History

I am reading the most fascinating book at the moment, The Muslim Discovery of Europe. Its amazing how small accidents of history have come to make the world as it is today.  It could all have been so different.

In the course of the struggle for the succession between the Sultan Bayezid II and his brother Jem, the Ottoman troops were withdrawn from Otranto, and the plan to conquer Italy was postponed and eventually abandoned. The ease with which, a few years later in 1494-1495, the French were able to conquer the Italian states one after another, almost without resistance, suggests that had the Turks persisted in their plans they would have conquered most or all of Italy without undue difficulty.  A Turkish conquest of Italy in 1480, when the Renaissance was just beginning, would have transformed the history of the world.

Small Ways to Make a Big Difference

Small Ways to Make a Big Difference is a free e-book compiled by Raam Dev is full of really awesome 'small' things you can do to make the world a better place.

I haven't read it all - but so far this idea, from Ali Dark, is my favourite:

Vote with your money

I want to introduce you to the wall. The wall holds up a raging dam of human potential. It's held together with money – the money the same people spend.  Change how you spend money and the wall collapses, and the world changes.  Drastically. Forever.

If you think that soda is bad for people (which it sure as hell is), never, ever, ever, buy soda. That's a vote in the ballot box. Same goes for meat, alcohol and other plagues on humanity.

Want more organic food? Bite the bullet and buy organic. That's a vote for the organic industry and more power to them.

Every dollar in your pocket is a vote. Don't forget it. Every single one is counted. It's a failsafe system. It's perfect democracy.

You can download the e-book from here.

Which of the tips do you feel most inspired by?

Books I Haven't Read Yet

Image via WikipediaThe writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encylopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Let us call this an antischolar - someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device - a skeptical empiricist.

From: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb