General

Start small

Photo by Christopher Sardegna on Unsplash

To be able to make a progress in anything there is a need to be able to set achievable goals. This is true also for weight loss. Setting grand goals that are hardly achievable can overwhelm you and even stop you from doing anything altogether.

That is why I suggest to set very small goals that you can reach with some effort. For example, instead of setting as a goal to be super muscular body builder, how about first starting to walk on a daily basis? Walking is free, easy to do and you do not need any special equipment for this.

Next, if you want to start with Intermittent Fasting don’t jump right into 48 hours fast, but start small with 12 hours eating window. Then decrease it gradually to 10, 8, 6, 4 hours.

If you want to include resistance training with rubber bands, dumbbells then start small by doing push ups in the morning or evening or both. Or maybe, start with one session a week at home, then two sessions a week etc. Gradual increase in a number of sessions is much easier than committing to a gym membership that costs you a lot of money.

So starting it small can take you quite far. As a teacher in a martial school used to tell us do it
Gradually, sequentially, continuously.

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Do it yourself. Write your own book.

Photo by Eugen Str on Unsplash

Quite frequently, I find myself curious why there aren’t that many books that will be interesting for me to read. Books that will be captivating, informative and inspiring. If you have the same feeling from time to time, then I think I have an answer for you.

Have you ever considered writing such a book yourself? Do you think that it’s even possible? It seems to me that it’s not only possible, but actually doable. In this post I’ll describe a couple of ways it can be done.

First of all, I’ve never written a book. So you may be thinking do I even entitled to give an advice about writing a book. Well, it’s a good question. Even though I haven’t written a book yet, I have this blog from 2013 and since then written a number of posts. So I have some understanding about what amount of effort will be required to work on an actual book.

Before describing how you can write your first book I’d like to emphasize that the type of book I envision is not a fictional book. I think it’s much easier to write a technically oriented book, which will be used by readers as a kind of manual. I have three examples to give you. I was personally involved in two of the examples.

Since writing a technical book is the easiest way of writing your first book, in my opinion, that’s talk about such book types.

Back in 2011 after I graduated I started to work as a software testing engineer at HP Indigo Division company. Working with software developers I realized that I want to write code instead of testing it. To make that transition possible I started to work through programming courses at Pluralsight online learning website. Actually, I took more than two dozens of courses there. C++, C#, JavaScript, Android development there were quite a few good courses at Pluralsight. One of the authors at Pluralsight that stood out to me was John Sonmez. Thanks to his courses I was able to get some very important advices that are still useful to me until this day.

Well, why I write that much about Pluralsight and John? It’s because John Sonmez not only had the most courses at Pluralsight at the time he also had a very popular blog called Simple Programmer. There he wrote a number of blog posts a week about software programming related topics. Lo and behold John’s first book Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual was a compilation of the blog posts he wrote for Simple Programmer. Do you see where I am heading here? That’s right. Having a blog where you write your thoughts in a form of a post can be a springboard to your own first book.

Now that I write this, I recall that actually, my first encounter with this approach to writing a book happened in 2012 when I searched for books about C++ programming and by a mere chance I came across Alex Allain’s website about C++, Cprogramming.com. This website contains a number of tutorials about C and C++ programming. But in addition to this Alex wrote a book that was based on the tutorials from the website and the book is Jumping Into C++.

There is an interesting story about that book that I can’t help but tell you. When I started to read that e-book and do all the exercises in it I noticed that there were a number of spelling mistakes and also bugs in the code. So I decided to contact Alex and notify him about the issues. Also I suggested him that I can provide him with all the errata that I find along the way. Well, thanks to this I was able to establish a working relationship with Alex and was mentioned as one of the contributors to the overall quality of the book. This is how thanks to Alex’s helpful book I started on a road of becoming a DIY technical editor.

Returning to the main topic of the post, first Alex Allain wrote a number of helpful tutorials about C and C++, later he used them to write his first book on C++ programming. John Sonmez used his blog posts from Simple Programmer to write his first book on soft skills in software development.

And now, we come to the third example, in which I was involved quite a lot. This example, you guessed, follows the same type of an approach where first you write blog posts on a technical subject before starting to write a book on that same subject.

This time we are talking about Machine Learning Mastery website. In 2016 I started to get interested in Deep Learning, which is a subset of Machine Learning. Back in 2016 a new hype cycle about Machine learning revolution started. This time, as I’ve mentioned, it was a Deep Learning flavor. While looking for a resources on the subject I came across a blog post at Machine Learning Mastery website. The main author and the owner back then was Jason Brownlee who is an expert in Machine Learning.

