Index of posts

Where to start?

Sep 20, 2021

My top heroes, Richard Feynman, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, and Aaron Swartz.

Why?

Exactly. All 4 asked why? Curiosity, a desire to understand how the world works.And how people work. And how society should work.

curiosity- “an eager desire to learn and often to learn what does not concern one : inquisitiveness. : something strange or unusual.”

So I suppose my goal is to get you to read as much of these 4 as possible.

So where to start?

Feynman - Manhattan project to build the Atomic bomb, Nobel prize for his work on quantum mechanics, Challenger explosion investigation, book selection board for local schools, teaching Physics in Brazil

Orwell

“Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are sometimes told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class — a sort of ‘bread and circuses' business — to hold the unemployed down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an un-conscious process — the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer's need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.

It amounts to saying, ‘We're soft — for God's sake let's stay soft!’ which at least is realistic. As I have pointed out already, the machine has got us in its grip and to escape will be immensely difficult. Nevertheless this answer is really an evasion, because it fails to make dear what we mean when we say that we ‘want’ this or that. I am a degenerate modem semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, ‘want’ to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't ‘want’ to cut down my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which ‘progress’ is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.

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Doris Lessing, Nobel prize for Literature and a passionate advocate for communism, socialism, anti-apartheid, anti nuclear bomb. Her autobiography is a who’s who of the 20th century-Henry Kissinger, Bertrand Russell, James Watson- an “inarticulate young scientist”, Kenneth Kaunda, Harry Nkumbula, Joan Rodker, Clancy Sigal, Nadime Gordimer, Paul Robeson, Mikhail Sholokhov, Laurence Olivier, Sean Connery, Brendan Behan, J.B.S. Halblane, C.P. Snow, Robert Shaw, Oscar Lowenstein, Arnold Wesker, Joan Littlewood, Stephen Ward, Graham Greene, Kenneth Tynan- “my most bizarre sexual encounter”,

For her, literature is social history.

“we are not the failures we think we are. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly less stupid than we are to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have always known, they have known for ten thousand years, that to lock a human being into solitary confinement can make a madman of him or an animal. They have always known that a poor man frightened of the police and his landlord is a slave.... They have always known that violence breeds violence. And we know it. But do the great masses of the world know it? No. It is our job to tell them.... The great men ... know we are there, the boulder-pushers. They know we will go on pushing the boulder up the lower slopes of an immensely high mountain, while they stand on the top of the mountain, already free. All our lives, you and I, we will use all our energies, all our talents, into pushing that boulder another inch up the mountain.” (The Golden Notebook)

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Swartz

“Why do you do what you do?

“That’s a good question.

I mean, you know, feel very strongly that it is not enough to just live in the world as it is and just kind of take what you are given, you know, to follow the things that adults told you to do … and you know, that your parents told you to do and that society tells you to do. I think you should always be questioning. You know, I take this very scientific attitude that everything you’ve learned is just provisional, that you know, it’s always open to recantation, refutation, or questioning. And I think the same applies to society.

And I, you know, I felt growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were the way things always would be. They weren't natural at all, They were things that could be changed and they were things that more importantly were wrong and should change

once I realized that there was really kinda no going back

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If none of this grabs you, then my site is probably a waste of time. If you do like this then I move on to Paul Graham, Michael Sandel, Yuval Noah Harari, David Eagleman, Scott Alexander, A A Gill and Thomas Bayes ending with a close look at the Bilderberg group.

I’ll add the links to make it more orderly.

I’m also interested in pain.

pain and what to do about it *

https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/jan-2025-english-course

a bit random, in progress

Michael Sandel, trolley car special forces, Ford Pinto, smoking, golfing

Yuval Noah Harari,

James W. Loewen,

Scott Alexander,

Steve Jobs,

Jensen Huang and Nvidia

Malcolm Gladwell,

cognitive dissonance

Bilderberg, Apophenia and conspiracy theories with chat gpt and assassinations

Is it possible to smell illness?

