#English – alper.nl

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The necessity of physical fitness to create peak mental performance has been a well-known fact in esports. Useful to see the documented effects of pushing yourself cognitively within the chess world.

The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. “He looked like death,” grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.

https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmasters-magnus-carlsen-fabiano-caruana-lose-weight-playing-chess

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A simple solution to this: how about you don’t lie to your kids?

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/amp33379355/parenting-coronavirus-lying-to-kids/?__twitter_impression=true

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It sounds very familiar here that the mark of a senior is to have continuous pressure against getting anything done and then still getting stuff done.

One part of it is that if you’re capable in a platform, you should be able to get out the same amount of code in a fraction of the time.

https://swizec.com/blog/why-senior-engineers-get-nothing-done/

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An introduction on how to measure and improve your engineering organization’s performance using delivery metrics.

https://leaddev.com/primer-engineering-delivery-metrics

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A nice interview with Gergely Orosz about building engineering teams.

https://evolutionarymanager.com/building-great-engineering-teams-gergely-orosz/

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Something to remember when embarking on a journey to improve large and complex systems of humans and technology: small changes can make big a difference and afterwards nobody will really remember how bad things were.

View at Medium.com

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More-Than-Human

Caring

Gardening

Engendering

Resurgence

Nurture

Contingency

Knots

Assemblages

Terrestrial

Interdependence

Precarity

The Dithering

'Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics' – I wrote up the transcript of my talk from Tentacular Festival on Critical Activism and Fungal Revolts

https://t.co/nx8vl0OjlP pic.twitter.com/79QtCHQ9i0

— Anab Jain (@anabjain) February 19, 2020

��You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

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Edge C2 is a nice ideal position to move towards in this article about military agility that contains a bunch of useful elements including an interlinked OODA loop and a visualization of the Trust Equation.

The Future of Command and Control: Four Models to Provoke Thought

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I read this science-fiction short story which is reminiscent of Ann Leckie’s books in how it plays with gender and militarism, but I think this is better.

"I sexually identify as an attack helicopter. I lied. According to US Army Technical Manual 0, The Soldier as a System, “attack helicopter” is a gender identity, not a biological sex." this is *fucking spectacular* and I am curious now about Isabel Fall. https://t.co/lHGgbC4euC

— ralph waldo cybersyn

❝fc❞ (@atomicthumbs) January 9, 2020

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Languages spoken

Found this on Reddit and made my own.

Picked the countries where 50% of the people speak a language where I have at least B level of skill.

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Unsubscribing from Micromobility

I was surprised to learn you are affiliated with a company (Smide) that you've been praising profusely on your podcast.

— Alper Çuğun-Gscheidel

(@alper) May 2, 2019

As an occasional listener to the various Asymco podcasts and somebody very much interested in new forms of mobility, I was taken more than a bit aback by this.

Dediu revealed himself as a founder in Bond which is the same company as Smide. I remembered him having somebody from Smide on in one of the first episodes of the Micromobility podcast but there was never any disclosure then or after about Dediu’s connections there.

A lapse in disclosure and some backroom action is not a big deal and nothing much seems to have come from this, but it is a good reminder that everything you see online (not just the posts on Instagram) is fake.

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The dropping arises from the combination of the laissez-faire attitude of Dutch parents along with the incredible safety of the Netherlands. I have been dropped as a child and I never considered that this was a uniquely local experience.

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A poor man’s instapaper

I’ve stopped using Instapaper for a long time now, but I’m still reading longreads. Let me explain how.

I go through my links in Chrome on my desktop. I close and read whatever I can and anything that’s too long stays in an open tab and floats slowly to the left.

On Chrome on my phone whenever I’m in transit or when I want to read something longer that isn’t a book, I go to the “Recent tabs” screen. Besides those you can also find synced open tabs from all your other Chrome browsers. I then pick something that I want to read.

Now, ideally it would allow me to close the tab on my desktop from my phone but understandably that’s not a feature. So I read a couple of articles, remember those and close the tabs manually next time I’m back on my desktop.

This works surprisingly well.

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Scooters in Berlin

Scooters are not legal in Germany yet but in select locations like here in Berlin you can try them out on private land.

This was my first ride and they are an immense pleasure to use once you get your feet positioned properly. I’m not sure yet what happens if you fall off one but I’m pretty sure it will be bad.

The law allowing these on the road has supposedly been signed but still has to work its way through some German institutions. What will happen when these are legal is obvious:

People will adopt them en masse because scooters are amazing.

Chaos will ensue everywhere because cities like Berlin have near zero infrastructure to facilitate these vehicles and are unable to adapt at the speed required.

There will be some accidents which will be blown up by the media.

A huge backlash will ensue as has already happened in many other places.

The German attitude towards risk and the ever-present machinations of the car lobby will get scooters banned.

I hope I’m proven wrong but it’s hard to see how it would go any other way.

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Reading 2018

I grabbed the code I had lying around for last year and without too much trouble ran the same analysis for the books. The graph is not that dramatic this time though for some reason I did not read much during summer.

Pages read per month in 2018

Page-wise this year with 13398 pages was a bit weaker than last year (15049 pages).

By some miracle, I managed to post my top ten recommendations to twitter on the 31st.

I've read some 71 books in 2018 and here are ten that I would like to recommend. Goodreads has a lot more on my year: https://t.co/WaVBlGDiPJ Format inspired by @dvdwinden's end of year list.

— Alper Çuğun

(@alper) December 31, 2018

Now as to the categories in which I read books and what I thought stood out.