The first e-book I bought from Jason was Deep Learning With Python which I found very helpful and straightforward. I bought a number of other books from the same website. As with the Alex’s book on C++, Jason’s book had a number of spelling and programming mistakes that got me thinking. So as previously, I contacted Jason and provided him with a list of issues I found. Jason was happy with my suggestions and as a consequence I became one of the technical reviewers/ editors for Machine Learning Mastery books. Since then I’ve reviewed more than 10 books on the subject for MLM.

Again, John’s, Alex’s and Jason’s approach to writing first and consecutive books was to write blog posts first and then compile them into a whole blown book. Since it was a technical subject that they wrote about, the book in essence was a collection of tutorials, which was much easier to write than a fictional book. Fiction or non-fiction for that matter is much more difficult to write in comparison to a manual about programming in my opinion.

One more, thing. To be able to write a blog post not mentioning a book, there has to be a topic that is close to your heart. A topic that excites you and makes you want to share your excitement with other readers. Otherwise, I hardly doubt there will be any good in attempting to write anything at all. I can tell it by looking at the most read posts at this blog. The most viewed posts were the ones that I cared a lot, the ones in which I shared useful and helpful information, the ones that described things I was personally involved in.

Now, the main question is shall you write a book?

Also, should I write a book myself?

Take care.

The Root Cause: In Search Of A Core Explanation

 

Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash

© Andrey Cheremskoy, 2022-07-30

What did cause this?

Not once when faced with a problem we tend to come to a superficial conclusions that may be far away from the underling causes of the issue. This can be seen in almost any human endeavor, particularly in scientific research, in engineering, such as software programming or electronics, in medicine etc. Hence, comes the need for finding a root cause of the problem which allows to come up with a core explanation of the phenomenon at play.

There are a number of ways to uncover a root cause of the problem, for example there is a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) techniques that provide heuristics of how to search for a possible root cause or causes of the issue at hand. Ishikawa diagrams also known as fishbone diagrams is one such example of using root cause analysis that is used to uncover potential causes of certain events and it is used in industry for quality control.

Some examples

As it was mentioned root cause analysis is very useful in engineering, such as hardware development and software programming. In these fields it’s rarely the case that a systems that was implemented works for the first time it is used. Probably, you’ve heard about the phrase Smoke Testing, which is used in IT world, but it comes from electrical engineering. And it is not a coincidence that it mentions smoke, since it’s almost always the case that a system will behave in an erratic manner when used for the first time.

For example, software programmers are known to use Debugging Tools in search for defects in software, which are informally known as bugs. And Quality Control engineers, or software testers find and report these bugs as a way of living. The same is true about hardware, where even a small part, such as resistor that goes awry can cause a whole module to fail in unexpected manner.

When root cause can be misleading?

It is then reasonable to ask whether the existing root cause is the only one possible to explain the issue? This is a good question. It happens that sometimes due to an existing status quo among experts we may tend to think that the root cause is known very well and there is no need to look for it any longer. This is a dangerous situation and it happened a lot throughout human history when experts insisted that there is no other root cause and hence there is no need to search for one.

For example, physicists in the end of 19th century believed that there is nothing new left to discover in physics and what’s left are small unresolved phenomena, but then came the mystery of the black body radiation which was a door into quantum mechanics physics of 20th century.

Another example is from medicine. It was long accepted that the root causes of obesity were the larger number of consumed calories over expanded ones and a lack of exercises, while we now know that a true root cause was a high level of insulin hormone, which was caused by frequent meals and high consumption of processed food, particularly sugar.

Conclusion

In summary, it is important not only to strive to find the root cause of an issue it is also important to check whether an existing explanation of the phenomenon is the one that explains all available evidence in the best possible way.

Useful tools for video and audio editing

If you have your own YouTube channel or just make video or audio recordings using your mobile phone, it is good to know that there are editing tools that can help you remove undesired artifacts from recordings. For example, in an audio recording you’d probably want to remove or at least reduce a background noise. In a low resolution video you’d possibly want to have a better picture quality by making resolution higher if possible. Also, when you find a YouTube video that you think could have a better audio or video quality and this video has a Creative Commons Attribution license then you could download it, edit and upload again to YouTube. This post is exactly about such editing tools, or at least tools that I use myself and find very helpful. Most of them are free open-source tools except for video editing software.

