Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

77 results back to index


pages: 317 words: 76,169

The Perfect House: A Journey With Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, financial independence, Frank Gehry, functional programming, invention of the printing press, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass, trade route

Ann Percy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 12–13, fn. 1. 8. Ibid., 21, fn. 11. 9. Martin Kubelik, “Palladio’s Villas in the Tradition of the Veneto Farm,” Assemblage, October 1986, 107. 10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 50. 11. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters, trans. T. J. Reed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 46. 12. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 73. 13.

SCRIBNER Cover design by John Fulbrook III Cover photograph by Witold Rybczynski Author photograph by Isak Tiner Visit us online at www.SimonandSchuster.com ALSO BY WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI Paper Heroes Taming the Tiger Home The Most Beautiful House in the World Waiting for the Weekend Looking Around A Place for Art City Life A Clearing in the Distance One Good Turn The Look of Architecture We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook. * * * Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com NOTES FOREWORD 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 47. 2. Reprinted in Witold Rybczynski, Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture (New York: Viking, 1992), 209–19. 3. James S. Ackerman, Palladio (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 185. 4.

Ackerman, Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 381, fn. 25. 12. Palladio, Four Books, 17. 13. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston Du C. de Vere, vol. 3 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 2015. 14. Palladio, Four Books, 203. 15. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 47. 16. Lionello Puppi, Andrea Palladio, trans. Pearl Sanders (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975), 269. 17. Paolo Gualdo, “Life of Palladio” (1616), in Lewis, Drawings, 3. 18. Georgina Masson, “Palladian Villas as Rural Centres,” Architectural Review, July 1955, 20. 19.


pages: 264 words: 68,108

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Columbine, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Paul Erdős, placebo effect

Mencken Philip Larkin Frank Lloyd Wright Louis I. Kahn George Gershwin Joseph Heller James Dickey Nikola Tesla Glenn Gould Louise Bourgeois Chester Himes Flannery O’Connor William Styron Philip Roth P. G. Wodehouse Edith Sitwell Thomas Hobbes John Milton René Descartes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Friedrich Schiller Franz Schubert Franz Liszt George Sand Honoré de Balzac Victor Hugo Charles Dickens Charles Darwin Herman Melville Nathaniel Hawthorne Leo Tolstoy Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky Mark Twain Alexander Graham Bell Vincent van Gogh N. C. Wyeth Georgia O’Keeffe Sergey Rachmaninoff Vladimir Nabokov Balthus Le Corbusier Buckminster Fuller Paul Erdos Andy Warhol Edward Abbey V.

Arriving in Sweden, in time for one of the coldest winters in memory, Descartes was notified that his lessons to Queen Christina would take place in the mornings—beginning at 5:00 A.M. He had no choice but to obey. But the early hours and bitter cold were too much for him. After only a month on the new schedule, Descartes fell ill, apparently of pneumonia; ten days later he was dead. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) As a young man Goethe could write all day long, but as he grew older he found that he could muster the necessary creative energy only in the mornings. “At one time in my life I could make myself write a printed sheet every day, and I found this quite easy,” he said in 1828.

., The Early Lives of Milton (1932; repr. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965). 391. “would complain”: John Phillips, “The Life of Mr. John Milton,” in Darbishire, 33. 392. René Descartes: Jack Rochford Vrooman, René Descartes: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970). 393. “Here I sleep”: Quoted ibid., 76. 394. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: David Luke and Robert Pick, eds., Goethe: Conversations and Encounters (London: Oswald Wolff, 1966). 395. “At one time”: Quoted ibid., 177. 396. “My advice therefore”: Quoted ibid., 178. 397. Friedrich Schiller: Heinrich Doering, Friedrich von Schillers Leben, in Thomas Carlyle’s Life of Friedrich Schiller, facsimile ed.


pages: 225 words: 61,814

The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton

classic study, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Socratic dialogue, the market place, urban planning

Schopenhauer quashes the plan, arguing that ‘life is so short, questionable and evanescent that it is not worth the trouble of major effort.’ Schopenhauer as a young man (Ill. 19.5) 1813 He visits his mother in Weimar. Johanna Schopenhauer has befriended the town’s most famous resident, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visits her regularly (and likes talking with Sophie, Johanna’s housemaid, and Adele, Arthur’s younger sister). After an initial meeting, Schopenhauer describes Goethe as ‘serene, sociable, obliging, friendly: praised be his name for ever and ever!’ Goethe reports, ‘Young Schopenhauer appeared to me to be a strange and interesting young man.’

We may be obliged to continue burrowing underground, but through creative works, we can at least acquire moments of insight into our woes, which spare us feelings of alarm and isolation (even persecution) at being afflicted by them. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge. The philosopher admired his mother’s friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe because he had turned so many of the pains of love into knowledge, most famously in the novel he had published at the age of twenty-five, and which had made his name throughout Europe. The Sorrows of Young Werther described the unrequited love felt by a particular young man for a particular young woman (the charming Lotte, who shared Werther’s taste for The Vicar of Wakefield and wore white dresses with pink ribbons at the sleeves), but it simultaneously described the love affairs of thousands of its readers (Napoleon was said to have read the novel nine times).

A better indication of their identity came in a passing remark in a letter to his mother and sister: Really, there is nobody living about whom I care much. The people I like have been dead for a long, long time – for example, the Abbé Galiani, or Henri Beyle, or Montaigne. He could have added another hero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. These four men were perhaps the richest clues for what Nietzsche came in his maturity to understand by a fulfilled life. They had much in common. They were curious, artistically gifted, and sexually vigorous. Despite their dark sides, they laughed, and many of them danced, too; they were drawn to ‘gentle sunlight, bright and buoyant air, southerly vegetation, the breath of the sea [and] fleeting meals of flesh, fruit and eggs’.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

These heraldic bearings came to be linked with rank and lineage, particularly for royal dynasties, and this is one of the reasons why European flags evolved from being associated with battlefield standards and maritime signals to becoming symbols of the nation state. Every nation is now represented by a flag, testament to Europe’s influence on the modern world as its empires expanded and ideas spread around the globe. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe told the designer of the Venezuelan flag, Francisco de Miranda: ‘A country starts out from a name and a flag, and it then becomes them, just as a man fulfils his destiny.’ What does it mean to try to encapsulate a nation in a flag? It means trying to unite a population behind a homogeneous set of ideals, aims, history and beliefs – an almost impossible task.

It had been designed as early as 1806 by one of Bolívar’s fellow revolutionaries, Francisco de Miranda, who credited two things for his inspiration. He remembered a fresco he had seen in Italy in which Christopher Columbus was unfurling a yellow, blue and red flag as he came ashore at Venezuela; he also recalled a conversation he had had with the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe several decades earlier. De Miranda claimed that Goethe, upon hearing of his adventures in the Americas, had told him: ‘Your destiny is to create in your land a place where primary colours are not distorted.’ Goethe had thought long and hard about colour and de Miranda says he proved to him ‘[why] yellow is the most warm, noble and closest to light, why blue is that mix of excitement and serenity, a distance that evokes shadows; and why red is the exaltation of yellow and blue, the synthesis, the vanishing of light into shadow’.

page_id=115 Carrasco, David and Sessions, Scott, Daily Life of the Aztecs: People of the Sun and Earth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998) von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Goethe’s Theory of Colours: Translated From The German, With Notes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Jensen, Anthony K., ‘Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/goethe/ ‘Latin America Has Achieved Progress in Health, Education and Political Participation of Indigenous Peoples in the Last Decade’, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Press Release, 22 October 2014 http://www.cepal.org/en/pressreleases/latin-america-has-achieved-progress-health-education-and-political-participation Macaulay, Neill, Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in Brazil and Portugal, 1798–1834 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986) ‘Panama Canal Riots – 9–12 January 1964’, GlobalSecurity.org http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/panama-riots.htm The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Ship’s Log, British Navy Ship HMS Poole, July 1700.


pages: 325 words: 101,669

The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood by Dhun Sethna

An Inconvenient Truth, Copley Medal, Fellow of the Royal Society, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

For the first time, fissures in the Galenic system were exposed, setting a preparation and precedent for Harvey’s overturning of the whole of Galen’s edifice a century later. Further, as in the case with Leonardo, the true knowledge at that time of any part or organ was based on its structure, on the accurate understanding of its anatomy, and in this, Vesalius revolutionized its study. AIR AND BLOOD Blood is a juice of a very special kind. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe fifteen Hunted Heretic Science like life feeds on its own decay. New facts burn old rules; then newly developed concepts bind old and new together into a reconciling law. —Henry James When Vesalius was studying at Paris University (now known as the Sorbonne), it is doubtful whether he knew much about a colleague who called himself Villeneuve.

A WORLD ON FIRE Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed. —Thomas Henry Huxley twenty-four Pride and Prejudice It is much easier to recognize error than to find Truth: the former lies on the surface, this is quite manageable. The latter resides in the depth, and this quest is not everyone’s business. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Science has a way of creating myths to explain existence and to address change. Galen had imagined septal perforations and an ebb and flow of blood a thousand years earlier and the world had marveled. It mattered little that what had been offered were false marvels. New ideas do not battle so much with ignorance as with presumed knowledge.

Physiology was at the intersection of what could be regarded as a horizontal–vertical crossroads: the point at which the motion of the heart as the result of fermentation was poised against the ideal of a powerful and all-important muscular organ. twenty-six Bad Blood Do not complain of the mean and petty, for regardless of what you have been told, the mean and petty are everywhere in control. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe At a disputation held at the Sorbonne in December 1642, it was concluded that blood did indeed move in a circle. Three years later, the question was raised whether Galen’s account of blood flow should be formally revised. The president at that event was Jean Riolan fils, son of Jean Riolan of Amiens who, for a period, had been dean of the Faculty of Medicine.


pages: 181 words: 53,257

Taming the To-Do List: How to Choose Your Best Work Every Day by Glynnis Whitwer

delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, Firefox, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, late fees, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Walter Mischel

The dreams of my heart speak in a whisper, not a roar. Especially when I press them down over and over. With my children, one quiet priority is time without an agenda, so our conversation can naturally flow. These priorities don’t shout at me; they just patiently wait for my attention. German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”[4] If you find yourself in a place of not knowing what is important, consider asking God. The Bible tells us God freely gives us wisdom, and that’s what we need most. In James 1:5–8, we find instructions on how to ask God for wisdom.