Leadership

Not as many books as last year, but some very good ones and an area where I will read more. Rumelt has written one of the best books on strategy I’ve seen. Marquet’s highly recommended book I think will bear fruit on future re-reading. Scott’s book contains a fairly complete operating system for a modern tech company.

The cracking books are ok and did helped me crack a PM interview but still had nothing to do with the job I started working at last month.

Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt

Turn the Ship Around, David Marquet

Radical Candor, Kim Malone Scott

Cracking the Tech Career

The First 90 Days

Cracking the PM Interview

Diversity (non-white/non-male): 3/6

I don’t have an Engineering category this year (I abandoned The Rust Book and consulted but did not finish the App Architecture book). I am reading topical things for my new job so this year will be better.

Non-Fiction

I’m pleasantly surprised how much I’ve managed to read. Mishra’s book is one of the few really mainstream non-white perspectives on a very important part of our history and I keep enjoying seeing him take names in the LRB and the Guardian. Bluets is a beautiful introspective trip just like The Argonauts was. Sandifer is a critical tour de force of with ideology and temperament I don’t see anywhere else. I’ve always been fond of Machiavelli but with Erica Benner’s rehabilitation of him I don’t have to be embarrassed about that anymore. Runciman’s book about the alternatives to democracy is like a protracted and focused episode of the podcast.

I don’t have a Fiction category or Sapiens would be there instead of here.

From the Ruins of Empire, Pankaj Mishra

Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton

A Contest of Ideas, Nelson Lichtenstein

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

Neoreaction a Basilisk, Elizabeth Sandifer

No Name in the Street, James Baldwin

Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker

Be Like the Fox, Erica Benner

The Chapo Guide to Revolution

The Hall of Uselessness, Simon Leys

Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine

How Democracy Ends, David Runciman

Diversity (non-white/non-male): 5/13

Genre Fiction

I have been very light on genre fiction and I’m not sure whether SF will continue to be a thing I read much of in the future. The genre is bigger than ever but there is so little serious stuff coming out.

I am glad to have re-read Le Guin this year. Majestic.

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor

Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan

The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin

The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin

The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin

Broken Angels, Richard Morgan

Woken Furies, Richard Morgan

The Planet on the Table, Kim Stanley Robinson

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin

Diversity (non-white/non-male): 5/9

Literature

I find it easier to read non-fiction because I can’t parallelize literature very well and whenever I read a dud (here’s looking at you Elif) they block the queue for everything else. Makumbi’s Ugandan family saga has opened up my perspective on the country like a good local novel can do. Hamid’s rumination on refugees is short and sharp like a blade. Shanbhag’s book is a quick family tale of rags to riches where everything becomes entangled.

Terug naar Oegstgeest, Jan Wolkers

Kintu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Dorsvloer vol confetti, Franca Treur

Voyage to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

Ghachar Ghochar, Vivek Shanbhag

The Idiot, Elif Batuman

Diversity (non-white/non-male): 5/7

Kids

I read so many (34!) kids books this year and this number will probably only increase since we have only just started visiting the library. We live close to the Amerika Gedenkbibilothek which has a fairly sized kids department.

Franchises that did well with us this year were Kikker and the newly discovered Pip & Posy. We finished the seasonal Wimmelbücher (of which Fall was the highlight and Winter a disappointment). Let’s see whether these see renewed play next year.

The kids books do inflate my reading number a lot but that is not taking into account that I have had to read most of these books dozens of times. So there’s that.

So Müde und Hellwach

Welcher Po passt auf dieses Klo?

Mama kwijt

De dieren van Fiep

Kikker en Eend

Kikker is jarig, Max Velthuijs

Was willst du Baby?

Piep piep met Fiep

Brown Bear, Brown Bear

So leicht so schwer

Der kleine Hase

Das kleine Lamm

Badetag für Hasekind

Sommer-Wimmelbuch

Frühlings-Wimmelbuch

Kaatje zegt nee

Pip en Posy en het nieuwe vriendje, Axel Scheffler

Das kleine Schwein

The Pony Twins

Sommer

Het vrolijke voorleesboek van Kikker

Winter-Wimmelbuch

Beestje, kom je op mijn feestje?

Hörst du die klassische Musik?

Het carnaval der dieren

Ssst! De tijger slaapt

Ik zou wel een kindje lusten

No Bad Kids

Oh Crap! Potty Training

Ein kleines Krokodil mit ziemlich viel Gefühl

Pip en Posy en de kerstboom

Herbst-Wimmelbuch, Rotraut Susanne Berner

Aki und Kon, der Fuchs

Die Wildnis ist unser Zuhause

Spirituality

Two solid books on this slow but steady path.

The Parent’s Tao te Ching

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

Previously in 2017 & 2016

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Highlights for Red Moon

Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can.

“Oh, nothing. I wish I knew what was going on.” She shook her head, stared at the wall. “It’s China,” she said. “Give up on that.”

He watched his mom fondly. How many times he had heard this story. Even inside the device, the weight of the world was still crushing him.

Bikes with trailers still doddering along right in the middle of the crazy mash of vehicles. Amazing to see such foolhardy recklessness. No doubt whole lifetimes had been spent in that danger. No different from a sailor going out to sea. Dangerous, yes, but not automatically fatal. A mode of being. Suddenly he saw they were all like those bicyclists, all the time. Someday every one of them would get run over.

And maybe it didn’t differ that much; prospectors were after money, which made them close students of the moon’s information; scientists were after the moon’s information, which if found would turn into a good living for them. So money and information were fungible and kept turning into each other. But in the end it was being on the hunt that mattered.

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