Audio editing

Suppose, you have voice recordings that have a background noise. It would be nice to reduce it as much as possible without affecting the overall quality of the recording. There is a free tool that can do this and much more. It is called Audacity. Audacity is free and open-source professional grade digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems. I personally, use it to record myself playing drums. For this purpose I use two microphones and a two channel Behringer sound interface. After the recording was done I use Audacity to compress the recording and export it as mp3 file. But one of the features that is relevant to this post is the Noise Reduction functionality.

Real Life Example – Removing humming noise from Hamming’s lecture

For example, I used the Noise Reduction functionality in Audacity to remove background humming noise from the Dr. Richard Hamming’s 1990 lecture at NPS SGL. 

To do this I

Video editing – Super-resolution

Sometime videos can have a very low resolution, especially when they were recorded with old recording hardware, like old fashioned video cameras etc. But there is a solution to this problem which is called technically a super-resolution or upscaling. It allows to improve the resolution of the video by smoothing the pixels based on surrounding pixels. There are a number of implementations for an upscaling algorithms. Some of them like video2x upscaling software uses Deep Learning based upscaling implementation, for instance, NCNN implementation of waifu2x converter. Check out the GitHub repository of the video2x to learn how to use it.

Real Life Example – Upscaling Alexander Stepanov’s talk

For example, I used the video2x upscaling software based on Deep Learning model to upscale Alexander Stepanov: STL and Its Design Principles lecture from 320×200 to 640×400 resolution.

To do this I

  • Downloaded the original video (Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
  • Used Audacity to add right mono channel to the original audio track which had only left mono channel available.
  • Used video2x software ran on a PC with Nvidia GPU to upscale the video from 320×200 to 640×400 resolution. Which took about 14 hours to process on that PC)
  • Used Movavi Video Editor to combine fixed audio track with the upscaled video
  • Uploaded upscaled video to YouTube.

You can try to play with the waifu2x Deep Learning powered upscaling website by uploading low resolution images and seeing the result by yourself.

Video editing

There are a number of free video editing tools out there, but from what I’ve seen the most useful ones that provide you with all required editing functionality are paid. And there is no workaround it. So I found this relatively inexpensive Movavi Video Editor software that I bought and use for all my video editing. Since I use mostly basic video editing, this tool suits me good. But if you are looking for more advanced capabilities, than you should check other versions of Movavi products or a different editor altogether.

How to download YouTube video for editing

If the YoutTube video has a Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed) license you can use the video and edit it. There are non criminal ways to download such videos from YouTube.

Reading hundreds of books makes you a different person

This post is a summary of the hard copies of the books I read and recommend to read if you have similar interest as I do.

Exceptionally good books about Apollo Lunar Program

  1. Flight – Chris Kraft
  2. Left Brains for the Right Stuff – Hugh Blair-Smith
  3. Sunburst and Luminary – Don Eylse
  4. Apollo 8 – Jeffery Kluger
  5. Apollo 13 – Jim Lovell and Jeffery Kluger
  6. and much more here

Exceptionally good books about Deep Space Exploration

  1. Interstellar Age – Jim Bell
  2. Chasing New Horizons – Alan Stern and David Grinspoon
  3. Mars Rover Curiosity – Rob Manning
  4. The Right Kind of Crazy – Adam Steltzner
  5. and much more here

Exceptionally good books about Aviation

  1. Skunk Works – Ben R. Rich
  2. Have Blue and the F-117: Evolution of the “Stealth Fighter” – Albertt C. Piccirillo and David C. Aronstein
  3. The Power To Fly – Brian H. Rowe
  4. Herman The German – Gerhard Neumann
  5. and much more here

  1. The beginning of Infinity – David Deutsch
  2. The Music of the Primes – Marcus du Sautoy
  3. Prime Obsession – John Derbyshire
  4. Unknown Quantity – John Derbyshire
  5. Infinite Powers – Steven Strogatz
  6. The Joy of x – Steven Strogatz
  7. and much here and here and here

Exceptionally good books about Neuroscience

  1. Mind and The Cosmic Order – Charles Pinter
  2. On Intelligence – Jeff Hawkins

The Book Struggle Within

This is a story of struggle, love and hate, but it’s not a movie. Instead, it’s a post about my love-hate relationship with digital versus print books. I think readers who like reading both print and e-books could understand what I am talking about. There is a constant tension, even a fight, between each book type and the pros and cons they have. I personally tend to read print books, though when it’s dark and there is no good lighting available there is nothing like reading an e-book.