Tim Kreider, “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” New York Times, June 30, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?_r=0. [2]. Carol Brazo, No Ordinary Home: The Uncommon Art of Christ-centered Homemaking (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1995), 24. [3]. “John D. Rockefeller,” New World Encyclopedia, accessed March 23, 2015, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/John_D._Rockefeller. [4]. “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes,” Goodreads.com, accessed March 23, 2015, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2326-things-which-matter-most-must-never-be-at-the-mercy. Chapter 8 Thinking with Focus and Clarity [1]. “Starving for Sleep: America’s Hunger Games,” The Better Sleep Council, February 2014, http://bettersleep.org/better-sleep/the-science-of-sleep/sleep-statistics-research/starving-for-sleep-americas-hunger-games/


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

* * * In the 17th century, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) penned his Geschichte des Agathon (Agathon; 1766–67), a landmark in German literature because it was the first Bildungsroman (a novel showing the development of the hero); Wieland was also the first to translate Shakespeare into German. Shortly after Wieland was summoned to Weimar in 1772, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) rose to become Germany’s most powerful literary figure, later joining forces with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) in a celebrated period known as Weimarer Klassik (Weimar classicism; Click here). * * * Read Simplicissimus (Adventures of a Simpleton) by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen as an appetiser to the early German novel

The average theatre in the network of city, regional and national spaces will put on about 20 or more plays each year. Masters of the Enlightenment who frequently get a showing include Saxony’s Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81); Württemberg-born Friedrich Schiller, who features especially strongly in Weimar’s theatre landscape today; and, of course, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who tinkered with his two-part Faust for 60 years of his life and created one of Germany’s most powerful and enduring dramas about the human condition. Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1813–37) is another popular piece and, having anticipated Theatre of the Absurd, lends itself to innovative staging.

Once you’ve done cultural and historical Thuringia, however, it’s time to shake off all those civilising influences and explore the rich natural offerings of the Thuringian Forest. Its sleepy villages are the portals through which hikers, cyclists and anyone in need of stress relief can indulge their love for the outdoors. You can walk in the footsteps of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, feeling embraced by thick forest and liberated by vistas that send the spirit soaring. Although its roads and trails are well trodden and its cities were long ago etched onto the world cultural map, Thuringia brings many unexpected rewards for visitors who put aside frantic activity and immerse themselves in the gentle momentum of slow travel


pages: 222 words: 74,587

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp

Apollo 11, business process, Charles Babbage, continuation of politics by other means, double entry bookkeeping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jacques de Vaucanson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge worker, means of production, new economy, paper trading, Turing machine, work culture

Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der “Principia Mathematica” und verwandter Systeme I. Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38:173– 198. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1801/1994. Tag- und Jahreshefte. In Autobiographische Schriften II. Vol. 10 of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, 10, 429–528. Revised edition. Munich: C. H. Beck. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1831/1996. Faust: Der Tragödie Zweiter Teil. In fünf Akten. Vol. 3 of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, 16, 46–364. Revised edition. Munich: C. H. Beck. Gosch, Josias Ludwig. 1789. Fragmente über den Ideenumlauf. Copenhagen: Proft. Graesel, Arnim. 1902. Handbuch der Bibliothekslehre: Zweite, voellig umgearbeitete Auflage der “Grundzüge der Bibliothekslehre, Neubearbeitung von Dr.


pages: 207 words: 64,598

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, desegregation, fear of failure, index card, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Some Classic Autobiographies and Memoirs (Pre–Twentieth Century) Saint Augustine: Confessions Benvenuto Cellini: Autobiography Jacques Casanova: Memoirs Duc de Saint-Simon: Memoirs Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: Memoirs, Life of the Duke Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Confessions Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Autobiography (“Poetry and Truth”) François-René Chateaubriand: Mémoires d’outre tombe Stendhal: Memoirs of an Egotist and The Life of Henri Brulard John Stuart Mill: Autobiography Frederick Douglass: Autobiography Henry David Thoreau: Walden Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater John Ruskin: Praeterita Alexander Herzen: My Past and Thoughts Edmund Gosse: Father and Son Daniel Paul Schreber: Memoirs of My Nervous Illness Ulysses S.

Cioran: The Temptation to Exist Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space, The Poetics of Reverie Theodor Adorno: Minima Moralia Diaries and Notebooks Sei Shonagon: The Pillow Book Kenko: Essays in Idleness Samuel Pepys: The Diary of Samuel Pepys James Boswell: Journals Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Notebooks Edmond and Jules de Goncourt: Journals George Templeton Strong: The Diaries Franz Kafka: Diaries Anne Frank: The Diary of Anne Frank Victor Klemperer: I Shall Bear Witness Cesare Pavese: The Burning Brand Witold Gombrowicz: Diary, vols. 1–3 André Gide: Journals Letters Mme. de Sévigné: Letters to Her Daughter Alexander Pushkin: Collected Letters Lord Byron: Byron’s Letters and Journals John Keats: Selected Letters Gustave Flaubert: Selected Letters Vincent van Gogh: Dear Theo Franz Kafka: Letters to Milena Aphorisms, Thought Catch-Alls, and Similar Curiosities La Rochefoucauld: Maxims La Bruyère: Characters Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy Thomas Browne: The Urn Burial, Religio Medici Giacomo Leopardi: Pensieri Cyril Connolly (Palinaurus): The Unquiet Grave Yang Ye (editor): Vignettes from the Late Ming History Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War Herodotus: The Histories Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution Jules Michelet: Histories of France Washington Irving: A History of New York Jacob Burckhardt: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Henry Adams: History of the United States under Jefferson and Madison Francis Parkman: France and England in North America, The Oregon Trail Richard Hofstadter: The Age of Reform, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Ferdinand Braudel: The Mediterranean Biographies Plutarch: Lives of the Greeks and Romans Giorgio Vasari: Lives of the Artists John Aubrey: Brief Lives Samuel Johnson: Lives of the English Poets James Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson Elizabeth Gaskell: The Life of Charlotte Brontë Charles Sainte-Beuve: Portraits J. Anthony Froude: Thomas Carlyle Lytton Strachey: Eminent Victorians Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Geoffrey Scott: Portrait of Zélide Travel and Place Basho: Back Roads to Far Towns Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Italian Journey Frances Trollope: Domestic Manners of the Americans Astolfe de Custine: Letters from Russia Charles M. Doughty: Travels in Arabia Deserta Robert Louis Stevenson: Travels with a Donkey Mark Twain: Life on the Mississippi Richard F. Burton: First Footsteps in East Africa, Wanderings in West Africa Henry James: Collected Travel Writings Robert Byron: The Road to Oxiana Djuna Barnes: New York Osip Mandelstam: Journey to Armenia Theodore Dreiser: The Color of a Great City Paul Morand: New York Joseph Roth: What I Saw, Report from a Parisian Paradise Louis Aragon: Paris Peasant D.


pages: 274 words: 66,721

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

Allen & Unwin Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: info@allenandunwin.com Web: www.allenandunwin.com Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 1 74175 755 2 Index by Jo Rudd Text design by Peter Long Set in 11.5/16 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group, Australia eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia Also by Jane Gleeson-White Classics Australian Classics For my father Michael Gleeson-White, who told me tales of art and finance And for Michael Hill, always What advantages does the merchant derive from Book-keeping by double-entry? It is amongst the finest inventions of the human mind. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1795 More than four hundred years ago, in the very first book published on the subject, bookkeeping was outlined in a form which still prevails around the entire world. A.C. Littleton, 1933 Historians often forget. Even the most mundane professions have their history, and those mundane professions increasingly run the capitalist world.

p. 128 ‘very impartially . . .’ Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Penguin, Ringwood, 1985, p. 83. p. 128 ‘tho’ the exactest book-keeping . . .’ Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 1725–27, www.online-literature.com/defoe/english-tradesman/20. p. 129 ‘At that time, you had no . . .’ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Bell & Daldy, London, 1867, p. 27. Chapter 6 p. 134 The passions it inspired . . . Yamey, Essays on the History of Accounting, op. cit., p. 137. p. 134 ‘For every debit there must . . .’ Brown, op. cit., p. 160. p. 135 ‘the false prophet had . . .’


pages: 62 words: 13,939

Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Mark Zuckerberg, Ralph Waldo Emerson

A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ● ● ● Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Fortunately, we have a record that chronicles both the development of empathic expression and the evolution of human consciousness. The evidence is embedded deep in the conversations that make up the stories we’ve told about ourselves across history. It’s in the narratives we’ve left behind. FIRST THERE WAS THE WORD The great German philosopher and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who dedicated a lifetime to unlocking the mysteries of light and color, tells a story about what is the most important single thing in life. The golden king asks the snake, “What is more glorious than gold?” “Light,” answers the snake. The king responds by asking, “What is more refreshing than light?”

In the mid-eighteenth century, however, the autobiographical genre exploded. In his book The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography, historian and Columbia University professor Karl J. Weintraub shows in the autobiographies of Giambattista Vico, Edward Gibbon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the line of progression in self-awareness and empathic expression that characterized the period leading up to the American and French revolutions and the opening of the modern age at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Italian scholar Giambattista Vico, in his autobiography, which was published in 1728, shared with his readers his belief that human nature is not preordained by God or determined by fate but, rather, an ever-evolving process in which human beings create their own realities and pass the lessons learned on to the next generation, who build upon it to fashion their own lives and stories.

At such times he felt himself to be whole, to be a harmonious part of a larger whole. At such moments he needed nothing, not even words. . . . A simple exclamation “Oh! Oh Nature! Oh Mother!” was the fully adequate expression of his overflowing heart.91 Fittingly, the great German philosopher and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiography From My Life: Poetry and Truth, released in 1808 and continually updated until 1831, stands alone at the beginning of modernity as the best attempt to reconcile the mechanistic cosmology and rationalism of the Enlightenment extolled by Descartes and Newton in the seventeenth century and the early Romantic reaction of Rousseau and his ilk in the eighteenth century.


pages: 243 words: 74,452

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck by Jon Acuff

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Ruby on Rails, Skype, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

Beware the temptation to isolate or hide during your Do Over. We need other people. We need friends. We need advocates. We need relationships as a critical part of our Career Savings Account. Investment 2: Skills Everybody wants to be somebody: Nobody wants to grow. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE If your best friend was a horrible mechanic, you wouldn’t ask him to fix your car a second time. If your closest confidant was a terrible accountant, you wouldn’t ask him to do your taxes. If your lifelong buddy was terrifically irresponsible, you wouldn’t ask him to watch your dog while you were out of town.

In my frustration I stayed stuck because I didn’t grab the right hammer. I hope you will. Every skill can be a hammer. Start banging. Career Ceilings were meant to be broken. Investment 3: Character A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world’s torrent. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE If relationships are who you know and skills are what you do, character is who you are. Since religion, science and philosophy have been trying to get to the bottom of that question for thousands of years I thought I would go ahead and figure it out for us all in this next section.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Besides, it was concerns about overpayment that led to the crisis in the posting system in the first place: if the auction system breaks down completely, it isn’t good for anyone.7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Amateur Auction Theorist It turned out that stamp collectors weren’t even the first to beat economists to the Vickrey auction. They were already anticipated, at least in spirit, by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe forty years before the Penny Black appeared. Like many a temperamental and idealistic artist, Goethe had an uneasy relationship with money. He was on the one hand disdainful of the profit motive (he once wrote to a publisher, “I look odd to myself when I pronounce the word Profit”), while at the same time anxious that his worth be recognized.


Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

Ethische Methodenlehre, 1st Section, §50: “He is the midwife of his thoughts,” on the teacher-student relationship. 46. Luhmann, “Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen,” 57. 47. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98–140, at 103. 48. Kleist, “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” 323. 49. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, vol. 2, trans. John Oxenford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 311f. 50. Kittler, Die Nacht der Substanz, 16. For a more strictly computer-archeological reading, see also Kittler “Memories Are Made of You,” in Schrift, Medien, Kognition. Über die Exteriorität des Geistes, vol. 19 of Probleme der Semiotik, ed.


pages: 51 words: 14,616

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

Anton Chekhov, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, means of production, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Forster, 0-553-21323-7 THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, Anne Frank, 0-553-57712-3 ANNE FRANK'S TALES FROM THE SECRET ANNEX, Anne Frank, 0-553-58638-6 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND OTHER WRITINGS, Benjamin Franklin, 0-553-21075-0 THE YELLOW WALLPAPER AND OTHER WRITINGS, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 0-553-21375-X FAUST: FIRST PART, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 0-553-21348-2 THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, Kenneth Grahame, 0-553-21368-7 THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM, The Brothers Grimm, 0-553-38216-0 ROOTS, Alex Haley, 0-440-17464-3 FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21331-8 JUDE THE OBSCURE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21191-9 THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21024-6 THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21269-9 TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21168-4 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 0-553-21270-2 THE SCARLET LETTER, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 0-553-21009-2 THE FAIRY TALES OF HERMANN HESSE, Hermann Hesse, 0-553-37776-0 SIDDHARTHA, Hermann Hesse, 0-553-20884-5 THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER, Homer, 0-553-21399-7 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Victor Hugo, 0-553-21370-9 FOUR GREAT PLAYS, Henrik Ibsen, 0-553-21280-X THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Henry James, 0-553-21127-7 THE TURN OF THE SCREW AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, Henry James, 0-553-21059-9 A COUNTRY DOCTOR, Sarah Orne Jewett, 0-553-21498-5 DUBLINERS, James Joyce, 0-553-21380-6 A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce, 0-553-21404-7 THE METAMORPHOSIS, Franz Kafka, 0-553-21369-5 THE STORY OF MY LIFE, Helen Keller, 0-553-21387-3 CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21190-0 THE JUNGLE BOOKS, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21199-4 KIM, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21332-6 LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, D.


pages: 383 words: 92,837

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him—they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own. And consider the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He began using opium in 1796, originally for relief from the pain of toothaches and facial neuralgia—but soon he was irreversibly hooked, swigging as much as two quarts of laudanum each week.

For many, the fall of the Earth from the center of the universe caused profound unease. No longer could the Earth be considered the paragon of creation: it was now a planet like other planets. This challenge to authority required a change in man’s philosophical conception of the universe. Some two hundred years later, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commemorated the immensity of Galileo’s discovery: Of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit.… The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe.


pages: 108 words: 27,451

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin by Jesse Berger

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, carbon footprint, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, liquidity trap, litecoin, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Satoshi Nakamoto, the medium is the message, Vitalik Buterin

Whether prices are volatile or stable, it stoically accepts them as they come – reflecting life’s changing values and preferences – and dutifully relays the knowledge they signal, making Bitcoin a far superior unit of account. 4.3.1 Time Is Money: Scarcity Abides “Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Writer & Statesman In a very real sense, time is money. Like money, time can be invested to create something of value, and can be traded if the price is right. The inherent scarcity of time in life inspires us to use it efficiently because, if wasted, time cannot be artificially re-created.


pages: 123 words: 36,533

Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gutkind

David Sedaris, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, The Soul of a New Machine

Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone is telling it.” Lorraine Adams, a columnist for the Washington Post, has dubbed this trend the rise of “the nobody memoir.” To trace the arc of memoir through the centuries, from St. Augustine to Mary Karr, would require a book-length manuscript. Memoirists have typically been heavy hitters: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, E. B. White, Gertrude Stein, Ulysses S. Grant, Mahatma Gandhi, Bill Clinton, Gore Vidal, George Orwell, Leon Trotsky, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass, Black Elk, Helen Keller, Carl Jung, Jean-Paul Sartre, and on and on.


pages: 128 words: 38,847

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

He was not a particularly good farmer, but found greater success as a grain merchant in Kentucky, and grew to be a prosperous small-business owner. Brandeis’s mother Frederika, the daughter of a Polish court physician, was a devotee of eighteenth-century German authors like Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and a moralist who pushed her children to develop “a pure spirit and the highest ideals as to morals and love.” The town of Louisville would figure essentially in what Brandeis would come to stand for. Louisville was no world capital, nor the seat of any corporate empire, but nonetheless a flourishing regional center, in a United States far more economically decentralized than today’s.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Goethe-Haus HISTORIC BUILDING Offline map Google map (www.goethehaus-frankfurt.de; Grosser Hirschgraben 23-25; adult/student/family €7/3/11; 10am-6pm Mon-Sat, 10am-5.30pm Sun; Willy-Brandt-Platz) Completely rebuilt after the war (only the cellar survived Allied bombing), the birthplace of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is furnished in the haut-bourgeois style of Goethe’s time, based on an inventory taken when Goethe’s family sold the place. One of the few pieces that actually belonged to the great man is a puppet theatre given to him at age four. Laminated information cards provide background in a variety of languages.

Upstairs there’s a peaceful rooftop garden with river views. Mittelmosel-Museum MUSEUM (Casinostrasse 2, Trarbach; adult/youth €2.50/1; 10am-5pm Tue-Sun Easter-Oct) If you’d like to learn more about Traben-Trarbach and its castles, head to this homey local history museum, housed in a furnished baroque villa proud of having hosted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for a few hours in 1792. Fahrradmuseum MUSEUM (Moselstrasse 2, Trarbach; 2-6pm Mon-Fri, 10am-3pm Sat, 10am-1pm Sun May-Oct, 10am-1pm Sat & Sun Apr) To check out a collection of historic bicycles, head up the stairs from the Wein-Kontor wine shop. Grevenburg RUINS The Grevenburg castle, built in the mid-1300s, sits high in the craggy hills above Trarbach.

Weimar Top Sights Fürstengruft A5 Goethe Nationalmuseum B3 Park an der Ilm C4 Schiller Haus B2 Sights 1 Bauhaus Museum A2 2 Goethe Haus B3 3 Goethes Gartenhaus D4 4 Goethe-Schiller Denkmal A2 5 Haus am Horn D4 6 Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek C2 7 Liszt-Haus B4 8 Römisches Haus D5 9 Schlossmuseum C1 10 Stadtkirche St Peter und Paul B1 11 Weimar Haus A2 12 Wittumspalais A2 Sleeping 13Casa dei ColoriB1 14Hotel AmalienhofA3 15 Hotel Anna Amalia A1 16 Hotel Elephant Weimar B2 17 Hotel zur Sonne A1 18 Labyrinth Hostel A1 Eating 19 ACC B2 Anna Amalia (see 16) 20 Anno 1900 A1 21EstragonB2 22 Gasthaus zum Weissen Schwan B3 23Jo HannsA1 24 Residenz-Café B2 25VersiliaB3 Entertainment 26 Deutsches Nationaltheater A2 27 Kasseturm A1 28 Studentenclub Schützengasse A2 Sights Goethe Nationalmuseum MUSEUM Offline map Google map (Frauenplan 1; combined ticket Goethe Haus & permanent museum exhibition adult/concession €10.50/8.50, permanent museum exhibition only adult/concession €6.50/5.50; 9am-6pm Tue-Fri & Sun, to 7pm Sat) No other individual is as closely associated with Weimar as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived in this town from 1775 until his death in 1832, the last 50 years in what is now the Goethe Haus Offline map Google map (545 401; Frauenplan 1; adult/concession €8.50/7; 9am-6pm Tue-Fri & Sun, to 7pm Sat Apr-Sep, 9am-6pm Tue-Sun Oct, to 4pm Tue-Sun Nov-Mar). This is where he worked, studied, researched and pennedFaust and other immortal works.


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

Each line has its own identity and appeals to a different type of potential customer, even though the clothes may be manufactured using the same processes and the revenues end up in the coffers of the same company. SHARE THIS CONCEPT: http://book.personalmba.com/economic-values/ Relative Importance Testing Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, NINETEENTH-CENTURY DRAMATIST, POET, AND POLYMATH The tricky thing about trying to figure out what people want is that people want everything. Here’s proof: bring together a group of potential customers for a focus group. Ask each participant to rate the importance of each of the nine Economic Values for your offering on a scale of 0 to 10.

Human attention requires novelty to sustain itself. Continue to offer something new, and people will pay attention to what you have to offer. SHARE THIS CONCEPT: http://book.personalmba.com/novelty/ 8 WORKING WITH YOURSELF To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, POET, DRAMATIST, AND POLYMATH Your body and mind are the tools you use to get things done. Learning how to work effectively with yourself makes accomplishing what you set out to achieve easier and more enjoyable. In today’s busy business environment, it’s easy to get stressed about everything that needs to be done.


pages: 473 words: 132,344

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, falling living standards, fiat currency, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, housing crisis, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, risk/return, strikebreaker, trade route, zero-sum game

The constitution-makers who met in early 1919 had been forced to evacuate themselves from Berlin to this attractive, modest-sized central German city (population at the end of the Second World War around 35,000), because the capital was still too violent and politically unstable for their safety to be guaranteed. They remained there until the situation in Berlin was somewhat restored. Weimar had become famous 120 years or so previously as the home of the great writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s Shakespeare - and more. In a long life, spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Goethe had also gained renown as a statesman and scientist. A fitting environment for Germany’s new start, perhaps, despite the circumstances. From now on, though, to the wider world the first thing the name would bring to mind would no longer be the greatest achievements of the German enlightenment.

These, then, were the distinguished, patriotic and apparently reliable officials who unwittingly set Germany and its currency on the road to ruin. Both were lawyers by education and training rather than economists or financiers. Both were very much men of the pre-war era. Glasenapp, in particular, was a man of broad culture, with a deep interest in the works of Germany’s and perhaps Europe’s greatest polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (for many years he served on the committee of the Weimar-based Goethe Society). In fact, Glasenapp did a bit of writing himself, reportedly setting his son’s translations of Indian poetry into polished German verse in his head while walking to work in the morning.1 Having played such a leading role in the growth of Germany’s indebtedness during the previous four or more years, the Reichsbank’s response to the armistice and the threat of a normalisation of the country’s economy was to demand austerity from the revolutionary government, while, paradoxically, at the same time the dubious underpinnings of the money supply, which implicitly encouraged the debauchment of the currency, remained in place.


Rome by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, bread and circuses, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, double helix, G4S, gentrification, Index librorum prohibitorum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, urban planning

Palazzo Valentini Archaeological Site Offline map Google map ( 06 32810; Via IV Novembre 119/A; adult/reduced €6/4, advance booking fee €1.50; 9.30am-5pm Wed-Mon, tours every 45 min; Spagna) Underneath a grand mansion that’s been the seat of the Province of Rome since 1873, the archaeological remains of several lavish ancient Roman houses have been uncovered, and the excavated fragments have been turned into a fascinating multi-media ‘experience’, which takes you on a virtual tour of the dwellings, complete with sound effects, projected frescoes and glimpses of ancient life as it might have been lived in the area around the buildings. Casa di Goethe Museum Offline map Google map ( 06 326 50 412; www.casadigoethe.it; Via del Corso 18; adult/reduced €4/3; 10am-6pm Tue-Sun; Flaminio) A gathering place for German intellectuals, the Via del Corso apartment where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe enjoyed a happy Italian sojourn from 1786 to 1788, but complained of the noisy neighbours, is now a lovingly maintained museum. Exhibits include documents and some fascinating drawings and etchings. With advance permission, ardent fans can use the library full of first editions. Villa Medici Palazzo Offline map Google map ( 06 6 76 11; www.villamedici.it, in French & Italian; Viale Trinità dei Monti 1; open for events; Spagna) This striking Renaissance palace has been home to the French Academy since the early 19th century.

