> "Rose isn't a dinosaur reader; she likes her Kindle."
I am probably a "dinosaur" reader. I have, and use a Kindle, but given the choice of reading a physical book or same book on Kindle, I will choose physical book 99% of the time.
There is just something about a real book that is deeply satisfying to read.
I read a lot of textbooks on pdf and it’s a very poor substitute. Jumping back and forth, as you do, between definitions, theorems, appendices is a nightmare with the pdf readers I’ve found. I have to reaort to making screenshots of things I’m likely to need to refer to again.
Perhaps a good solution exists? It wouldn’t be hard to make.
Reading is more fun in discussion groups or even reading aloud with discussion. Immersive fiction reading is just one special mode of reading. The focus of research reading is more intensive than immersive. There is some social intent. HN is a lovely reading group.
The simplest things are not contextualized. The methods are sold like aspirin for any pain point. We confuse methods with instant "solutions." The best salad recipes fail of unripe or overripe ingredients. We might better contextualize method with case examples sharing some measurable comparative formalisms. Then we confuse project execution success with market penetration or buyout acquihire payday dreams.
Close attention and years of reading are important to writing code worth writing. I read literature oriented around "skunkworks" sized teams and applied them at somewhat similar scales. The better literature is fantastic. But the literature presumes too much of readers and means little outside operative exposure to multiple successful applications. Folks seeking method for quick home runs are barking up the wrong trees from the beginning.
I did the same in elementary school. I started at the first shelf with the intention of reading every book in the non-fiction section as my plan to know everything I needed to know. I made it 4 or 5 shelves but then lost my determination when a librarian informed me that she was adding new books to the shelves I had finished. I then switched to a more directed reading agenda based on a plan.
I'm learning Dutch on Duolingo, and they recently updated the "Tree". Basically whenever they do that, you lose a lot of your "progress", and have to revisit (months of) previous sections that you'd already completed (because some new things are added to previous subjects). It sounds similar to what you described (very demotivating), and seems (from comments on the site) to especially affect people who are relatively newer to the site. I'm not sure yet, but I think there's a mismatch between gamification and motivation for actual learning.
This article makes it pretty clear that if the Kindle doesn't emit light, it's ok. The experiment was done with an iPad. Kindles were designed with this issue in mind, so I think posting the article in this manner is misleading.
If I don't have paper nearby, I write in the margins and dogear the pages, and then refer back to the book to extract the information later. I keep a few pens and pencils in my pocket at all times.
Those articles are about students taking notes on laptops during lectures, which Ibthink is a pretty different case to taking notes while reading a book.
Reading on a phone, I get the ability to look up unfamiliar words immediately, add them to my spaced recognition tool if they seem useful, add quotes to my quote file, and arrange notes on new things learned either per book, or on a per project basis. In addition, taking notes like this they are still available over the years, and backed up in multiple places, whereas the paper notes I have taken are either filed away somewhere or lost during one of my moves.
my bedroom theory is that our brains like to associate physical stimuli to ideas, and flipping through pages is a lot more giving than typing a page number or swiping.
I do most of my reading on physical books, but I have the core of my library on a Kindle as well, and where it shines is search. I can phrase and keyword search the larger part of my library. It has become an invaluable research tool. I also import highlighted passages into a database on my computer. Granted there are things like books.google.com, which I could use for search, but that's not my library. I also prefer to read on a Kindle compared to my monitor, so I regularly email large documents to it. My wish for the next Kindle is for it to be faster (more responsive UI) and handle even larger libraries.
Brought to mind the parable of the hunter guide shaman:
"The livelihood of an ancient indian tribe was buffalo hunting. If the hunters came back with a small amount of kill or, unimaginable, empty-handed, from their Springtime hunts, the village would go mostly hungry for the next four months and many people would die. Luckily, before each hunt the village's shaman gave the head of the hunters a map with lines drawn on a hide that will guide the group to where the buffalo is. Without this map, the hunters wouldn't find where the buffalo gathered on the Great Plains.
