Alexander Killby's Completed Shelf

Source Code, BookMy Beginnings

by Gates, Bill

Available

Added Mar 17, 2025

The Sound of Waves, eBook

by Mishima, Yukio

All copies in use
Holds: 0 on 1 copy

Added Feb 01, 2025

Comment:

Another fantastic read by Mishima. I felt transported to Shinji's simple island life in this straightforward but captivating account of his coming of age and its attendant adventure. Highly recommended!

Edinburgh, Book

by Chee, Alexander

No Longer Available

Added Aug 04, 2024

The Prince, eBookThe Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau

by Maher, Stephen

Available

Added Aug 04, 2024

Comment:

Quotations

"The thing I remember most was how impressive Sacha was," says Herle. "He seemed like a very sharp, practical tactician, hardball political operator. He was astute." But the campaign already had a chief strategist, and it wasn't Sacha. As such, "he didn't look like a guy to me who was going to fall in line with whatever Gerry's view were."
When he [Scott Brison] spoke up in Cabinet meetings, counselling a more restrained approach to public spending, he felt that the prime minister treated him like a member of the opposition.
Once in Ottawa, Trudeau proved to be a loner rather than a team player. Liberal MPs found him a bit much, as he continued to arrive on the Hill riding a skateboard. They resented the way reporters sought him out, ignoring his more experienced, harder-working colleagues, and found him uninterested in policy work.
Until he entered politics, Justin Trudeau had not distinguished himself except in ways connected to his family's celebrity.
Everyone who has spent time with him remarks on his keen intelligence, although not everyone agrees that he has a focused, disciplined mind.
The convoyers wore his comments as a badge of honour. Belton could not believe that Trudeau was attacking people like her. "The wording that he used was division, the whole time," she testified later.
When the Liberals govern, they are colonized by public servants, and colonize them in turn, until the country seems to be run by a remote and inward-looking apparatus for resisting accountability.
For public servants and office workers, the pandemic had been mostly about hunkering down at home, but for street-level workers, life was different. "I think it's time we stop dividing the population," Lightbound said. "Not everyone can earn a living on a MacBook at a cottage."

Declassified, Downloadable AudiobookA Low-key Guide to the High-strung World of Classical Music

by Warsaw-Fan Rauch, Arianna

Available

Added Aug 03, 2024

Queen Elizabeth II's Guide to Life, Book

Available

Added Jul 21, 2024

Quotations

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom,' said the Queen, speaking in her Christmas broadcast in 1991

Show Me Rio!, Streaming Video

Added Jul 20, 2024

What to Listen for in Music, Downloadable Audiobook

by Copland, Aaron

Available

Added Jul 16, 2024

Quotations

All that you MUST have to appreciate music is an ability to recognize the melody.

Co-intelligence, Downloadable AudiobookLiving and Working With AI

by Mollick, Ethan

All copies in use
Holds: 31 on 2 copies

Added Jul 10, 2024

Comment:

False Alarm, BookHow Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

by Lomborg, Bjørn

All copies in use
Holds: 1 on 5 copies

Added Jul 07, 2024

Comment:

Quotations

CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, it is caused predominantly by carbon emissions from humans burning fossil fuels, and we should tackle it intelligently. But to do that, we need to stop exaggerating, stop arguing that it is now or never, and stop thinking climate is the only thing that matters. Many climate campaigners go further than the science supports. They implicitly or even explicitly suggest that exaggeration is acceptable because the cause is so important.
[...] less grandiose responses to climate change night also be more effective, because the electorate won't turn against them. Climate policy has to be steady to be effective over the long run, and if the costs of climate policy are so high that citizens consistently turn against the governments that promote it, then meaningful change will be hard to come by.
Only when the screaming stops will we finally be able to identify the most effective ways to both address global warming and actually help people with their real-world problems.
[P. 50] The prediction that the polar bear would suffer immensely because of a lack of summer ice was always somewhat odd. Polar bears survived through the last interglacial period 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when it was significantly warmer than it is now. They also survived the first thousands of years of the current interglacial period, when Arctic sea ice cover was strongly reduced and there were even long periods of ice-free summers in the central Arctic Ocean.

Six sonatas for solo violin, Streaming Music

by Ysaÿe, Eugène

Added Jul 03, 2024

Violin concertos, Streaming Music

Added Jul 03, 2024

The Jump, Streaming Video

Added Jun 27, 2024

Comment:

Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover, Streaming Video

Added Jun 26, 2024

Comment:

Great Romances Of The 20th Century, Series 2, Queen Elizabeth And Prince Philip, Streaming Video

Added Jun 24, 2024

The Coddling of the American Mind, BookHow Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up A Generation for Failure

by Lukianoff, Greg

All copies in use

Added Jun 24, 2024

Comment:

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt take an unapologetic and critical view at what they term the three great “untruths” which activists seem to be pushing on the younger generations in the western world: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” “always trust your feelings,” and “life is a battle between good people and evil people.” Lukianoff and Haidt make a well reasoned and convincing argument that much of the societal progress of the twentieth century is in the process of being undone by these pernicious ideas. Ideas that seem firmly entrenched in the prevailing social discourse of today and throughout the past decade. I am not unaware of the highly charged and controversial topics that this book examines: safetyism, anxiety and depression, trigger warnings, identity politics, and the like. However, after taking the time to read it and to watch an accompanying lecture given by Jonathan Haidt, I now believe this book serves as an urgent reminder of some of the great ideological achievements of the western world, and the implications for abandoning them. Lukianoff & Haidt’s analysis focuses on the American university campus as one of the most illustrative battlegrounds for these “untruths.” They examine the impact of these ideas with intuitive and common-sense arguments, and statistical research. Importantly, this book reasons from first principles of the role of the academy, and provides a prescription for a return to the correct functioning of the institution: The Chicago Statement on Principles of Free Expression. In short, that the university return to its role of serving society primarily through the ongoing testing and competition of all ideas, and not to compromise that role by becoming an undergraduate consumer experience: treating students privileged to attend these institutions as a customer, and thereby compromising this role. Equally importantly, the book brings with it what I consider to be a far more inspiring message of encouraging individuals to develop resilience, strength, and to overcome the unfair disadvantages, challenges, or discrimination they encounter in their lives, that offence is a normal and healthy part of a university experience, that difficult ideas are the ones that advance the total human understanding of the world and our place in it, and that we would all benefit from a little more humility as an entrant to this important institution. This isn’t to say that society doesn’t have work to do to continuously make good on the cherished western values of equality of opportunity, mutual respect, the equal worth of all human beings, and individual freedoms and responsibilities, but it shifts our focus a little more towards what all of us individually can do to improve our own fortunes and to build a less divisive society.

Quotations

Our argument is ultimately pragmatic, not moralistic: Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals if you do the opposite of what Misoponos advised. That means seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).
We should all take reasonable precautions to protect our children’s physical safety–for example, by owning a fire extinguisher–but we should not submit to the pull of safetyism (overestimating danger, fetishizing safety, and not accepting any risk), which deprives kids of some of the most valuable experiences in childhood.
The Dalai Lama has long urged such an approach, based on the same social psychology. In May 20187, he tweeted this: > I’m Tibetan, I’m Buddhist and I’m the Dalai Lama, but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers with other people. What we need to do is to pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people.
Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships. Happiness, maturity, and even enlightenment require rejecting the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning and learning instead to question our feelings.
Most people want individuals to be treated well, and they recoil from cases where individuals are treated unfairly in order to bring about some kind of group-level equality.
Developmental psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom reviewed the research on fairness in children and concluded that “humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones,” and “when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”
Sometimes the left-leaning view turns out to be correct, sometimes it’s the right-leaning view, but on average, students will get closer to the truth if they are exposed to debates among credentialed scholars who approach difficult problems from differing perspectives.
Greg’s […] theory was this: Students were beginning to demand protection from speech because they had unwittingly learned to employ the very cognitive distortions that CBT tries to correct. Stated simply: Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.
Conversely, if you accidentally say or do something that a member of a group finds offensive, but harbour no dislike or ill will on the basis of group membership, then you are not a bigot, even if you have said something clumsy or insensitive for which an apology is appropriate. A faux pas does not make someone an evil person or an aggressor.
The notion that a university should protect all of its students from ideas that some of them find offensive is a repudiation of the legacy of Socrates, who described himself as the “gadfly” of the Athenian people. He thought it was his job to sting, to disturb, to question, and thereby to provoke his fellow Athenians to think through their current beliefs, and change the ones they could not defend.
If the telos of a university is truth, then a university that fails to add to humanity’s growing body of knowledge, or that fails to transmit the best of that knowledge to its students, is not a good university. If scholars do not advance the frontiers of knowledge within their disciplines, or if they betray the truth to satisfy other goals (such as accumulating wealth or advancing an ideology), then they are not good scholars. If professors do not pass on to their students a richer understanding of the truth, as it has been discovered in their discipline, along with skills and habits that will make them better able to find the truth after they graduate, then they are not good professors.
A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.
In a chilling passage that foreshadows events on some campuses today, Marcuse argued that true democracy might require denying basic rights to people who advocate for conservative causes, or for policies he viewed as aggressive or discriminatory, and that true freedom of thought might require professors to indoctrinate their students[…]
One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases.
Jones then delivered some of the best advice for college students we have ever heard. He rejected the Untruth of Fragility and turned safetyism on its head: > I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. Jones understands antifragility. Jones wants progressive college students to see themselves not as fragile candles but as fires, welcoming the wind by seeking out ideologically different speakers and ideas.
Social scientists analyze correlations like this constantly (to the great annoyance of friends and family). They are self-appointed conversation referees, throwing a yellow penalty flag when anyone tries to interpret a correlation as evidence of causation. But a funny thing has been happening in recent years on campus. Nowadays, when someone points to an outcome gap and makes the claim (implicitly or explicitly) that the gap itself is evidence of systemic injustice, social scientists often just nod along with everyone else in the room.
They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes: First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight”; second, they “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties”; and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
Of greatest importance in free play is that it is always voluntary; anyone can quit at any time and disrupt the activity, so children must pay close attention to the needs and concerns of others if they want to keep the game going. They must work out conflicts over fairness on their own; no adult can be called upon to side with one child against another.

