Ryanware

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.
– What is Outliers about?

I’ve been waiting for this book, Outliers, to come out for, well, as long as I’ve known about it. I don’t know how long that is, but it’s felt like a long time.

It finally came out today.

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
- On Audible
- On Amazon

I bought it in both audio and paperback. If you like audiobooks at all I highly recommend the audio versions. He reads them himself and does a fantastic job.

Why? Because then you’d have cheesecake! All the time!

If, that is, you had a beech tree.

Not recommended if you don’t like cheesecake, or beech trees (you tree racist!).

Discworld, “a comedic fantasy book series by the British author Terry Pratchett,” are the weirdest books I’ve ever read (listened to, actually). There’s something like 36 books and I’ve listened to two of them thus far. Beyond random and weird, they’re completely hilarious. Maybe it’s just my wacky sense of humor.

Here’s an example from the second book, The Light Fantastic:

It was a still night, tinted with the promise of dawn. A crescent moon was just setting. Ankh-Morpork, largest city in the lands around the Circle Sea, slept.
   That statement is not really true.
   On the one hand, those parts of the city which normally concerned themselves with, for example, selling vegetables, shoeing horses, carving exquisite small jade ornaments, changing money and making tables, on the whole, slept. Unless they had insomnia. Or had to get up to go to the lavatory. On the other hand, many of the less law-abiding citizens were wide awake and, for instance, climbing through windows that didn’t belong to them, slitting throats, mugging one another, listening to loud music in smoky cellars and generally having a lot more fun. But most of the animals were asleep, except for the rats. And the bats, too, of course. As far as the insects were concerned . . .
   The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that “all men spoke of his prowess” any bard who valued his life would add hastily “except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.” Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.
   Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase “only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.”
   So. Approximately sixty-seven, maybe sixty-eight percent of the city slept.

This is how I think, people. Not all the time, of course. Perhaps only sixty-seven percent of my life is spent thinking this way. Maybe.

I love Independence Day. No, not the movie. Today, the 4th of July. I figured today would be a good day to listen to a portion of John Adam’s biography by David McCullough. I didn’t listen to any specific part of it. I listened to the abridged version years ago and for the past few months have been listening to the 30 hour unabridged version, while also trying to listen to podcasts and other audiobooks.

I have no profound thoughts from listening to it today, though I did gain an heightened sense of appreciation for what is enjoyed here in the United States of America. I highly suggest everyone either read or listen* to the John Adam’s biography. I also suggest reading at least the first and last parts of our Declaration of Independence.

* You can get the abridged version for $7.49. And no, I don’t get any affiliate benefits of any kind from anyone buying anything linked in this post.