Roman Reads Roman Tales (Alberto Moravia) That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (Carlo Emilio Gadda) The Secrets of Rome, Love & Death in the Eternal City (Corrado Augias) Romantic Visions In the 18th century the city was a hotbed of literary activity as historians and Grand Tourists poured in from northern Europe. The German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe captures the elation of discovering ancient Rome and the colours of the modern city in his celebrated travelogue Italian Journey (1817). Rome was also a magnet for the English Romantic poets. John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and other writers all spent time in the city.


The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Five Kings of England and, including Washington, no fewer than fourteen Presidents of the United States of America have been Masons. Freemasonry can boast a long list of writers, such as: Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns; the author of Dangerous Liaisons (1782), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos; Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle; and the towering figure of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Numerous composers, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn and Jean Sibelius, have been ‘on the Square’. There are sportsmen in the list, like golfer Arnold Palmer, Caribbean cricket giant Clive Lloyd, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson and basketball player Shaquille O’Neal. There are also many entertainers, ranging from Harry Houdini and Peter Sellers to Nat King Cole and Oliver Hardy.

The bulk of the membership was made up of government officials, journalists and academics. Businessmen were put off by the extremely demanding curriculum of Enlightenment reading. The most famous Illuminatus of them all had no such aversion to study: the writer and senior advisor to Grand Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It is possible that Goethe joined simply to keep a governmental eye on the society. The Illuminati grew despite being in a state of flux. Knigge, who formally only belonged to the second tier of the organisation, wrote desperate letters to Weishaupt asking to know more. He had been reduced to stringing his members along when they demanded to be rewarded for all their studying with access to higher Degrees and superior knowledge.


pages: 162 words: 56,627

Top 10 Venice by Gillian Price

call centre, centre right, G4S, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass

Coryate $ Thomas The very first English- language traveller to write a detailed description of Venice, this eccentric gentleman from Somerset, England (1577–1617) compiled Crudities, with Observations of Venice (1611): “Such is the rarenesse of the situation of Venice, that it doth even amaze and drive into admiration all strangers that upon their first arrival behold the same.” % Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The story goes that this German literary giant (1749– 1832) had his first ever view of the sea from Venice’s CampaJohann Wolfgang nile. Attracted by the von Goethe lands south of the Alps, his first visit was an experience of personal renewal, the account published William Shakespeare as Italian Journey (1786–8).


pages: 244 words: 58,247

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: Get Wise, Get Wealthy...and Get on With Your Life by Alexander Green

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, behavioural economics, borderless world, buy and hold, buy low sell high, cognitive dissonance, diversification, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, endowment effect, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, financial independence, fixed income, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, hindsight bias, impulse control, index fund, interest rate swap, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, mental accounting, Michael Milken, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Finance, Personal. I. Title. HG4521.G693 2008 332.6—dc22 2008017690 This book is dedicated to Judith and Braxton Green. If there is one thing I know how to do, it’s pick the right parents. If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe FOREWORD You have no idea what good hands you’re in. I do . . . You see, at this point I’m now one of the world’s most widely read investment analysts. I’m not quite sure how I got here. I don’t have a gimmick. I don’t promise zillion-percent returns overnight. I think I’m here because I’ve given consistently good advice over my career.


pages: 559 words: 174,054

The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer

British Empire, clean water, confounding variable, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lao Tzu, placebo effect, Plato's cave, spice trade, trade route, traveling salesman

prologue The Discovery of Caffeine Although caffeine-bearing plants may have been used for their pharmacological effects from before recorded history, it was not until the flowering of interest in plant chemistry in Europe in the beginning of the nineteenth century that caffeine itself was first isolated and named. The discovery was made by Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, a young physician, in 1819 as a result of an encounter with the seventy-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, baron of the German empire, one of the greatest poets the world had seen, and the preeminent intellectual and cultural hero of the Europe of his day. Runge was born in Billwärder, a small town near Hamburg, Germany, on February 8, 1794, a pastor’s son and the third of what was to become a family of seven children.

This kind of insidious confounder can easily engender false claims of a causal connection between coffee or caffeine and health problems.9 notes OVERVIEW 1. Henry Watts, ed., Dictionary of Chemistry, vol. I, p. 707. 2. John Evelyn, Works, note, p. 11. 3. Sir Richard Steele, Tatler, April 12, 1709. PROLOGUE 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (Attempts to Illustrate the Metamorphosis of Plants). In this book Goethe takes his place as a pioneer in the theory of evolution. 2. As P.Walden, in his essay “Goethe and Chemistry,” states, “At Weimar the time had come for Goethe to reexamine his chemical knowledge and concepts, to transfer them into the realm of practice and reality, simultaneously, however, to give them a more solid theoretical foundation” (George Urdang, Goethe and Pharmacy, p. 15). 3.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

There have been many iterations of the Faust theme by various writers, but the first version appeared in 1587 by an anonymous German author. The general story is that Dr. Faust makes a bargain with the devil: in exchange for wealth and power, Faust sells his soul to the devil. Although the story dates back to 1587, it wasn’t until Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took the legend up around 1770 that Dr. Faust joined the longevity literature. In Goethe’s version, Faust seeks youth in addition to money and power. According to historian Lucian Boia, “Here Faust swallows a witch’s potion designed to restore his youth and make him fall in love.”19 Goethe’s play was followed by a popular 1859 opera by Charles Gounod that shows the “miracle of rejuvenation” on stage, after which the newly young man falls in love.20 Risking eternity in hell for youth is a bad decision, but other stories warn that extended longevity could turn people into monsters, potentially creating hell on earth.


Great Continental Railway Journeys by Michael Portillo

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, railway mania, Suez canal 1869, trade route

From here, academics seeking inspiration would set forth on what became known as the ‘Philosopher’s Way’, a scenic elevated route through woods where stunning views of the town could be glimpsed in a climate that’s been compared to Tuscany. Correspondingly, they found inspiration in nature, more exotic than the norm, the same key ingredient that would fuel the work of Romantics in literature, philosophy, art and music. The most famous figure known to have trodden that thought-provoking path is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. A poet, playwright, novelist, scientist and statesman, Goethe found more satisfaction in the unspoiled vistas of Heidelberg than he did in run-down Rome. But he was in good company. Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) studied law at Heidelberg in 1808, before beginning to author his famously lyrical poems.


pages: 296 words: 78,227

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, delayed gratification, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, inventory management, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, The future is already here, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

Those who want a time revolution need to link together their past, present, and future, as suggested above by Figure 35. Behind the issue of how we allocate time lurks the even more fundamental issue of what we want to get out of our lives. 11 YOU CAN ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT Things that matter most Must never be at the mercy of things that matter least. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Work out what you want from life. In the 1980s phrase, aim to “have it all.” Everything you want should be yours: the type of work you want; the relationships you need; the social, mental, and aesthetic stimulation that will make you happy and fulfilled; the money you require for the lifestyle that is appropriate to you; and any requirement that you may (or may not) have for achievement or service to others.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Rational philosophy, complained poet John Keats, will “clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line…Unweave a rainbow.” These attacks on science created intellectual battle lines that laid the groundwork for a counterattack by rationalists accusing the Romantics of indulging in sentimentality.14 On the Continent, poet and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe refused to go along with this division being formed between science and beauty. Goethe, who founded the science of morphology—the study of forms—instead saw beauty, like Leonardo centuries earlier did, as “a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.”

Lorenz”; John Dugdale, “Richard Dawkins Named World's Top Thinker in Poll,” Guardian, April 25, 2013. 44. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64. 45. Ibid., 85–86, 151–52. Chapter 20. Consuming the Earth in the Modern Era 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorcerer's Apprentice,” trans. Brigitte Dubiel (1797). I am indebted to Steve Hagen for pointing out this work as a parable for the power of technology. See Steve Hagen, Buddhism Is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom beyond Beliefs (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004), 28–29. 2.


pages: 312 words: 86,770

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Brownian motion, classic study, dark matter, Drosophila, Gregor Mendel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method

But even without the active opposition, we can do better, and we have to do better. Evo Devo and the Evolution/Creation Struggle If you are convinced of a matter, you must take sides or you don’t deserve to succeed. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Propylaea (1798) In the short time between the first and second edition of The Origin of Species , Darwin inserted three more words into that famous closing paragraph, adding “by the Creator” to rewrite the phrase as “having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…” Darwin later expressed his regret for doing so in a letter to botanist J.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

And because thinspo, tricks and tips, suicide methods and diets are put forward by a seemingly caring community of people, it is easy to forget just how deadly the advice can be. It could be said that almost any action, no matter how misguided, can quickly become acceptable – even admirable – if you believe that others are doing it too. In 1774 the German novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which his thoughtful young protagonist takes his life after failing in his endeavours to be with the woman he loved. The book sparked a spate of copycat suicides across Europe by young men who had found themselves in a similar predicament.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

They are made of a type of iron called goethite, and limpets use them to cling to rocks with a vice-like grip and excavate them like a tiny JCB. Johann Georg Lenz (1748–1832) of the University of Jena discovered goethite in 1806. He named it after his friend, the writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Goethe had become obsessed with mineralogy in his twenties, as a result of his plan to re-open a medieval silver mine in the Harz mountains. By the time he died, he had amassed 17,800 samples – the largest private collection of rocks and minerals in Europe. Blue whales, by the way, don’t have any teeth at all.


The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, cosmological constant, Elliott wave, Eratosthenes, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, mandelbrot fractal, music of the spheres, Nash equilibrium, power law, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method

., “Constantly Mean” by Paul Bruckman; presented in Chapter 4) or about geometrical shapes or phenomena that are closely related to the Golden Ratio. Second, there can be poems in which the Golden Ratio or Fibonacci numbers are somehow utilized in constructing the form, pattern, or rhythm. Examples of the first type are provided by a humorous poem by J. A. Lindon, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's dramatic poem “Faust,” and by Oliver Wendell Holmes s poem “The Chambered Nautilus.” Martin Gardner used Lindon's short poem to open the chapter on Fibonacci in his book Mathematical Circus. Referring to the recursive relation which defines the Fibonacci sequence, the poem reads: Each wife of Fibonacci, Eating nothing that wasn't starchy, Weighed as much as the two before her, His fifth was some signora!


pages: 227 words: 81,467

How to Be Champion: My Autobiography by Sarah Millican

Albert Einstein, call centre, Downton Abbey, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson

I didn’t want the kids who couldn’t afford to go to think that this would in any way stop them from having a great life. Sure, if you want to be a doctor or lawyer, there’s no way around it. But there are plenty of jobs where work experience and being keen and willing to learn can get you a foot in the door. A quote that always gives me fire in my belly is by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: ‘Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.’ * It was in this job that I met my first husband. We had a lovely time for about seven years. To see how this turned out, skip to the chapter entitled ‘Divorce’. * By this time I was married and living in a rented flat which turned out to be incredibly damp.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

BEWITCHING HARZ The Harz Mountains constitute a mini-Alpine region straddling Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony. Here, medieval castles overlook fairy-tale historic towns, while there are caves, mines and numerous hiking trails to explore. The region’s highest – and most famous – mountain is the Brocken, where one-time visitor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set the ‘Walpurgisnacht’ chapter of his play Faust . His inspiration in turn came from folk tales depicting Walpurgisnacht, or Hexennacht (witches’ night), as an annual witches’ coven. Every 30 April to 1 May it’s celebrated enthusiastically across the Harz region. Goslar Goslar is a truly stunning 1000-year-old city with beautifully preserved half-timbered buildings and an impressive Markt .