Well, that’s the main point, these two kinds of books are not contradictory, but could be viewed as a complementary solutions. Each type has its advantages and disadvantages, but when combining advantages of both print and e-books we got the best out of all worlds.

Print books advantages as I see them

As biological agents living in a physical world we tend to like things that we can touch, hold and feel. So it’s not a big surprise that physical print books are so appealing to us. The book having a good and colorful cover draws attention and has a seductive forces to it. You can take it, flip through it quickly. Check whether are there any good diagrams, or pictures. Jump to the end of the book to check how it ends. In addition, the books have a smell to them and their weight provides a reassurance that knowledge could be a real force in the world.

  • I value the most the flipping part and fast navigation through the print books.

Well what are the disadvantages?

Print books, being physical objects take a lot of space, which could be an issue and storing them requires a book shelf or shelves. If you happen to travel or simply wants to take a few books with you to read on the go, then you’d better be in a good physical shape and have a big suitcase, which is kind of problematic to say the least (I mean the suitcase).

Also, print books are usually cost more then their digital counterparts, so buying them isn’t cheap. But both digital and print books could be rented or borrowed in the library making them less expensive as a product.

With a print book you need a good lighting, good weather conditions, preferably without pouring rain, when you outside, and a table with a chair. Non of this is required for digital books, for example, when reading on a mobile phone.

E-books advantages as I see them

E-books are cost effective, take almost no physical space, except for the container where they reside as bytes in memory. Nowadays, they can be read on a dedicated devices, computers, mobile phones. The e-books themselves could be stored locally or read in the cloud. There are a number of good mobile phone applications and dedicated websites that provide a reader with conveniences of reading, searching, translating and highlighting the content of the digital books. When the time comes to move around, you can carry almost unlimited number of e-books, limited by the memory space you have on you device (or a remote server). All in all, the e-books sound like a clear winner in the print versus digital books fight.

  • I value the most reading in the dark, searching and translating capabilities.

But…

E-books disadvantages

Though, e-books could be read in complete darkness, it points out that the device that they are stored in requires electricity, hence a battery that should be charged. When the battery is empty good bye. Nowadays, reading a digital book requires downloading it from a cloud storage locally, which means there is a need in an internet connection, which too could be interrupted. In addition, since digital books are presented in strictly two dimensional format it is impossible to flip through them like could be done with a print book, and jumping back and forth quickly is also hardly possible, if at all. But searching them for a particular word or phrase, or translating content is a charm in comparison to print counterparts (strictly speaking it’s an advantage, ops). In addition, when you try reading and working with the content from a number of books in parallel (which happens to me) all you need is a regular table. To achieve the same feat with an e-book you need a big size monitor, and I mean really big.

Conclusion

Unless there will be invented a hybrid of a print and e-book, that would require almost no electricity (or would have a long lasting battery) and could be flipped in 3D space (say like a hologram), we are destined to use both approaches depending on circumstances where the reading process should take place.

  • One side note I forgot to mention, we have physical books (scrolls) that survived for thousands of years, but our electronic devices that store e-books definitely would not.

Universal organizers

source: Freepik

In this post I want to briefly outline what the next posts will be about. As we know from our day to day life and also from psychology and neuroscience research that we are very good at classifying, organizing things around us, and we have a naturally inclination to do this, since this is how our brain works. Our brain tends to build a hierarchically organized picture of the world, organizing things into groups, sub-groups etc.

Why I mention all of this? Well, I also tend to organize things and the most I like to organize is data that I think could be of interest to me. I do it by using Google Chrome Bookmarks functionality where I have bookmarks folders stand for various categories and nested sub-folders as sub-categories etc. Surely, it is possible to do it in many different ways, for example using an old-fashioned way of card-index, or a more modern approach of using Excel spreadsheets, OneNote application or Google Sheets etc.

It turns out that well known and less known scientists, writers, artists did similar things to organize their own work and most of them, if not all of them, did this following similar kind of “algorithm”. They methodically organized, categorized things that mattered to what interested them the most. For example, the renowned science fiction write Jules Verne had an extensive and well organized card-index about different topics that allowed him to write his novels without him actually visiting places he wrote about. Another example was Wilson Bentley who meticulously photographed various kinds of snowflakes to be able to understand their formation. And there are ample other examples of this kind.

The main point is, that for us to be able to make sense of the surrounding world there is a need in systematical classification of various topics, objects, ideas for their later analysis and then synthesis of new insights. For how is it possible to understand anything that you’ve got when you do not know where to find it?

So, what I want to write in the next few posts in the blog is a well organized and categorized listing of the books I read end-to-end that could be potentially useful to other readers. I want to augment the listings of these books with short commentaries about an author or content of the book. That’s it.

The topics that I want to cover are aviation, space exploration (manned and unmanned), popular science (including math, physics, neuroscience), applied mathematics, creative thinking and TRIZ. Let’s take, for example, the category of aviation and its breakdown with regard to books.

  • Aviation
    • Civil Aviation
      • Biographies of plane engineers
        • 747 by Joe Sutter
      • Biographies of jet engine engineers
        • The Power to Fly: An Engineer’s Life by Brian H. Rowe
        • Herman the German: Just Lucky I Guess by Gerhard Neumann
    • Military Aviation
      • Jet Fighter Planes
        • Hornet: The inside Story of The F/A-18 by Orr Kelly
      • Biographies of military jet planes engineers
        • Kelly: More Than My Share of It All by Kelly Johnson
      • Low Observable Technology aka Stealth
      • Stealth Planes
        • SR-71
        • F-117
        • Tacit blue
        • B-2
        • F-22

Think twice before you post a link

image source: Freepik

Abstract

This post is about time. It states that time is a scarce and valuable resource we have, and to be able to accomplish any goals in life a person should consider carefully managing it.

Who is this post for?

The information in this post could be applicable to general public, but the more intended audience is people who already have a professional occupation, have family and kids, but still want to allocate some time to think about our place in universe, who we are, where we came from and where we are heading.

Definitions

Before proceeding any further that us define a terminology to be able to use it later.

A content producer is a person or an algorithm that produces useful or useless content on the Internet.

A goal is a thoroughly defined objective with a plan of how to achieve it.

A valuable time is a time that’s left at your own disposal, except for time spent on work, chores and time with friends and family.

An intellectual activity is an activity that is a goal oriented toward thinking about questions of who we are, where we came from and where we are heading etc. and is done during a valuable time.

A disciplined approach is an approach to intellectual activity where it is carried out in a focused and mindful manner.

How goals affect the value of time

To say whether time is valuable or scarce depends on an attitude of a person towards it, namely a person who has no goals in life may think about time as a thing that’s in abundance and doesn’t care how it’s used. On the other hand, a person with defined goals think of a valuable time as a precise resource that should be accounted and measured.

On the total time management side is an example of a Russian biologist Aleksandr Lubischev who accounted all his time, and not only a valuable time. This type of time management is at the very extreme and, apparently, isn’t suitable for most of the people who still want to have a time for the family and friends and other hobbies.

On the opposite side, is a complete carelessness about time and the best example of this behavior is an objectiveless browsing on various kinds of social media, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc. and watching of endless TV series on streaming platforms and YouTube. This type of “time management” is familiar to most of us and I am guilty of this too.

Some practical advice

Note

As I mentioned, this advice could be potentially helpful only to a person with goals, who wants to get most out of available valuable time by applying a disciplined approach toward intellectual activity.

Consider eliminating all social media producers that tend to take all you valuable time.
  • This type of time waste is not only distracting and disorganizing, but it also tends to create a kind of addiction to it that is harmful in its own way.
    • This can be done by completely deleting all non required accounts in social media
    • Or if you have to have them it is possible to unfollow everyone, except for a carefully considered number of contacts who are valuable and do not take your valuable time by sharing useless content.
Consider unsubscribing from all streaming content providers, like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney and YouTube etc.
  • In a similar way to social media, streaming content is addictive and could waste months if not years1 of your valuable time without you noticing this happening.
    • If you have to have watch something to relax, at least you can try watching things related to your favorable intellectual activity topics
Think twice before posting any content on social media platforms
  • Since, most of what other content producers post on social media is useless and waste your valuable time, do not post anything that could potentially waste time of other people, even if they don’t care, and do not value their own time.

To summarize

Time could be a valuable or not depending on what your attitude toward it is, and whether you have defined goals you want to achieve in life. Social media and streaming platforms are the main source of useless and distracting content producers. Be mindful when posting content on social media and think twice does it have any value or not.

Endnotes

  1. Let’s have a quick back of the envelop calculation of how much time could be wasted by a person who watches say, four 45 minutes episodes a day, of a 5 season series that has 20 episodes a season, and he watches 20 such series in his life time.

Then,

Twasted = (4 hours a day x 45 minutes x 20 episodes x 5 seasons x 20 series) / 60 minutes / 24 hours = 250 days which is more than 2/3 of a year spent on watching!