A young hunter was curious about how the shaman always knew where the buffalo gathered, so before the Springtime Hunting Festival, he hid in the shaman's tipi and secretly watched jim as he prepared the map. There were many steps involved but in essence the shaman did the following: After calling on divine powers he crumpled a large raw piece of hide that was softened with oils. That was it! Then the lines to guide the hunters appeared correctly drawn by gods' will every time the map was created."
I used to read a lot. I had a long, long to-read list in a spreadsheet, and I would add items to it faster than I would tick them off.
Competing demands for my time cured me of this list, and I came to view reading not as something indisputably virtuous (as my schooling had trained me to do), but as just another form of consumption.
There is such a thing as too much consumption. Junk books are no better than junk food, and even a diet of classics might be no better for your head than constant fine dining is for your gut.
I now take more care in choosing to give my time and energy to reading.
That idea that reading is inherently virtuous has bothered me my whole life! I read a lot (well, at least I did before I had children) and have always been complimented on it which annoyed me to no end because I knew much of what I read was pretty trashy. I've had to explain to people so many times that a good portion of the books I read are no better than the movies or TV shows they watch, I just happen to like reading to relax.
And by the way, I don't believe in giving up on junk books. I think a good mix of fun but trashy and serious books is better. Just like anything in life: I wouldn't want to have only deep meaningful conversations or eat only fine dining or only write computer programs that do something useful or stop playing basketball just because I'm terrible at it or learn only prestigious fields of math... I think it's OK to do something just for fun, not everything needs to be edifying.
Reading even a bad book is better than watching TV. Apart from the content the act of reading itself is very wholesome. You need to conjure up an entire world out of thin air, imagine what all the characters look like, how they sound etc.
The Destroyer Series, about Remo Wlliams, Chiun, and the martial art known as Sinanju. They even made a movie and a tv pilot.
They are absolutely horrible. They give you nothing of value, not even education. They were mostly written by two authors who grew to despise each other,
They take a couple of hours to read, maybe a little more. They are the pinnacle of pointless time wasting. I read most of them while in the service.
I'm not sure I'd still recommend them now, but when I read them many, many years ago I really enjoyed David Morrell's [1] novels about highly trained assassins. They had titles of the form The $GROUP_OF_PEOPLE of the $THING: The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Fraternity of the Stone, The Covenant of the Flame, The League of Night and Fog (and maybe a few others whose titles didn't match that pattern, I think Testament was about the same characters, but can'lt really remember).
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[1] David Morrell is probably best known for First Blood, the novel Rambo is based on.
You’re probably right that you can spend too much time reading “junk”. However, even “junk books” have positive effects. They increase reading comprehension and speed which is useful when you’re not reading junk.
Personally I also feel like books don’t “numb” my brain the way TV does. Sitting down with a book for hours, even “junk” doesn’t leave me feeling dumber the way watching hours of TV does. I imagine that reading activates higher order brain function a lot more than TV.
A high school friend of mine did a 'Pi tour' of the library where they read the 'nth' book on the shelf for each 2 digits of Pi. So book 31 on the first shelf, but 41 on the next, 59th on the next. There wasn't anything magical about using Pi for this, it merely provided the backdrop and gave some 'flavor' to the choices other than random. He had to get creative when the shelf didn't have enough volumes on it (typically he would do banker's division by 2).
The result was he found some interesting books (and some turds too). I could not argue with his logic that 20 years later none of the information I got sitting through an hour of the "Six Million Dollar Man" would be useful but something he got from one of the books might be.
I enjoyed going to my local small library, randomly selecting an aisle, then reading everything on an entire shelf. Let me to books I likely would never have otherwise discovered.
(And am I alone in missing card catalogs? Picking a random card out of the catalog and reading the next three books in alphabetical order right after that card?)
But isn't there value in avoiding bad information and low-quality content in general?
And aren't books on-average filled with bad information and low-quality content? That ratio for the general catalog of your typical library is not very good.
I think I'd feel better about watching Six Million Dollar Man.
How do journalists hear about this type of story? Did the lady call up her local newspaper and say "hey I just read every book on the shelf at the library. Thought it was newsworthy."
