have actually read a book from 1841 but at the time (meaning about four years ago) I thought it was an interesting overview on folies of English people from beliefs in haunted houses, witches and stupid things done in the name of religion such as crusades and other intriguing fits of craziness.

‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘ is Surowiecki’s answer to Mackay’s hypothesis. In a few words and being very blunt, Mackay was trying to illustrate that ‘masses are asses’ – that when put together, people will believe all sorts of stupid things and that individuals are a lot more intelligent taken separately. His ‘madness of crowds’ term was a bit exaggerated – crowds can be stupid if not organised properly.

Surowiecki gives a lot of examples to prove Mackay wrong – he shows that collective thinking can bring better and more accurate results rather than piling up ’specialists’ and asking them to produce something close to perfection. Answers are only accurate when crowds are diverse, when highly capable individuals mingle with common people and when particular ‘thinking’ conditions are met.

His best example was the Challenger Space shuttle disaster in 1986. The event was extremely well covered by the media, 85% of Americans saying that they had found out about it in less than one hour from the explosion. The interesting part about the story is how the stock market guessed or, better put, predicted the company responsible for the tragedy. Out of four companies that participated in the construction of the space shuttle, only one’s stock dropped twelve percent in six hours from the disintegration compared to a three percent drop for the other companies. Why was this? Morton Thiokol, the company that provided the solid-fuel booster rocket was close to bankrupcy. This meant that the stock market had identified them as the ones guilty for the accident only a few minutes away from the disaster. No media, no information from the outside, it just happened.

Newspapers didn’t shed any light on why the Challenger exploded nor did they point out the guilty company. Only six months later the mystery was elucidated:

‘The O-ring seals on the booster rockets made by Thiokol – seals that were supposed to prevent hot exhaust gases from escaping – became less resilient in cold weather, creating gaps that allowed the gases to leak out. In the case of the Challenger, the hot gases had escaped and burned into the main fuel tank, causing the cataclysmic explosion. Thiokol was held liable for the accident’

According to Surowiecki, this is a very good example of how collective wisdom works – the stock market knew exactly they were the ones guilty. Lucky guess? Could be, but the crowd met all the conditions in order to produce an accurate result: diversity of opinions, independence in thought, decentralisation and aggregation – the perfect balance between knowing too little and knowing too much.

I think it’s a very interesting read to anyone, it’s very well written and it covers a lot of aspects of day-to-day life that we’ve never really considered before. It doesn’t tell you how to make groups think if that’s what you’re looking for, it just shows how collective thinking is far superior. It doesn’t tell you how to organise a focus group but it could give information about what makes them work better. For £4, it’s a lot better than any other piece of s*it like ‘tragic life stories’ or self help books.

Religion, Wealth and Lifestyle

Since a while ago I said this would be a blog about trends and other things related, there is this brilliant article about Global Attitudes over at Pew. Their survey comes as no surprise really and to quote The Washington Post:

It’s interesting, of course, because it’s a graphical demonstration of something I’ve long figured was true, and like most of us, I just love it when I see confirmation of a preexisting belief.

Onward to the report. Download it here. The rest of it with findings can be found here.

Among their findings:

• People are open to free trade, multinational corporations and free markets but they’re more worried about their own culture, threats to the environment and threats posed by immigration
• China and India are more open to multinational companies than Americans and Western Europeans were five years ago
• Majorities believe that people are better off under capitalism, even if it means that some may be rich and others poor.
• People worry about losing their traditional culture and national identities, and they feel their way of life needs protection against foreign influences. In other words, they want prosperity but they don’t want the immigrants that come along with it.
• Large majorities in nearly every country surveyed express the view that there should be greater restriction of immigration and tighter control of their country’s borders.
• The gap in technology use between the world’s advanced countries and less developed nations has increased significantly.
• Throughout Western Europe and much of the Americas, there is widespread tolerance towards homosexuality.
• In much of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, there is a strong consensus that belief in God is necessary for morality and good values. Throughout much of Europe, however, majorities think morality is achievable without faith.

The last statement is the most amazing thing if you think about it – the more focused you are on your religion, the less money you have reveals the survey.

As people get less religious, they get wealthier. Or perhaps the other way around.

This seems really strange, at least the US seems to stand in a very interesting spot – wealthy but still holding on to their spirituality. I wonder what people actually believe – I fall under the ‘not very religious person’ cliché because I agree with being spiritual but at my own pace (if it makes any sense), whenever and wherever I want.

Max Portal Nerdiness

If you’re a gamer you definitely know Valve’s Steam.

If you know Steam, you must know The Orange Box.

If you know what The Orange Box is, you know it contains a game called Portal.

If you know Portal then you LOVE the Companion Cube.

The Companion Cube has a lot of built-in phrases that represent internet memes or just references to them. Some are plain mean and others are just sarcastic but in the end the internet is a horrible place. Having all of them gathered in one spot, the idea was amazing. Forums everywhere exploded with people wanting the Companion Cube and surprise, surprise some went so far as to bake a cake shaped like one:

Listen to a sample of the Companion Cube.

I don’t remember anything like this since the legendary ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us‘

YouTube Paradox

So YouTube and record labels are randomly removing videos from profiles because they violate copyright terms. Now you’d think okay, let’s not let users post the videos. Let’s have the record label upload them (see Sony BMG) but why the bloody hell can’t I embed it? Why can’t I blog about it? Where’s the harm in that? Having that said, it just makes me want to go back to the search page and look for a higher quality one (yes, even the Sony video is shit and I won’t censor myself) and embed it and put it where I want to.

c*nts!

Sky One Ambient

At the Manchester Piccadilly:

The other one read ‘Do You Ever go Commando?’

The Good Life

I see a lot of people complaining about this and that, moaning that things aren’t working as intended, that there are unscheduled changes in their daily lives like no water running, roads being closed, their sat-nav systems not telling them, being late for work and so and so on.

After spending a lot of time in a place that doesn’t even have roads showing on Google Maps or a very well organised public transportation system, I came to the UK thinking ‘ahh, what a nice feeling’. I can start sending text messages from my phone using T9 again instead of having to cope with a language that isn’t even integrated in most of the phones sold in Romania – only selected (more expensive) models have T9 in Romanian and I wasn’t fortunate enough. I can cross the street without fear of being ran over by a car (which has previously happened to me while crossing the street correctly), I can go out in a skirt thinking no one will be whistling at me or touching me on the bus.

And then you see a lot of nice things happening. People caring about the environment, companies actually answering your emails and local stores taking over initiatives from the US – what a way to buy wine!

“One aspect of wine buying that always has frustrated me is the liquor store experience. How many times have you been charged with picking up a bottle of wine as a house warming gift or bringing the bottle of wine to your friend’s house for a dinner party?

You decide that $10 may be too cheap for the friend’s party so you hit that $15-$30 range, but you’re only making that decision because you perceive a $20 bottle of wine to be better than a $10. Is that any way to buy wine?

Bottlerockets has organized the wines based on the consumer’s needs.

This is how you should buy wine. I don’t know enough to walk through endless rows of bottles and select a variety that is right for my tastes or for other factors.“

Today I went to a local liquor store and the owner said he’d never really thought about it because people always ask what they should buy – he left me his email and asked me to send him the article and that he’ll give it some thought. How nice is that? Check out Bottlerocket’s site to get an idea of what their store looks like.

Overheard

‘Is that a budgie?’

‘It does look like one, yeah’

‘Do those talk?’

‘No, that’s only parrots’

Teenage kicks

I’ve become so nostalgic now about Converse shoes, about Vans checkered slip-ons and statement/vintage/threadless tshirts. Oh sigh, the good old days of going to school dressed like that and people looking strange because I didn’t seem to buy my clothes from where they did. Am I mental? Probably…

But to me Converse/Vans have always been the trainers that said ‘youth’, over 14. The trainers that said Radiohead, Iron Maiden, Casino Versus Japan, random gigs, nights out, getting drunk, underaged drinking, skate park round the corner, sitting on the grass staring at the sky, first kiss (I wasn’t wearing Converse then, it was a pair of Adio shoes but they fall under ’skate shoes’ anyway) and so and so on. I never actually thought a pair of shoes could say so much with so little

© All rights reserved to Frue @ Flickr

© All rights reserved to Bradley Fry @ Flickr

 

Interesting thought from this month’s Glamour magazine : apparently women in Manchester own 27 pairs of shoes in average. Now that’s a big number…only to compete with women in Belfast which own at least 5 pairs of trainers each. Now there’s a thought!