Seymour Hersh and the Nordstream pipeline-a whodunnit!

Dos Passos- USA,

Steve Jobs and Bob Noyce * more Noyce

Carl Sagan, Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins

David Eagleman, Larry Lessig, Massim Nicholas Taleb, Kieran Egan, Paul Graham, Rachel Carson, Alison Bechdel, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Claire Hughes Johnson, Janna Levin, Jeremy Paxman

Stripe

Negotiating with terrorists- Ken Livingstone and Israel

Lies in education: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

How to avoid chronic pain, Sciences Po 2025 course, a bit on pedagogy, Moral equivalence, targets, Churchill, Eisenhower and lobbies, climate success? no money left, Moyo and aid, reading, best of rev televised, common good, critical thinking

Essential and Ultimate guide to English Language Teaching

A collection of fine pieces

Richard Feynman,

counting ice and magnets water pipes counting radio teaching the bomb the bloodhound ants fixing radios cargo cult science

Surely you’re joking, Mr F

Feynman podcast meaning

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Doris Lessing,

Walking in the Shade : Volume Two of My Autobiography 1949-1962

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George Orwell,

* George Orwell quotes

*Orwell on Gandhi Dali Orwell- Wigan Pier

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Aaron Swartz,

Aaron Swartz views on education and change

Paul Watson- sea shepherd

Pilates

ctl F for complete list

see recent ones below

spring term 2024 week 3,4,5

week one sept 2024

Foundation training

Dec 2023- hydrogen, JFK, media, clipboard, aggregator

Jan 2024

How to grow a Miyawaki forest

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teaching methods DIY English (incl sciences po)*

efl common errors Getting from A2 to B2

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week 1 here Number 5

Israel Palestine

Population density

Swartz life hacks

Nobel prize science

death, exercise, neuroscience, environment,oil,

Musk on the climate

Political conviction and compromise

3D house printing

ETS or IELTS * Toeic and Toefl

Choosing topics conspiracies CIA fine pieces

The basics, TOEIC, exams, McNuggets,

links to all the posts so far:

Pain in French* grow it!

* Relaxing neuroscientifically

**the environment- fix the system?

Paint it white *

Paul Graham on schooling * Peter Thiel * broken windows———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Bill Gates on Alzheimer’s, David Eagleman on the Nun study

Aphantasia and tickertape

critical theory

Non Binary- Kieran Egan

Non Binary topics- negotiating with terrorists

Non Binary approach- poems

Sex education

Thames water

El Salvador

Bullet ants and waterboarding

Carbon capture with trees

**geoengineering

Claire Hughes Johnson stripe scaling people

Blaise Aguera y Arcas on AI criminal face recognition

The Paypal mafia

The Panama Papers

Toxic Masculinity rugby for mixed children

on death

best movies

brain facts and myths

magazine cartoons and cartooons for kids

global warming

Mars

Jancovici and Kissinger- good and evil

de-growth

Chomsky, Dick, Seth

Just stop oil

AI overview (Hinton, Ng, Larry Page) gpt 3

more open AI Chat gpt3

Rising sea levels and lobbies

Hinton v LeCun

food growing and revolution food

relaxing neurologically

memes

twitter * twitter 2 twitter 3 and 4 twitter 5

All things twitter?

chatgpt in French

Education

The French govt site gives advice here on teaching English- basically teach it the way you teach the first language with lots of stress on writing and reading as the kids have learned to speak and listen at home- which works great for the first language but a bit sub-optimally for the second language.

Is there a better way?

SLA https://applingtesol.wordpress.com/2018/10/07/summary-of-sla-review/ ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

EFL

best teaching websites * How the French govt teaches English

Improve your vocabulary *

learning English with twitter * causative verbs

grammar must * used to *

Ielts and Proust * Norman Rockwell (and why you shouldn’t study him)

Pronunciation and how to say it

how to pronounce comfortable and mountain

best 100 tedtalks

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