Not at all. Most reporters have a beat. They accrue and build relationships with sources around a broad subject. If you're reporting on books (the author does), you'd probably know quite a few a librarians who you keep in touch with just to hear what's going on.
38 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 84.1 ms ] threadI am probably a "dinosaur" reader. I have, and use a Kindle, but given the choice of reading a physical book or same book on Kindle, I will choose physical book 99% of the time.
There is just something about a real book that is deeply satisfying to read.
Perhaps a good solution exists? It wouldn’t be hard to make.
Close attention and years of reading are important to writing code worth writing. I read literature oriented around "skunkworks" sized teams and applied them at somewhat similar scales. The better literature is fantastic. But the literature presumes too much of readers and means little outside operative exposure to multiple successful applications. Folks seeking method for quick home runs are barking up the wrong trees from the beginning.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...
http://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-p...
If I don't have paper nearby, I write in the margins and dogear the pages, and then refer back to the book to extract the information later. I keep a few pens and pencils in my pocket at all times.
Reading on a phone, I get the ability to look up unfamiliar words immediately, add them to my spaced recognition tool if they seem useful, add quotes to my quote file, and arrange notes on new things learned either per book, or on a per project basis. In addition, taking notes like this they are still available over the years, and backed up in multiple places, whereas the paper notes I have taken are either filed away somewhere or lost during one of my moves.
"The livelihood of an ancient indian tribe was buffalo hunting. If the hunters came back with a small amount of kill or, unimaginable, empty-handed, from their Springtime hunts, the village would go mostly hungry for the next four months and many people would die. Luckily, before each hunt the village's shaman gave the head of the hunters a map with lines drawn on a hide that will guide the group to where the buffalo is. Without this map, the hunters wouldn't find where the buffalo gathered on the Great Plains.
A young hunter was curious about how the shaman always knew where the buffalo gathered, so before the Springtime Hunting Festival, he hid in the shaman's tipi and secretly watched jim as he prepared the map. There were many steps involved but in essence the shaman did the following: After calling on divine powers he crumpled a large raw piece of hide that was softened with oils. That was it! Then the lines to guide the hunters appeared correctly drawn by gods' will every time the map was created."
I usually employ a similar random search strategy (e.g. http://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume13/bergstra12a/bergstra12a....) to select a book when I'm at a library, though not as extensive as the method described in the article.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autodidact
Competing demands for my time cured me of this list, and I came to view reading not as something indisputably virtuous (as my schooling had trained me to do), but as just another form of consumption.
There is such a thing as too much consumption. Junk books are no better than junk food, and even a diet of classics might be no better for your head than constant fine dining is for your gut.
I now take more care in choosing to give my time and energy to reading.
And by the way, I don't believe in giving up on junk books. I think a good mix of fun but trashy and serious books is better. Just like anything in life: I wouldn't want to have only deep meaningful conversations or eat only fine dining or only write computer programs that do something useful or stop playing basketball just because I'm terrible at it or learn only prestigious fields of math... I think it's OK to do something just for fun, not everything needs to be edifying.
They are absolutely horrible. They give you nothing of value, not even education. They were mostly written by two authors who grew to despise each other,
They take a couple of hours to read, maybe a little more. They are the pinnacle of pointless time wasting. I read most of them while in the service.
They are perfect in every way.
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[1] David Morrell is probably best known for First Blood, the novel Rambo is based on.
Personally I also feel like books don’t “numb” my brain the way TV does. Sitting down with a book for hours, even “junk” doesn’t leave me feeling dumber the way watching hours of TV does. I imagine that reading activates higher order brain function a lot more than TV.
The result was he found some interesting books (and some turds too). I could not argue with his logic that 20 years later none of the information I got sitting through an hour of the "Six Million Dollar Man" would be useful but something he got from one of the books might be.
(And am I alone in missing card catalogs? Picking a random card out of the catalog and reading the next three books in alphabetical order right after that card?)
And aren't books on-average filled with bad information and low-quality content? That ratio for the general catalog of your typical library is not very good.
I think I'd feel better about watching Six Million Dollar Man.