So I just finished Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, Hitch-22. It was an exhilarating read that left me with one overwhelming thought:

I don’t know anything. Every page of his book had ten references that could keep me reading and learning for 3 months without interruption. What you get most from reading Hitchens is the feeling that you are morbidly uneducated and clueless about history and literature.

One could posit that this is precisely the effect he was hoping to have on the reader, i.e. “Look how smart I am.”, but I don’t think that’s it. I think he is, more than anything, saying “look how interesting the world is”.

And I agree with him.

I certainly hope his cancer does not turn out to be as deadly as everyone is saying it is. He supposedly has less than five years to live, at which point he’ll succumb to esophageal cancer just as his father did before him.

If that does happen I will be very sad. I want to see far more from Christopher Hitchens. ::

If you’re a geek like me you’ve probably dabbled with speed reading at some point in your life. There are many theories on the “best” way, but there are two common techniques that you’ll see in most of them:

1. Don’t subvocalize. Sounding out words slows you down.
2. Don’t linger. Use some method that forces you to take data in quickly and only gives you one chance to see it.

Enter Spreeder, a free, online speed reading application. The fact that it’s online and free by itself makes it cool, but what makes it brilliant is that it’s implemented as a bookmarklet!.

This makes it dead-simple to use:

1. Go get the bookmarklet.

   

2. Highlight text anywhere on the web.

   

3. Activate your bookmarklet.

Your text will instantly be imported into the application, ready for you to read.

And you can modify how the content comes to you in a number of ways: the speed of the flow, size of chunks, etc. And with the advanced settings you can omit filler words, break at sentence points, and much more.

I am now able to read very comfortably at 500 WPM using this system, and can do 750 decently well.

Bottom line: if you’re looking for a way to quickly consume online articles, the Spreeder bookmarklet is a must. ::

My friend Steven Harms has just put up an excellent reference for those interested in philosophy. It attempts to chart the relationship context between the various books mentioned in my Episteme post from a while back. Steven writes:

Recently I read about a “Most Influential Books” list via Daniel Miessler’s post “Episteme”. I commented that it was a bit presumptuous to believe that the reader of the 100 list would be able to get anything out of some of the selections without other key concepts and items discussed in the previous authors’ work. For example, to make sense of Hume or Berkeley, you really need to know Aristotle’s Categories and Descartes’ Meditations. The former is not singled out and the latter didn’t make the list ( cogito ergo sum doesn’t rate? ). I gave some thought as to how I could give a rough sketch of Western intellectual development in a broad-strokes sense that worked visually. Enter FreeMind. FreeMind is a mind-mapping software ( Free! ) that exports to PDF. So I took an attempt at producing a PDF that gives context for these books.

Head over to Steven’s site to see the full post as well as the mind-map.

[ A Mind-Map to Western Philosophy ]

One does not become more intelligent or wise simply by being born in a more modern age. The knowledge and understanding of previous generations is not absorbed through some default means.

No. To gain that knowledge we must read. We must actively seek out those shoulders before we can stand on them, and I for one am tired of stumbling upon profound wisdom that should have been part of my early education. Here’s what I’m doing about it:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtinfluential.html

I am building a master book list. Please let me know, either by comments here or via email, what you think should be included. The only criteria is that they should be must-reads — i.e. books that should, in your opinion, be required reading of all humans during secondary education and/or university. I’d prefer your favorite classics, but new books are fine too.