East of Römerberg, behind the Historischer Garten (which has the remains of Roman and Carolingian foundations), is the Frankfurter Dom (Domplatz 14; museum adult/child €3/2; church 9am-noon & 2.30-8pm) , the coronation site of Holy Roman emperors from 1562 to 1792. It’s dominated by the elegant 15th-century Gothic tower – one of the few structures left standing after the 1944 raids (see the pictures inside). ‘Few people have the imagination for reality’ uttered the ever-pithy Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Read more quotes at the Goethe-Haus (www.goethehaus-frankfurt.de; Grosser Hirschgraben 23-25; adult/student €5/2.50; 10am-6pm Mon-Sat, 10am-5.30pm Sun) , where he was born in 1749. Museums MUSEUMS Frankfurt’s museum list is long and a mixed bag. To sample them all, buy a 48-hour Museumsufer ticket (€15) .

Arts Germany’s meticulously creative population has made major contributions to international culture, particularly during the 18th century when the Saxon courts at Weimar and Dresden attracted some of the greatest minds of Europe. With such rich traditions to fall back on, inspiration has seldom been in short supply for the new generations of German artists, despite the upheavals of the country’s recent history. Literature The undisputed colossus of the German arts was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: poet, dramatist, painter, politician, scientist, philosopher, landscape gardener and perhaps the last European to achieve the Renaissance ideal of excellence in many fields. His greatest work, the drama Faust, is the definitive version of the legend, showing the archetypal human search for meaning and knowledge.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In 2010, he was interviewed by a journalist named Joshua Foer. Under Ed’s Yoda-like tutelage, in 2011, Joshua became the very next American Memory Champion. It took less than a year for Ed to transform a novice into world-class. The result was Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein. On the Magic of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe “Goethe is really cool. . . . At the age of 25, he writes a novel, which is extraordinarily brilliant [The Sorrows of Young Werther], about the troubles of young Goethe. It’s this wonderful story of a young man who falls in love, and it doesn’t really work out so well. . . . Goethe wrote this book by locking himself in a hotel room for 3 months, imagining his five best friends on different chairs, and then discussing with his imaginary friends different possibilities of plot and so on and so forth.

Anthony), Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Jon Krakauer) Cho, Margaret: How to Be a Movie Star (William J. Mann) Cooke, Ed: The Age of Wonder (Richard Holmes), Touching the Rock (John M. Hull), In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays (Bertrand Russell), The Sorrows of Young Werther; Theory of Colours; Maxims and Reflections (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), The Joyous Cosmology (Alan Watts) Cummings, Whitney: Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart), The Drama of the Gifted Child (Alice Miller), The Fantasy Bond (Robert W. Firestone), The Continuum Concept (Jean Liedloff) D’Agostino, Dominic: Personal Power (Tony Robbins), Tripping Over the Truth (Travis Christofferson), The Language of God (Francis Collins), The Screwtape Letters (C.S.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

CHAPTER TWELVE CAPITALISM, WARTS AND ALL Has there ever been a time when people really felt at ease with capitalism? That question was put to me by Richard Lambert, former director-general of the Confederation of British Industry and before that editor of the Financial Times, when I explained to him the theme of this book. An interesting light is cast on his question by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his great two-part drama Faust, written at the start of the nineteenth century when the industrial revolution in Europe was in its earliest stages. Faust, Part Two, among many other rich themes, incorporates what amounts to a parable of the costs and benefits of capitalist economic development.


pages: 310 words: 91,151

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

I try to imagine all the other students who are still in the early years of being helped by Room to Read. If Vu could make this much progress in eight years, what might become of the nearly 1 million other students now attending our schools and eagerly devouring books in our libraries? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “If all the musicians in the world played this piece simultaneously, the planet would go off its axis.” That’s how I feel about education for the children of the developing world. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED THAT AN ENTREPRENEUR WILL ONLY SUCCEED IF he surrounds himself with talented and passionate people.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

The Indo-European root of the English word leadership, leith, means “to go forth,” “to cross a threshold,” or “to die.”55 Letting go often feels like dying. This deep process of leadership, of letting go and letting the new and unknown come, of dying and being reborn, probably has not changed much over the course of human history. The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe knew it well when he wrote, “And if you don’t know this dying and birth, you are merely a dreary guest on Earth.”56 But what has changed is the structure of the collective social body in which this process is enacted. As indicated in table 3, that social body has changed from a single-pyramid-type structure in which leadership is centralized and hierarchical (1.0), to a more decentralized multipyramid structure in which leadership happens through delegation and competition (2.0), and from there to a more participatory, relational, and networked structure in which multiple stakeholder and interest groups negotiate and engage in dialogue with one another (3.0).


pages: 286 words: 90,530

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In the biological realm, and everybody back then was quite explicit that analogy was being drawn with culture, progress meant that among organisms there is an order from simple to complex, from the least to the most, from (as was often said) the monad to the man. (Some put plants at the bottom, some put plants on a different scale.) Organic evolution came into being on the back of biological progress. The early evolutionists, Denis Diderot7 and then Jean Baptiste de Lamarck8 in France, Erasmus Darwin (1794-1796) in England, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany,9 were all ardent progressionists in culture and biology, and saw their evolutionism as part and parcel of this general picture. The story of evolution and progress continued through the nineteenth century from beginning to end. The notorious pre-(Charles) Darwinian work, The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,10 published anonymously but later revealed to be the work of the Scottish publisher and author Robert Chambers, was explicit in its progressionism.


pages: 293 words: 90,714

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

In some cities, the politicians get it, but their ideas die on the doorstep of the engineering department. In others, the professionals get it, but they lack politicians with the chutzpah to make it happen. For every visionary, there is a whole pile of lazy. CHAPTER 8 THE ARROGANCE OF SPACE None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe that they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. Jean-Paul Sartre Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, Japan. The world’s busiest pedestrian crossing. When we describe cities, we have a tendency to give them human character traits. It’s a friendly city. A dynamic city. A boring city. Perhaps, then, a city can be arrogant.


pages: 322 words: 92,769

The Alps: A Human History From Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond by Stephen O'Shea

car-free, clockwork universe, Edward Snowden, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Large Hadron Collider, plutocrats, Snapchat, trade route

“[T]hese distorted mindless beings,” wrote an English traveler in the Alps, “commonly excite one’s disgust by their hideous, loathsome, and uncouth appearance, by their obscene gestures, and by their senseless gabbling.” As for mountainous scenery, the tradition of excoriation is just as withering. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s appraisal of the Alps in the 1780s can stand in for dozens of similar denunciations. For Goethe, “These zig-zags and irritating silhouettes and shapeless piles of granite, making the fairest portion of the earth a polar region, cannot be liked by any kindly man.” As with so many present-day Germans careering southward at the wheel of a Mercedes, the great man wanted nothing more than to get the mountains behind him and luxuriate in the embrace of Italy.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900, CUP, 1986 Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, Romanticism and the Sciences, CUP, 1990 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, A Philosophical Poem with Notes, 1791 Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats, OUP, 1991 Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London, Chicago UP, 1989 Patricia Fara, Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Age of Enlightenment, Pimlico, 2004 Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (a novel), HarperCollins, 1995 Tim Fulford (editor), Romanticism and Science, 1773-1833, a 5-vol anthology, Pickering, 2002 Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson (editors), Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, CUP, 1998 Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era, CUP, 2004 John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment, CUP, 1994 James Gleick, Isaac Newton, Pantheon Books, 2003 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies (edited by Douglas Miller), Suhrkamp edition of Goethe’s Works, vol 12, New York, 1988 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain 1760-1820, CUP, 1992 Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, Picador, 2001 Peter Harman and Simon Mitron, Cambridge Scientific Minds, CUP, 2002 John Herschel, On the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1832 J.E.

., p21 11 Ibid. 12 Introduction to Humphry Davy on Geology: The 1805 Lectures, pxxix, British Library catalogue X421/22592 13 HD Archive Box 13 (f) pp41-50, Mss notebook dated 1795-97 14 HD Archive Box 13 (f) p61 15 The whole poem, no fewer than thirty-two stanzas, is given in JD Memoirs, pp23-7 16 HD Works 2, p6 17 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain 1760-1820, CUP, 1992, pp133-42 18 Ibid., p109 19 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Maxims and Reflections’, from Goethe, Scientific Studies, edited by Douglas Miller, Suhrkamp edition of Goethe’s Works, vol 12, New York, 1988, p308 20 Reprinted in HD Works 9 21 See Madison Smartt Bell, Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in the Age of Revolution, Atlas Books, Norton, 2005.


pages: 1,014 words: 237,531

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

If post-Roman polycentrism was the norm, the very existence of the Roman empire was anomalous; otherwise it would have been the other way around.23 In the end, outcomes appear to have been overdetermined: just as the “First Great Divergence” can be traced to multiple factors, so scholars have linked the “(Second) Great Divergence” to a variety of features that have only one thing in common, namely, that they are predicated upon productive competitive polycentrism—or, in other words, the fact that in Europe, Roman power had remained unique. In this respect, the story of modernity is also a story about Rome: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was right to exclaim in 1786 that “an diesen Ort knüpft sich die ganze Geschichte der Welt an”—“the whole history of the world attaches itself to this spot.” It does indeed, if only thanks to what Edward Gibbon two years later famously called the “the decline and fall of the Roman empire; the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene, in the history of mankind.”

As Wickham rightly observes regarding the survival of states (and not just large empires, but state structures as such), “It is survival that is the norm, failure that is the deviation” (1994: 74), and that this poses a challenge to scholars of post-Roman Western Europe. I hope to have reduced this challenge. 24. Quotes: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Italienische Reise (ch. 24, December 3, 1786, on the city of Rome); Gibbon 1788b: 645. 25. Paired by Campbell 2004: 167. The inscription appears as no. 138 in Sartre 1993, and Virgil’s quote is from the Aeneid 1.279. 26. “Getting to Denmark” is a metaphor for establishing political and economic institutions that are highly conducive to human welfare, a concept that goes back to Pritchett and Woolcock (2002: 4) and that has since been popularized especially by Fukuyama 2011: 14.


