Notes

アルジャーノンに花束を - Daniel Keyes

この本はなぜか日本で知られてるけどイギリスではそれほど有名じゃないようだ。
僕の大好きなNUJABESの「FEATHER」という曲に出てくるから知ってる：

...
The best laid plans of Mice and Men are never right
I'm just a Vagabond with Flowers for Algernon
An Average Joe who knows what the fuck is going on
...
読むしかない、、、
＊＊ネタバレ注意＊＊

知的障害者でIQ８０の主人公が子供のように無邪気な生活を送ってる。
名前はチャーリーである。
チャーリーはベーカリーで働くこともでき、ある程度自立をしており、友達も少なくない。 ある日、チャーリーは科学者に選ばれ、「知能を向上させる手術ができるかもしれない」と告げられる。 チャーリーには、子供の頃から他の子供と同じように「利口になりたい」という夢があり、喜んで手術を受けることにした。

手術が成功し、チャーリーの知能は日々少しずつ向上していく。 知能が上がることで、これまで理解できなかった過去の記憶や経験を新たな視点で見直すようになる。彼が友達だと思っていた人々が実は彼を見下し、いじめていたことや、子供の頃に親から虐待を受けていたことに気づく。 チャーリーは知能を得ることで幸せになれると信じていたが、高い知能を持つことで人間の闇がはっきり見えるようになり、時には元の白痴状態がよかったのではないかと感じることもあった。 しかし、手術の影響で正常のIQに止まらず、時間が経てば経つほどチャーリーの知能が伸びる一方であった。

天才的なIQにまで達したチャーリーは、心理学者になり、手術を行った科学者たちが実験用に使用していたネズミ「アルジャーノン」を観察することで、恐ろしいことを予測する。 手術の効果は一時的なものであり、いずれ知能が元に戻る、むしろ、さらに低下してしまうという結論であった。 天才的なIQを持つ人間しか予測できなかったことを予測してしまい、能力があるうちにチャーリーは得た知能を保つ方法を必死に探しはじめた。

さて、どうなるでしょう？

Debt, the first 5,000 years - David Graeber

Its long! Exactly 400 pages, but what a book. If there is just one book that I could read on economics/history/anthropology this would be it. The title sounds a lot more impenetrable than the content, when I tell people about this book I often get "that sounds very academic" but as a layman I found it perfectly readable.

This book takes a stab at the following questions:

• What is the origin of money?
• How is money created?
• What is debt?
• What is capitalism?
• Where do markets come from?

So it is by no means just about what many people think of when they hear the word "debt".

The parts of this book that I enjoyed most were when the author got to show off his anthropological prowess. It really opened my eyes to the diversity (in the treatment of debt) of societies spanning millennia and continents. This includes the Tiv people of Africa, the Indus valley civilizations, the Irish kingdoms, ancient India and the usual suspects like the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese and so on. Across world history there are trends that regardless of culture or geography make themselves apparent when considering what mediums of exchange were widely used at the time. You would think that knowledge of a particular society's culture, economic system and geography would first need to be analysed before sufficient anthropological predictions could be made. However, the author makes the case that simply by determining whether a transaction was settled in cash, bartering or through credit, much can be gleaned about the sort of goods that could be acquired (e.g. slaves etc.).

One major point of the book is that we exist in the very early stages of an economic era that may yet span many hundreds of years, beginning in 1971 when the Dollar was taken of the gold standard. Across history, societies that use precious metals as the medium of exchange tended to have a propensity for war, expansion and enslavement. Societies that did not, tended to be more peaceful, however we don't yet know if that trend will continue to be relevant in our modern era.

I must also mention that there is something that the author absolutely flogs a dead horse on. It is the total and thorough debunking of the idea that the inconvenience of barter provides the impetus for the advent of money. Every 15 pages or so we get a reminder of why the myth of barter is absurd and could not have been the primary means of exchange prior to money being established. Thank you David Graeber, I will personally guarantee that if I ever hear anyone repeat this myth I will forcefully point them in the direction of this book.

May you rest in peace.