This calculation is a conservative one and the waste could be a year or even more.

Rendezvous with Rama… sorry ʻOumuamua interstellar object. Are We Alone?

It all started when I, as usual, was skimming through the Google digest on a mobile phone before I went to sleep. There was this article about Avi Loeb a theoretical physicist and Professor of Science at Harvard University who hypothesized that an interstellar object that zipped through the Solar System in December 2017 could have been an artifact or a spaceship from an alien civilization.

This is how I ended up reading unexpectedly Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth book written by Avi Loeb about possible origins of ʻOumuamua. The book itself is not that long and it has a mix of factual information about interstellar object ʻOumuamua and Avi’s thoughts on Scientific Method, philosophy and his childhood in Israel. The book felt too repetitive at times and could have been much shorter. It also could have had more than Drake equation. In a number of places it could have benefited from using math notations instead of describing numbers in words.

What I liked

Avi’s thoughts on science where he suggested that science should be preoccupied with practical theories that try to explain existing evidence sounds similar to the thoughts expressed in Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math book. But this view is not shared by David Deutsch which he expressed in The Beginning of Infinity book and with which I tend to agree more. David Deutsch supports

Karl Popper’s epistemology, especially its anti-inductivism and requiring a realist (non-instrumental) interpretation of scientific theories. (a quote from Wikipedia)

The hypothesis that ʻOumuamua could be an alien interstellar visitor, based on its anomalies is an interesting one. Since Avi was participating in the Breakthrough Starshot project, which proposed to use a solar sail to travel to nearest star, he suggested that ʻOumuamua could have been similar object. Then he described how an advanced civilization could surround a star, about to explode, with such solar sails that would be blasted away in all directions, serving as a probes, into space. The only issue with this approach is that somehow it assumes that an advanced civilization, that is capable of surrounding a star with millions of solar sails, would use such technology, can’t we assume that such a civilization could have discovered laws of physics that we cannot imagine yet and could use other means to traverse space.

An advanced ancient civilization here on Earth

There are ample evidence, here on Earth, that shows that in ancient Egypt, and in South America (namely Machu Picchu and other locations) we find hundreds of granite blocks that have marks of being cut by machining tools, like large diameter disk saws and wire saws, that required a power supply and an infrastructure similar to what we have in the factories that use CNC machines to produce granite blocks. The 7 great pyramids and Osirion in Egypt are the best examples of the machining tools applied to granite and limestone blocks.
More details can be found in a good documentary produced by the Laboratory of Alternative History (LAH)

The Film “Mysteries Of Ancient Egypt (2005)

The filmmakers decided not to rely on a particular theory, but on real facts, logic and common sense. This approach leads inexorably to the conclusion that in the land of Egypt for thousands of years before the first pharaohs a highly developed civilization existed that was superior in their knowledge and technology not only primitive society of the ancient Egyptians, but modern humanity.

Additionally, in Israel (Western Wall Tunnel) and in Lebanon (Temples of Baalbek) there are building blocks of some 100 tons that cannot be extracted and moved easily taking into consideration what we know about the level of human technology in ancient times.

Here on Earth and there in space

So not only we should start looking more carefully at what is in the space, we have the evidence of an advanced ancient civilization (interstellar or not) here on Earth.

Main points from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

It could have been much shorter

Having finished, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise book by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool I want to provide my thoughts about it and summarize main points of the book.

Overall, I liked the book and found it very interesting if repetitive at times. The book can be distilled down to a couple of main points and, frankly speaking, it could have been presented as a short article with a number of pages. A large part of the book is dedicated to examples that Anders Ericsson drew from his or others’ research papers.

Main points

  • The brain is more flexible than it was previously thought, which means that even adults can acquire expertise in new fields.
  • Any regular person can potentially become and expert, conditioned on following advice below
  • The research into what makes people experts shows that the innate characteristics play almost no role in becoming an expert, except for sports where height and body size plays certain role.
  • People who become experts in the end, used to practice deliberately, having a clear plan consisting of clearly outlined goals, where each step is a little bit more challenging than a previous one, causing a person to get out of the comfort zone.
  • This deliberate practice when exercised develops “mental representations” in a person, helping him or her to see patterns in a field of that person’s expertise.

Let’s it. As I mentioned, most of the book is dedicated to providing supporting examples from research papers.

Well, don’t wait and deliberately practice to become one

It turns out, that becoming an expert could be achieved by anyone determined to deliberately practicing and willing to put thousands of hours of focused effort while constantly expanding one’s comfort zone.