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

It should be noted that what is presented herein deals essentially with violations of civil liberties and human rights, and does not include the numerous forms of corporate abuse which are economic in nature or which adversely affect people's health. Many of the violations reflect foreign policy considerations given a domestic twist to bring the "threat" home to US citizens and win support for those policies. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • In every state, the police or the National Guard and, at times, active-duty army troops, are conducting relentless helicopter drug-surveillance over people's homes and property, setting up roadblocks, interrogating, detaining, harassing and terrifying residents with displays of excessive power. • In hundreds of American cities, young people are being subjected to a nighttime curfew law; many have a daytime curfew as well • The CIA, FBI and other federal agencies are refusing to respond to subpoenas for documents issued by attorneys who need them for the defense of their clients in national security cases in state courts. • US residents are undergoing assorted harassments and penalties from the federal government for having traveled to, spent money in and/or shipped various goods to Cuba, Libya, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Yugoslavia or other nations of that ilk.


pages: 313 words: 100,317

Berlin Now: The City After the Wall by Peter Schneider, Sophie Schlondorff

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, young professional

WEST BERLIN political leaders from dueling fraternities: Members of dueling fraternities traditionally engaged in fencing duels with rival fraternities. A “WESSI” ATTEMPTS TO FIND BERLIN’S SOUL the Gendarmenmarkt, which Karl Friedrich Schinkel enlivened: More than any other architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a multitalented contemporary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, shaped the neoclassic center of Berlin in the first half of the nineteenth century. BERLIN: EMERGENCE OF A NEW METROPOLIS “Four times as much space would hardly be”: James Hobrecht quoted in Ulrich Zawatka-Gerlach, “Magistralen und Mietskasernen,” Der Tagesspiegel, August 2, 2012.


pages: 361 words: 97,787

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

The long legacy and storied history of paper money in our psyche and culture is a formidable artifice in itself, not to be taken lightly. For Westerners, the history begins with Marco Polo’s insightful account of paper currency in China, a revelation that stunned Europeans as some form of alchemy. This suspicion is echoed in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, when the demon Mephistopheles tempts the emperor, who is in severe financial distress, to introduce paper money to increase spending and pay off state debt. The device works in the short run but ultimately leads to inflation and ruin. Goethe, writing early in the nineteenth century, was nothing if not prescient.


pages: 325 words: 97,162

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

And continued to weep. Chapter 5 A Bizarre Adventure into Morning Mastery “Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. . . . The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “If you two are interested,” said the homeless man, “I’d be happy to spend a few mornings coaching you at my oceanside compound. I’ll show you my private morning routine and explain why dialing in the way you run your first hour to the highest degree is essential for personal mastery and exceptional business performance.


pages: 479 words: 102,876

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich by Daniel Ammann

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business intelligence, buy low sell high, energy security, family office, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, peak oil, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

Gray added, “It is worth noting that these are not the traits most praised by conservative moralists.”2 “Yes,” a senior Marc Rich + Co. director with vast experience all over the world once confessed to me, “sometimes we had to make a Faustian bargain to clinch the deal.” The words resonated in my head for quite some time. A Faustian bargain. Nowadays this phrase is usually used to describe self-serving actions and moral sacrifices—a pact with the devil in order to gain power, wealth, or influence—but in Faust: A Tragedy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s greatest work, the scholar Heinrich Faust is not simply a ruthless egoist. He represents men who strive for achievement and who want to test their own limitations. Faust stands for the scientist who breaks conventions in order to discover “what holds the world together in its innermost.”


pages: 535 words: 103,761

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

His sensitivity to the predicament faced by alienated youth provided insights on which future writers would draw to develop the concept of adolescence and identity crisis. Other authors, too, were driven towards the depiction of characters at the threshold of adulthood. The association of emotional upheaval and preoccupation with the self and young adulthood acquired widespread public recognition in the aftermath of the publication of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. Werther became the media sensation of the 18th century. It touched a raw nerve and led to widespread disquiet on both sides of the Atlantic. This was a story of unrequited love that led to the act of suicide by the main character of the novel. Goethe’s sympathetic depiction of Werther and of his demise drew attention to the turbulent emotional upheavals experienced by young people attempting to endow their life with meaning.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The hunter hands over the kill to the cook, and the data scientist cooks up her model, translates it to a standard computer language, and e-mails it to an engineer for integration. A well-fed tribe shows the love; a psyched executive issues a bonus. The tribe munches and the scientist crunches. To Act Is to Decide Knowing is not enough; we must act. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Potatoes or rice? What to do with my life? I can’t decide. —From the song “I Suck at Deciding” by Muffin1 (1996) Once you develop a model, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. Predictions don’t help unless you do something about them. They’re just thoughts, just ideas. They may be astute, brilliant gems that glimmer like the most polished of crystal balls, but hanging them on the wall gains you nothing and displays nerd narcissism—they just hang there and look smart.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Now, if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust? —Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Miller’s Crossing Mathematicians are like a certain type of Frenchmen: when you talk to them they translate it into their own language, and then it soon turns into something completely different. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe CONTENTS Prologue: The Wire Service PART ONE: ENTROPY Claude Shannon • Project X • Emmanuel Kimmel • Edward Thorp • Toy Room • Roulette • Gambler’s Ruin • Randomness, Disorder, Uncertainty • The Bandwagon • John Kelly, Jr. • Private Wire • Minus Sign PART TWO: BLACKJACK Pearl Necklace • Reno • Wheel of Fortune • More Trouble Than an $18 Whore • The Kelly Criterion, Under the Hood • Las Vegas • The First Sure Winner in History • Deuce-Dealing Dottie • Bicycle Built for Two PART THREE: ARBITRAGE Paul Samuelson • The Random Walk Cosa Nostra • This Is Not the Time to Buy Stocks • IPO • Bet Your Beliefs • Beat the Market • James Regan • Resorts International • Michael Milken • Robert C.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

But please don’t be a man (or a woman) with a hammer – still less someone unaware that there are other tools available. To extend the analogy, use a Swiss army knife instead, with different tools for different tasks. ‘Everything factual is already a theory’: facts, even numbers, are in the end not objective Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German writer (Faust) and scientist (Theory of Colours), once said that ‘everything factual is already a theory’.1 This is something to bear in mind when looking at economic ‘facts’. Many people would assume that numbers are straightforward and objective, but each of them is constructed on the basis of a theory.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Any paper that can simultaneously manage to entertain and engage millions of readers while also addressing the great issues of the day can, as he argued, play an important role in democracy. BREVITY ‘I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.’ This remark is variously attributed to Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Blaise Pascal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Winston Churchill, Pliny the Younger, Cato, Cicero, Bill Clinton, Benjamin Franklin and . . . but I am already going on a bit. Whoever said it, they were acknowledging that it is quite often harder to write something concise and well-structured than it is to ramble on at length. But how long is right?


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

When he connected both with a wire, he suffered abdominal pain and reported that ‘by inserting the silver more deeply into the rectum a bright light appears before both eyes’.13 Fortunately, Humboldt survived the rigours of self-experimentation and, in 1794, visited his brother, Wilhelm, who was living with his wife, Caroline, in the town of Jena, then the cultural heart of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar and close to the home of that colossus of German culture Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Wilhelm and Caroline were members of Goethe’s circle of friends and so they provided Alexander with an introduction to the great poet. By this time, Goethe was no longer the Adonis-like figure who had won and broken many hearts in his youth. He was fat, middle-aged and sullen. However, the arrival of the young Prussian, bursting with fascination for all things natural, helped to rekindle Goethe’s youthful enthusiasms, particularly for the natural sciences.


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Just so are men equal before God, but they are unequal according to the station which God has placed them. Shakespeare called on them in Julius Caesar, implying that Brutus is so greedy as to steal even worthless counting tokens: When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous to lock such rascal counters from his friends be ready, gods . . . And as late as the nineteenth century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe could write of them in Faust, relying on his audience to know that Rechenpfennige (counting tokens) were inherently valueless: Did you think they’d give you real money and goods? In this game even worthless counters Are far too good for you.81 Shakespeare, Luther, and Goethe were right: counters had no numeric or monetary value, except when placed in their natural habitat of the counting board.


pages: 312 words: 114,586

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty by Harry Browne

do what you love, full employment, independent contractor, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, military-industrial complex, Ralph Waldo Emerson, source of truth, War on Poverty

If that principle seems far removed from the problem that led you to this book, I hope to show you shortly that this is the foundation necessary to free yourself of any restriction. Until you discover and accept yourself fully, you won't have the conviction or the courage to be free. As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. —FRANCIS BACON 3 The Intellectual and Emotional Traps TO BECOME FREE requires a well-conceived plan of action. It can't be achieved by occasional spur-of-the-moment hunches. To be free, you must know what you're doing and why. Otherwise, slight setbacks can cause you to discard your plans and give up.


pages: 378 words: 120,490

Roads to Berlin by Cees Nooteboom, Laura Watkinson

Berlin Wall, centre right, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Potemkin village, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control

A world is coming undone, and on the screens it looks like a celebration, just like that other distant celebration, only a few weeks ago. July 15, 1989 1 As a bird of prey / Rests on heavy morning clouds / With wing so gentle / And seeks its quarry / Let my song hover. “Harzreise im Winter,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 2 From Goethes Harzreisen by Rolf Denecke (Hildesheim: Verlag August Lax, 1980). 3 I neither wish to examine the unrest within me, nor to have it examined. When I am quite alone I recognize myself as I was in my first youth, when I was drifting through the world all on my own. People still seem the same to me, but today I made an observation: as long as I was subject to the stresses and strains of life, as long as there was nobody who understood what was going on inside me (rather, as it happens, people did not respect me at first, indeed they looked at me with suspicion because of some of the strange contradictions within me) I had with all the integrity of my heart a multitude of false and warped pretensions—it is not easy to say, I would have to go into details—I was eaten up by misery, oppressed, mutilated you might say.


Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, disinformation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, liberation theology, Plato's cave, precariat, scientific worldview, side project, traveling salesman, wikimedia commons

Classification: LCC B3181 .E5513 2020 (print) | LCC B3181 (ebook) | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050893 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050894 Cover design: Stephanie Ross Cover images: (clockwise from top) Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, Moritz Nähr / IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo; Ernst Cassirer, Transocean 1931 / ullstein bild / Getty Images; Martin Heidegger, Apic / Getty Images; Walter Benjamin, J. Ll. Banús / age fotostock / Alamy Stock Photo pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0 For Eva The best that we have from history is the enthusiasm that it stimulates. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections CONTENTS I. PROLOGUE: THE MAGICIANS The Arrival of God • High Fliers • Maintaining One’s Composure • The Davos Myth • Human Questions • Without Foundation • Two Visions • At a Crossroads • Where Is Benjamin? • Fail Better • Does My Life Need a Goal?


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), pp. 5, 7–8, 13, 23, 27, 43, and 96. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16 Brodsky, Watermark, pp. 62 and 70. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17 Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed (New York: Penguin Books, [1956] 1972), pp. 177, 180–81, and 275. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey [1786–1788], trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Penguin Books, [1816] 1962 and 1970), p. 77. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 McCarthy, Venice Observed, pp. 190-93. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas (New York: Random House, [2011] 2012), pp. xxvi–xxviii and 5.


