135 posts tagged with "in-English"

(More than) half of the year is over already, and I thought I should update you on my new year's resolutions for 2025.

Put some pressure on me!

⭐⭐⭐

I am a bit embarrassed to notice that this may be the first “biography” I've ever read. It probably is. I'm not sure.

Perhaps due to that lack of experience on my part, I was expecting something a bit different from this book. I had decided I wanted to read it for one simple reason: to (try to) understand what it's like to be really, really intelligent. I had heard all kind of stories about John von Neumann and about his feats. I wanted to delve into that, try to understand how exactly his brain was so different from a normal one. What it meant for him to be so much smarter than almost everyone around him. How he thought, what “extremely intelligent” actually means.

“As a child, von Neumann absorbed Ancient Greek and Latin, and spoke French, German and English as well as his native Hungarian. He devoured a forty-five-volume History of the world and was able to recite whole chapters verbatim decades later.”

Two years ago I realised for the first time that I end up making the “right” moves in life, but often I make those changes later than the average of my peers.

Owning a house, investing money, getting married, having kids… It's not that I fail at those projects, or shun those life decisions: it's just that sometimes I get to those places a few years later than would be desirable — judging with the benefit (and the bias) of hindsight.

That was stating the obvious, I guess. Of course you want to start earning money earlier rather than later. Of course you want to travel soon, so that you'll have more time to visit more places in your life. You'll probably end up marrying and having kids (like most people do), so why postpone it unnecessarily? And yet, for me, strangely, that was a novel realisation.

Armed with that silly “insight”, in 2023 I noted that

“now that I've spotted a trend in my life trajectory, it should be ‘easy’ for me to course-correct. […] That means making an effort to identify the next life goals, and acting quicker to get there. And so I have been wondering:
What are people my age starting to do now?
What will they be doing in a few years' time?”

Thinkers​

I asked Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Grok:

“What are the ten most influential thinkers in human history? What ten individuals made the most important contributions to philosophy? They should all be real people who actually existed, about whom we have enough information, who were original in their ideas, and who continue to be discussed and appreciated. Consider philosophers, theologians, social scientists, authors, and any other kind of intellectual.”

Results:

• Five mentions: Aristotle, Confucius, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx.
• Four mentions: Plato.
• Three mentions: René Descartes and Jesus.
• Two mentions: Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Avicenna, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Socrates.
• One mention (discarded): Buddha, Laozi, John Locke, Muhammad, John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft.

(← See the third week)

⭐⭐ for the entire work; ie, the seven volumes.

I've written about In Search of Lost Time before (book #1, book #2, book #3, book #5), so I won't elaborate here. Some of those volumes I liked (#5 and #6) while others I found quite boring (#3 and this last one, #7).

It has been quite a journey of five and a half years for me, and one that I'm glad I made. I don't think I'll ever read another ~4,000 page-long novel with so many highs and lows, so many characters, and sentences so long and convoluted. OK, Proust: you're a genius. I'll give you that. Not sure if you could have made a better investment of your talent and the last years of your comfy life, though. And I'm uneasy about your moral compass and your values, to be honest (yes, I know it's fiction and that was not your life — wink, wink).

(← See the second week)

(← Start on the first week)

Like every month of April since 2008, I'm taking one photo a day to document my routines and the state of my world for my future self (and for some friends and family).

There's no particular theme or prompt in 2025 — in the last years I consider it a success if it doesn't get to midnight and I have forgotten to take at least one picture.

So, here goes my first week:

This:

“Toxic masculinity is a contradiction in terms, it's a non sequitur. In order for a thing called ‘toxic masculinity’ to exist you'd have to have a thing called ‘positive masculinity’, and you'd also have to have toxic femininity, and positive femininity.
There is no reality in which positive masculinity isn't synonymous with femininity, because a trait cannot be gendered equally masculine and feminine at the same time, or it ceases to be gendered at all. That's the entire point of a dichotomy: it's one or the other.
If a trait signifies masculinity, it cannot simultaneously and to an equal extent signify femininity. Aggression is not good or bad — it's good or bad depending on the circumstances. Nor should it be good or bad depending on the genitalia of the person exhibiting it.”