I've only been using Kagi for a couple of days now, but the search results on programming topics are leagues better than Duckduckgo. I may be a little late to the party, but just realised that you can have shared state between pages without polluting _app.tsx in NextJS. I credit Kagi for taking me to this page where I learned about getLayout. https://nextjs.org/docs/pages/building-your-application/routing/pages-and-layouts#per-page-layouts

Here is how to add Kagi as your default search engine to Firefox on NixOS (home-manager)

home-manager.users.<my-user>.programs.firefox = {
  enable = true;
  profiles = {
    myProfile = {
      ...
      search = {
        force = true;
        default = "Kagi";
        engines = {
          "Kagi" = {
            urls = [
              { 
                template = "https://kagi.com/search?q={searchTerms}"; 
              }
            ];
            iconUpdateURL = "https://assets.kagi.com/v2/favicon-32x32.png";
            updateInterval = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000; # every day
            definedAliases = [ "@kg" ];
        ...

The Trial - Franz Kafka

This is one one of those books that people tell you to read when they actually haven't finished it themselves (you know who you are). I don't think anyone would mind me saying that its a painful read, because surely that was the author's intention. It's about a guy who lives in a world that is governed by an impenetrable court system, the workings of which nobody understands. He gets arrested randomly and put on trial without explanation. Nobody knows what the charges are (except maybe the high judges?) so its very difficult to defend himself. There is what they call an "advocate" who offers to help the protagonist with the trial. However the help he provides consists of various sycophantic offerings to court judges who happened to have been acquaintances from the past. The protagonist also finds himself entangled with various female characters with tenuous connections to the courts, who for some reason show great romantic interest in him. They offer to help in one way or another by providing the protagonist with some sort of 3rd-hand information about the courts, which nevertheless fails to translate to much advantage in the proceedings. The setting of the book is no doubt dystopian, and reminds me of the Maoist witch hunts described in the book Wild Swans. For me it served as an unsettling reminder that there are people in this world who would quite happily construct such an opaque bureaucracy as described in the book. If the consequences of the court's ruling were not so dire, it could even be interpreted as comedic, but the sinister aspect of it all seems a little too real and a little too plausible for it to make me laugh.

I may have been a bit harsh. Overall I am glad to have read this book.

人間失格　太宰治

日本人なら誰でも知ってる小説だと聞いて読もうと思った一冊。（読んだ後に友達に確認したらそれは大げさだったらしい。笑）
内容はとても暗く、絶望感がすごく伝わってくる。
落ち込んでる時に読ない方がいいと注意されていたけど、自分は落ち込んでいる時に読んでも大丈夫だったかもしれない。
描写が抽象的で「何が起きた？具体的に言ってくれ！」みたいなところが多かったけど、文学って言うのはそんなもんだろう。
主人公の葉蔵は変わりたくてもアル中から脱することができなくて、最後の方にお酒をやめたけど結局薬物依存症に移っただけだった。
現在はインターネット依存症、スマホ依存等が広がる一方、少なくとも誰もが一人ぐらい依存症を持ってる知り合いがいるんじゃないかなって思う。
自分だってインターネット依存症だもん。笑。
主人公の葉蔵はいつも周りに人がいても素でいられなかったから孤独だったと思う。
私達がLINEで友達とやり取りしていても感じる孤独と似てると思う。

心に響いた箇所

• 女は死んだように深く眠る、女は眠るために生きてるのではないかしら。
• 自分は道化を演じ、男はさすがにいつまでもゲラゲラ笑ってもいませんし、それに自分も男の人に対し、調子に乗ってあまりお道化を演じすぎると失敗すると言う事を知っていましたので、必ず適当のところで切り上げるように心掛けていましたが、女は適度という事を知らず、いつまでもいつまでも、自分にお道化を要求し、自分はその限りないアンコールに応じて、へとへとになるのでした。
• 自分は、女があんなに急に泣き出したりした場合、何か甘い物を手渡してやると、それを食べて機嫌を直すという事だけは、幼い時から、自分の経験によって知っていました。
• 俗にいうチャッカリ性でした。田舎者の自分が、愕然と眼を見張ったくらいの、冷たく、ずるいエゴイズムでした。自分のように、ただ、とめどなく流れるたちの男では 無かったのです。
• 「モチよ」