The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World by Robert Morrison

British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, financial independence, full employment, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, railway mania, stem cell, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, wage slave

In America, the literary critic and novelist John Neal lauded Childe Harold as “full of deep philosophizing sadness.” In Canada, the essayist James Irving found in Byron’s poetry “a populous world of the human heart,” for “there would be many Giaours, and Corsairs, and Laras, were the opportunity given.” In Germany, the septuagenarian poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe praised Don Juan (1819–24) as “a work of boundless genius.” 76 Female interest in Byron was even more intense. Teenage girls and young women besieged him with fan letters asking for his autograph, a signed copy of one of his books, a lock of his hair, or a place in his thoughts. His most hysterical fan, Lady Caroline Lamb, famously described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” a phrase that enshrined his “bad boy” image and that succinctly captured his rakish appeal.


pages: 436 words: 141,321

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

I feel inspired to focus and accomplish more than I ever have. I feel empowered to make decisions, and invited to get support around doing so. I feel totally lit up by the aim I am serving.134 Chapter 3.2 STARTING UP A TEAL ORGANIZATION Whatever you do or dream you can do—begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Perhaps as you read this book you are about to start a new business, nonprofit, school, hospital, or foundation, and you are wondering how to bake Teal yeast into the dough of the organization from the start. (If you run an existing organization and are wondering how to transform it along Teal lines, the next chapter addresses that question more specifically.)


pages: 444 words: 139,784

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, Charles van Doren

Albert Einstein, George Santayana, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, land tenure, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

John Jay (1745-1829), James Madison (1751-1836), and Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) * Federalist Papers (together with the *Articles of Confederation, the * Constitution of the United States, and the * Declaration of Independence) 85. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) * Faust Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) * Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) Phenomenology of Spirit * Philosophy of Right * Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Poems (esp.


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

And while this barometer works well with liquid mercury, if you use liquid water—a more easily available but much less dense substance—you’ll need a tube that’s around 10.4m high for it to work: any shorter and all the water will run out of the tube before the outside water holds it in place.* A more clever approach for using water to measure air pressure is the following design, called a “Goethe barometer.” It was invented by a human named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early 1800s CE, but is now going to be invented by a human named your name in whatever time period you’re in: Figure 29: Behold, your latest invention: a good barometer. This is just a glass container with a spout, open to the air, that reaches up and above the container itself.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

We learned, in myriad ways, that there was something sacrilegious about even speaking of the Nazi Holocaust in the same breath as any other crime, that to do so made it less horrific, less shocking, somehow ordinary. But what if ordinary is horrific? What if that’s the point: that Nazism is not an aberration from an otherwise uplifting story of enlightenment and modernity, but its not-so-distant double, its other face? Referencing Germany’s great scribe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lindqvist writes, “The idea of extermination lies no farther from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar. That insight has been almost completely repressed, even by the Germans, who have been made sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination that are actually a common European heritage.”


I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

We pause by the Nationaltheater, where the Weimar National Assembly hosted the German Parliament briefly after the First World War, from February to August 1919, after the January 1919 election – the first time women had been able to vote in Germany, and also the first election carried out under a system of proportional representation. This was also the place where the Weimar Constitution fully established Germany as a parliamentary democracy. In front of the theatre there’s the famous double statue of friendship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Friedrich von Schiller, the two spiritual giants of this place. A young guy with a ponytail, a music student, is playing classical requests on a piano in the main square. How is it really possible to grasp the meaning of Weimar in German culture? It’s best known as the home of those twin pillars of German thought, Goethe and Schiller, the place where Goethe lived for most of his life – arriving in 1775 at the age of twenty-six, and staying here until his death nearly sixty years later in 1832.

But, in the absence of this possibility, I have tried to bring them together in the pages of this chapter. 1 Weimar was also the place where Bach began writing his sonatas and partitas for solo violin, including the astonishing Partita No. 2 in D minor, which Brahms said contained ‘a whole world of the deepest thoughts’ and Yehudi Menuhin believed was simply ‘the greatest structure for solo violin that exists’. 2 ‘In living nature nothing happens that is not in connection with the whole …’ ‘Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt’ (‘The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject’) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 3 The ‘mortality among them was extraordinarily high’ quote about the Dora works is from Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer. 4 Levi’s comment on wanting the sequel to The Drowned and the Saved to be an investigation into ‘the German industries (BASF, Siemens, Bayer) involved in the Nazi camps’ is from Ian Thomson’s biography Primo Levi (‘In London 1986’).


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

The aim of the rest of this book, then, is to get closer to error: close enough to examine other people’s real-life experiences of it, and, in the end, close enough to live with our own. 10. How Wrong? Once you have missed the first buttonhole you’ll never manage to button up. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE On the morning of October 22, 1844, a group of people gathered to await the end of the world. They met in homes, in churches, and in outdoor revival meetings, primarily in New York and New England but also throughout the United States and Canada, and as far away as England, Australia, and South America.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

Anjali Singhvi and Karl Russell, “Inside the Self-Driving Tesla Fatal Accident,” New York Times, July 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/01/business/inside-tesla-accident.html. “A Tragic Loss,” June 30, 2016, https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss. 148 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Sorcerer’s Apprentice—Fantasia, accessed June 7, 2017, http://video.disney.com/watch/sorcerer-s-apprentice-fantasia-4ea9ebc01a74ea59a5867853. 148 German poem written in 1797: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” accessed June 7, 2017, http://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_e4.html. 149 “When you delegate authority to a machine”: Bob Work, interview, June 22, 2016. 150 “Traditional methods . . . fail to address”: U.S. Air Force Office of the Chief Scientist, Autonomous Horizons: System Autonomy in the Air Force—A Path to the Future (June 2015), 23, http://www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/SECAF/AutonomousHorizons.pdf?


pages: 466 words: 146,982

Venice: A New History by Thomas F. Madden

big-box store, buy low sell high, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, Costa Concordia, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, financial innovation, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass, spice trade, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

It was, he believed, “the finest ship in the world. . . . The floor is wood laid in handsom figures, every thing else you see in side and out is finely carv’d and gilt all over in the most beautifull manner . . . at the helm is the Doges gilt throne the Nobles being rangd all down.” The German polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attended the Sensa in 1786, and wrote of the bucintoro: “The ship is itself an ornament; therefore one may not say that it is overloaded with ornaments, and only a mass of gilded carvings that are otherwise useless. In reality it is a monstrance, in order to show the people that their leaders are indeed wonderful.”


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

The authors wish to thank the developers and contributors of: Python and Perl Scipy, Numpy, Matplotlib, and Scikit-Learn Weka The Machine Learning Repository at the University of California at Irvine (Bache & Lichman, 2013) Finally, we encourage readers to check our website for updates to this material, new chapters, errata, addenda, and accompanying slide sets. * * * [1] Of course, each author has the distinct impression that he did the majority of the work on the book. Chapter 1. Introduction: Data-Analytic Thinking Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The past fifteen years have seen extensive investments in business infrastructure, which have improved the ability to collect data throughout the enterprise. Virtually every aspect of business is now open to data collection and often even instrumented for data collection: operations, manufacturing, supply-chain management, customer behavior, marketing campaign performance, workflow procedures, and so on.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Used daily by the great majority of Americans—perhaps 80 percent—it is “by any measure, the world’s most popular drug . . . the only addictive psychoactive substance that has overcome resistance and disapproval around the world to the extent that it is freely available almost everywhere, unregulated, sold without license, offered over the counter in tablet and capsule form, and even added to beverages intended for children.”11 Yet two centuries ago, at the moment of its discovery, caffeine was anything but mundane. Instead it was a window on nature’s sublime intricacy. Toward the end of his life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the most celebrated intellect in Napoleon’s Europe, could see in his mind the invisible connections that bound the world together. He rejected Descartes’s separation of the mind and the body. He rejected Newton’s idea that the universe could be chopped into free-standing parts, each of which could be analyzed in isolation from the others.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Mass tourism is a part of modern discretionary spending on experiences rather than on purchases of additional goods, a special category of consumerism that ranges from attending professional sports matches and contests to the so-called ecotourist expeditions, and it does so with a steadily widening orbit. Leisure travel has a long but largely elitist history and some of its description from the 18th and 19th centuries—including Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766) or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italienische Reise (1816–1817)—remain among the classics of Western literature. For a long time, this kind of travel also had strong cultural and historical components. This was particularly true about the Grand Tour, the early modern custom among young rich English men and women (suitably chaperoned) to visit sites in France and Italy (Chaney 1998).


pages: 450 words: 144,939

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

I did not completely recover my sense of humor while in Florida, as I had hoped I might, but I could see that, even with all the tragedy and evil around us, there was still going to be humor in the world, and Tommy and I would both be part of it. Chapter 10 Writing Trump Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE We returned to Maryland in time for two birthdays: Tommy’s, on January 30, when he would have turned twenty-six, and Tabitha’s, on January 31, when she turned twenty-four. Sarah and Hannah would be back home, too. Our close friend Judy Minor came to spend the weekend also, and we had decided to be all together at home and to read letters, but there was also a charitable outing on the morning of January 30.


pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

@ReaderE, “This is the first evidence…,” May 14, 2016, comment on “The DAO Creation Period Price Schedule: There is 24 more hours until the price *actually* rises,” Reddit, May 14, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDao/comments/4jap6d/the_dao_creation_period_price_schedule_there_is. 29. Gavin Wood, “Why I’ve Resigned as a Curator of the DAO,” Medium, May 13, 2016, https://gavofyork.medium.com/why-ive-resigned-as-a-curator-of-the-dao-238528fbd447. 30. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” trans. Katrin Gygax, accessed March 28, 2021, http://www.gygatext.ch/english_translations_zurich_sorcerers_apprentice.html. 31. 11,727,772.78, to be exact. 32. Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss, “Virtual company may raise $200 million, largest in crowdfunding,” Reuters, May 17, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-crowdfunding-idUKKCN0Y82LI?


pages: 483 words: 145,225

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody

barriers to entry, business logic, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, ghettoisation, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, hypertext link, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, thinkpad, VA Linux

For example, generous funding from aristocratic patrons enabled Ludwig van Beethoven to devote himself to writing works of such originality that they were often incomprehensible to his contemporaries, and also to promote the then-radical ideals of liberty he believed in. In the same way, Richard Stallman has been able to devote himself to his coding and campaigning thanks in part to patronage such as the McArthur Foundation fellowship. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a minister of state at the German court of Weimar, and took his duties there as seriously as his work on such projects as his masterpiece Faust, a vast patchwork of poetry that occupied him for fifty years. Alongside these major responsibilities, Goethe managed to juggle a family life (unlike Beethoven), rather as Linus somehow does (unlike Stallman) while holding down a full-time job at Transmeta and pushing forward his own life work that grows through constant accretion.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

This speeding up of socioeconomic time is integral to modern life in the Urbanocene. Nevertheless, like many of us, I harbor a romantic image that not so long ago life was less hectic, less pressured, and more relaxed and that there was actually time to think and contemplate. But read what the great German poet, writer, scientist, and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said on the subject almost two hundred years ago in 1825, soon after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution1: Everything nowadays is ultra, everything is being transcended continually in thought as well as in action. No one knows himself any longer; no one can grasp the element in which he lives and works or the materials that he handles.


Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country by Simon Winder

British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Gorbachev, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia

Freed, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth (New Haven, 2016) Johannes Fried, Charlemagne (Cambridge, MA, 2016) Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London, 2016) Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799–1914 (London, 2008) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Campaign in France and Siege of Mainz, trans. Ricardo Cunha Mattos Portella (Amazon, 2012) Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, 2000) Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (London, 2010) Marjolein ’t Hart, The Dutch Wars of Independence (Abingdon, 2014) Holger H.


pages: 638 words: 156,653

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Also part of the new generation are Thomas Ostermeier and Jens Hillje, codirectors of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. Dramatic History Surprisingly, Berlin’s theatre scene had rather modest beginnings. The first quality productions weren’t staged until the arrival of such stellar dramatists as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the middle of the 18th century. One of the first impresarios was August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814), who took over the helm of the Royal National Theatre in 1796 and was noted for his natural yet sophisticated productions. Iffland’s act proved hard to follow: when he died in 1814, Berlin theatre languished until Otto Brahm became director of the Deutsches Theater in 1894.


pages: 618 words: 159,672

Fodor's Rome: With the Best City Walks and Scenic Day Trips by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

call centre, Donald Trump, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, low cost airline, Mason jar, mega-rich, messenger bag, Murano, Venice glass, retail therapy, starchitect, urban planning, young professional

You may prefer to limit your shopping on Via Condotti to the window variety, but there’s one thing here that everybody can afford—a stand-up coffee at the bar at the Antico Caffè Greco, set just off the Piazza di Spagna and the Fontana della Barcaccia. With its tiny marble-top tables and velour settees, this 200-year-old institution has long been the haunt of artists and literati; it’s closed Sunday. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Byron, and Franz Liszt were habitués. Buffalo Bill stopped in when his road show hit Rome. The caffè is still a haven for writers and artists, along with plenty of Gucci-clad ladies. The tab picks up considerably if you decide to sit down to enjoy table service. | Via Condotti 86, Spagna | 00187 | 06/6791700 | www.anticocaffegreco.eu.


pages: 559 words: 164,795

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, dark matter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, German hyperinflation, haute couture, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, uranium enrichment

By combining this with horrifying (and frequently accurate) scare stories of the Red Army’s rampages through the smaller towns and villages of the east, Goebbels had summoned a vision of Armageddon, a lurid sunset on a civilized world and a world to follow that was a prospect too terrible to endure. In this way, suicide was made to seem natural, washed free of the stigma of mental instability. It was also, in a terrible way, an echo – possibly deliberate – of a German Romantic leitmotif of suicide and self-sacrifice. In the late eighteenth century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther – the tragedy of a tortured young man, helplessly in love with a married woman, who finally decides that his suffering can be ended only by taking his own life – was said to have inspired a large number of its readers to follow the same course. Whereas the Church taught the inherent and grave sinfulness of self-destruction, Goethe depicted it as the heart-rending result of acute sensitivity and sensibility; exquisite passions tormented beyond reason.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Georg Simmel, a German sociologist and contemporary of Freud, argued that money imitated the world around it: “There is no more striking symbol...of the world than that of money.”29 Money is the ultimate Faustian bargain—a pact with the devil in return for earthly power, wealth, or knowledge. In the second part of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has Faust and Mephistopheles visit the Emperor who lacks the money to pay his retinue of soldiers and servants as well as his lenders. Mephistopheles comes to the aid of the Emperor, obtaining his permission to print paper money. Faust has the Emperor sign a note that anticipates modern money: “To whom it may concern, be by these presents known, this note is legal tender for one thousand crowns and is secured by the immense wealth safely stored underground in our Imperial States.”


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

Sometimes, whether in the world of fire-making or cooking, finding the path of least resistance is as easy as Googling “backward,” “upside-down,” or “reverse,” plus whatever skill you’re deconstructing. TRANSLATING: THE GRAMMAR OF ANY LANGUAGE (If the language stuff gets too dense, skip to “Learning to ‘Taste.’”) * * * “Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.” “He who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe * * * Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, born 1774, was called “the Devil” on many occasions. The charming Italian could speak at least 39 languages and, by some accounts, had been tested in 72. As arguably the world’s most famous hyperpolyglot, he was also systematic. First, he learned languages in families.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Lewis “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case you fail by default.”—J. K. Rowling What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? “If I accept you as you are, I make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming I help you become that.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe In my practice, when I see clients for the first time, I see them as the end product—the way they will be in the future. They are all beautiful. What stands between who they are and who they want to be is their willingness to change strong habits, belief systems, and the gracefulness to embrace a new way of living.


The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

With hired guides called ciceroni – and Winckelmann himself was sometimes available, to the right sort of party – the tourists raced dutiful circuits of Rome’s various collections, together holding some 10,000 surviving specimens of antique art. The hopeless agitation of new arrivals in the galleries reminded Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, at Rome in 1787, of wasps batting themselves against a window to bounce off and go buzzing stupidly off along the walls of the endless rooms. Exposure to all this art was meant to be an education in taste. Goethe, already a literary celebrity when he arrived in Rome, was humbled by the experience: ‘No one who has not been here can have any conception of what an education Rome is,’ he wrote.


pages: 934 words: 232,651

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

Parades, floats, spectacles, and speeches were also dedicated to older or more universal cultural figures, with an aim to winning over a wider public and appealing to national pride. When the German communist party realized that August 28, 1949, was not only the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of Germany’s most revered writers, but that Goethe had fortuitously been born in Weimar, an East German city, the party, the Culture Ministry, and even the Stasi launched an almost frantic effort to claim this aristocratic Enlightenment figure as a kind of proto-communist. Meticulously, they planned an elaborate festival designed to show the West that communists cared more about high culture than did capitalists, to show their own people that communists were true German patriots, and to involve as many different kinds of people in as many events as possible.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin (1984, p. 283) claim that memes presuppose a "Cartesian" view of the mind, whereas in fact memes are a key (central but optional) ingredient in the best alternatives to Cartesian models (Dennett 1991a). CHAPTER THIRTEEN Losing Our Minds to Darwin 1. This bon mot appeared in the Tufts Daily, attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but I daresay it is a meme of more recent birth. 2. This is an elaboration of ideas I first presented in Dennett 1975.1 recently discovered that Konrad Lorenz (1973) described a similar cascade of cranes — in different terms, of course. 3. In fairness to Chomsky, all he says is that free will might be a mystery.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

[TWO] SMART BOMBS, NORMA JEANE, AND DEFECATING DUCKS: A SHORT HISTORY OF ROBOTICS The further backward you look, the further forward you can see. —SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL “Perhaps the most wonderful piece of mechanism ever made” is how the famous Scottish engineer Sir David Brewster would describe it some one hundred years after it was invented. By contrast, the great poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called it “most deplorable ... like a skeleton [with] digestive problems.” The two men were talking about Vaucanson’s duck, the mechanical wonder of its age, or, as present-day scientists call it, “the Defecating Duck.” Jacques de Vaucanson was born in Grenoble, France, in 1709. At the age of twenty-six, he moved to Paris, then the center of culture and science during the Age of Enlightenment.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Ian Kershaw, Manchester, November 2017 Foreword: Europe’s Two Eras of Insecurity It is the same with history as with nature, as with all profound problems, whether past, present or future: the more deeply and seriously one enters into problems, the more difficult are those that arise. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe In 1950 Europe was reawakening from the dark years of the worst war in history. The physical scars were to be seen throughout the continent in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. The mental and moral scars would take far longer to heal than the time to rebuild towns and cities. The inhumanity of the recent past would, in fact, cast a deep shadow over Europe throughout subsequent decades.


pages: 394 words: 110,352

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

The chapter provides a good grounding for getting started, but always be open to your own context and how you meet the needs of that context. You will find your own approaches and techniques that will build on and in some cases replace the approaches here. This chapter is a start, not an end to this process. Chapter 10. Governance “Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Mike Basinger is a nice guy. Some would say a little too nice for his own good: he is one of those people who are impossible to dislike, no matter how much you try. Quiet, conscientious, considerate, and understated, Mike is the epitome of the open source community. Few would imagine that he helps to govern the worldwide Ubuntu community at the highest level.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

To an audience in Stuttgart, she said that the risks of fiscal spending were best understood by the Swabian housewives from that region. Those frugal housewives, Merkel said, “would give us some short and good advice, which would be this: ‘You cannot live beyond your means in the long run.’ ”35 Merkel’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, repeated that theme. Quoting German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schäuble said, “Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.”36 Schäuble believed that countries like Greece, with their undisciplined public finances, did not belong in the euro area. Since 1994, he had promoted his strongly held view that European integration should move forward with only a “hard core” of grown-​up countries while the laggards shaped up.37 In his original conception, even Italy did not fit into Europe’s hard core.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 15. Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote at F8 2017 Conference (Full Transcript),” April 19, 2017, https://singjupost.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-keynote-at-f8-2017-conference-full-transcript. 16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” German Stories at Virginia Commonwealth University, 1797, http://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_e4.html. 17. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 20. 18. Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 23 (italics mine). 19.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

The French writer Alexandre Dumas declared he had experienced a ‘coup de foudre’ on reading Ivanhoe (1820) and settled down to write a series of historical romances including The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–5) and Robin Hood (1863). The Hungarian Jósika Miklós (1794–1865) even included direct quotations from Scott in his Abafi (1854), set in Transylvania, the first historical novel in the Magyar language. Pushkin called Scott ‘the Scottish sorcerer’. Germany’s most famous writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who championed the principles of Classicism while exercising a substantial influence on the Romantics through his most celebrated work, the poetic drama Faust (1808, part I, and 1832, part II), said of Scott: ‘I discover in him a wholly new art with laws of its own.’ Victor Hugo took Scott’s technique of elaborate descriptions of landscape and pageantry as an inspiration for his massive novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831).


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

The French, distracted by enthusiasm for systems and universal principles, had failed to notice the unique beauty and importance of a people’s tongue; in contrast to the idea of French philosophes that languages were interchangeable, each one being an endless variety of the same thing, German thinkers held that every language gave expression to a people’s soul, placing it in direct relation to God. In the early nineteenth century, a cult of German language and culture grew in the Thuringian city of Weimar that was associated with the poets who made their home there, above all Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But the cult’s prophet was their friend Johann Gottfried Herder, a Protestant pastor, universal historian, and thinker about nationhood whose ideas became so popular among Germans that Goethe later said people forgot the origins of these ideas, assuming they constituted eternal wisdom.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

There is not a Pole who cannot recite ‘Oh, Litwo, my homeland, you are like health …’; not a German who has not been bewitched by ‘the land where the lemon-trees bloom’; no Russian schoolchild who has not been taught the lines of ‘The Bronze Horseman’ from St Petersburg: (Here we are destined by nature | To cut a window into Europe; | And to gain a foothold by the sea … I love you, Peter’s creation, | I love your severe, graceful appearance, | The Neva’s majestic current, | the granite of her banks… | City of Peter, stand in all your splendour, | Stand unshakeable as Russia! | May the conquered elements, too, make their peace.)15 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), however, was not merely a national bard. He was an Olympian who bestrode almost all intellectual domains. The variety of genres in which he excelled, his awareness of a rapidly changing world, and the numerous evolutions through which his creativity passed gave him a claim to be the last ‘universal man’.