Wanderings – Page 38 – Akshat Rathi

Ten books in one month

January 27, 2013December 30, 2013 Akshat Rathi3 Comments

I hadn’t heard about Aaron Swartz before his demise on January 11th. He was a brilliant chap: master computer programmer, co-founder of Reddit, activist for open data and much more. He was also just 26 years old.

After the news of his suicide, the web exploded with eulogies. Much was said about bullying by US prosecutors, openness of data and difficulties of dealing with depression, all of which contributed in someway to his suicide. But what stood out for me came mostly through Aaron’s own words. (His blog Raw Thought is a treasure trove and a great way of learning about him.)

One thing in particular stuck with me: his ability to read more than 100 books every year. (He dropped out of high school and that’s how he taught himself.) I want to do this. And I know managing that with a full-time job and my other writing work is going to be a hard thing to do. So I’ve decided to start by setting a goal of reading 10 books in the next 4 weeks. (This is a little more than the 2 books per week needed to make up 100 books per year.)

At first glance this seems like a difficult task given that previously I averaged about 1 or 2 books per month. But some simple calculations show that this is not a ridiculous aim. At an average size of 300 pages (70,000 words), I’m aiming to read 25,000 words per day. This means at an average reading speed of 200 words per minute, I will need just over two hours of reading time. Allowing for sometime for note-taking and breaks will make it 2.5-3 hours every day.

If I cut out watching TV and I read only the most essential things online, I should be able to do this. If I can do 10 books before February 24th and manage the rest of my life properly, I’ll extend this challenge to 100 books before January 27th, 2014.

With help of friends on Twitter and Facebook and my own reading list, I’ve compiled a list of 10 books that I am planning to read in the next four weeks:

Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin
The End of Science by John Horgan
Genome by Matt Ridley
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

If I find the book not worth my time, I will replace it with another one and update the list here. Although I doubt that this list of 10 will need any replacing. I will post a review of the book once I’ve read it (here and on Amazon). If you are keen to support me in this endeavour, you can buy me one of the books above. At present I only first 5 of them. Here is my Amazon wish list. (PS: email me if you need my address).

The #100bookschallenge starts now.

PS: I’m taking the average word count of a book as 70,000 because I am planning to read more non-fiction than fiction. Image from here.

The largest human migration occurs annually

January 25, 2013December 15, 2013 Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Captured in the 2009 documentary The Last Train Home by Lixin Fan:

Ever year tens of millions of migrant workers go home to see their families for the New Year holidays. For most, the cheapest and the fastest route home is by train, but the impossible crowds strain the system past the breaking point. Police use bullhorns, batons, verbal abuse—whatever means necessary—to keep the vast mob under control. Many migrants camp at the railway station for weeks, waiting to by tickets. Others give up in despair, crippled by exhuastion. Those who get a ticket often have to climb through a window to get on the train, for a ride that can last up to three days but seems much longer. Many have to stand day and night, for lack of space on the floor to sit. Some wear diapers to avoid using the lavatory, and struggle to keep their sanity during the ride.

In 2009, an estimated 130 million people made the holiday journey—but each year the numbers were growing by double digits, like so much in China.

Taken from Ruchir Sharma’s Breakout Nations

My PhD described using the 1000 most used words

January 16, 2013December 15, 2013 Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Challenge set by XKCD’s Up Goer Five:

At the big boys’ school I worked on making really, really tiny things that can help many people not be sick. To do that we spent days reading books and learning how to add smaller bits together, one by one, to make the whole tiny thing. All the things around us are made of these tiny bits held together in different ways. But because these bits can not be held in hands, or seen by eyes, we had to do work with them in ways that would allow us to understand if we were doing it right.

The tiny thing I was making was hard to make. So I had two other people working on it with me. We talked and helped each other to come up with a way to make the tiny thing after three years of trying very hard. We made most of it, but some bits remain on which one person is still working.

After my work was done I wrote a book on it. Now the big boys have read the book and they will ask me hard questions. If I answer them then they will give me a note which will help me go out in the world and get a job that will pay me money and let me do what I want to do.