Best of Enemies, DVD

All copies in use
Holds: 3 on 1 copy

Added Jun 24, 2024

Comment:

Quotations

"The Buckley-Vidal debate was the harbinger of an unhappy future."

Side Hustle, eBookFrom Idea to Income in 27 Days

by Guillebeau, Chris

Available

Added Jun 21, 2024

Feel-good Productivity, Downloadable AudiobookHow to Do More of What Matters to You

by Abdaal, Ali

Available

Added Jun 21, 2024

Gargantua, Booksuivi de, Pantagruel

by Rabelais, François

All copies in use
Holds: 0 on 1 copy

Added Jun 21, 2024

Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?, BookPinker & Ridley Vs. De Botton & Gladwell

Available

Added Jun 20, 2024

Comment:

Quotations

By trying to highlight the most important issues at crucial moments in the global conversation, these debates not only profile the ideas and solutions of some of our brightest thinkers and doers, but crystallize public passion and knowledge, helping to tackle some global challenges confronting humankind. — Peter Munk
As Thomas Babington Maccaulay said a long time ago, in 1830: On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
We think this world is a “vale of tears,” a “slough of despond” compared with what it could be — and will be in the future — if we do the right things. I’m not an optimist by temperament, but by evidence. That’s what changes my mind. We’re not saying, “Don’t worry, be happy.” We’re saying, “Don’t despair, be ambitious.”
I think many of the worst movements in history have been born out of the minds of people who believed in perfectionism — scientists, politicians, and others who thought that we could straighten things out, once and for all. And this is an incredibly dangerous philosophy of life. The perfectionists amongst us are those who very often ruin and wreck the world. And true human progress is often the work of people who are much more modest, who accept their own flaws and the flaws of others, and are not attempting to make a paradise on earth.
And the story that always stays with me and I think bears repeating this evening is the story of what’s known as the Petrov incident.
The cure for cognitive fallacies is data, and the trend lines are unequivocal. On average, people are living longer, healthier, richer, safer, freer, more literate, and more peaceful lives. While past performance is no guarantee of future returns, the world is not Wall Street. We are unlikely to wake up one morning and face a world with smallpox, slave auctions, or surgery without anaesthetics.
Progress has been real, progress is real, progress has been good for the great majority of people. Progress has been particularly good for poor people. And there’s no reason to think that it’s suddenly going to stop now just because we’re not thinking enough about our soul or our psyche.
Optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, so is pessimism. The progress we enjoy is not the result of some mysterious historical dialectic or law of inevitable progress or arc bending toward justice. It is the result of people spotting problems, including fragility and nuclear proliferation, and instead of moaning that we’re all doomed, applying their ingenuity and their efforts to solving them.
Recently, the epidemiologist Hans Rosling gave a thousand people a series of multiple-choice questions on population, literacy, life expectancy, and poverty. He noted, “If for each question I wrote the alternatives on bananas and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, they would have done better than the respondents.” The reason was that the respondents consistently picked answers that were too pessimistic.

Lifespan, Downloadable AudiobookWhy We Age--and Why We Don't Have to

by Sinclair, David

All copies in use
Holds: 18 on 3 copies

Added Jun 20, 2024

Among the Walking Wounded, eBookSoldiers, Survival, and PTSD

by Conrad, John D

Available

Added Jun 20, 2024

Chip War, Downloadable AudiobookThe Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Miller, Chris

All copies in use
Holds: 28 on 1 copy

Added Jun 20, 2024

Filter your results by...

Format

Source CodeSource Code, BookMy Beginnings

The pactThe pact, DVDPagten

Comment:

The PrinceThe Prince, eBookThe Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau

Comment:

Quotations

DeclassifiedDeclassified, Downloadable AudiobookA Low-key Guide to the High-strung World of Classical Music

Quotations

Quotations

Co-intelligenceCo-intelligence, Downloadable AudiobookLiving and Working With AI

Comment:

False AlarmFalse Alarm, BookHow Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

Comment:

Quotations

Comment:

Comment:

The Coddling of the American MindThe Coddling of the American Mind, BookHow Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up A Generation for Failure

Comment:

Quotations

Comment:

Quotations

Side HustleSide Hustle, eBookFrom Idea to Income in 27 Days

Feel-good ProductivityFeel-good Productivity, Downloadable AudiobookHow to Do More of What Matters to You

GargantuaGargantua, Booksuivi de, Pantagruel

Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?, BookPinker & Ridley Vs. De Botton & Gladwell

Comment:

Quotations

LifespanLifespan, Downloadable AudiobookWhy We Age--and Why We Don't Have to

Among the Walking WoundedAmong the Walking Wounded, eBookSoldiers, Survival, and PTSD

Chip WarChip War, Downloadable AudiobookThe Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Source Code, BookMy Beginnings

The pact, DVDPagten

The Prince, eBookThe Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau

Declassified, Downloadable AudiobookA Low-key Guide to the High-strung World of Classical Music

Co-intelligence, Downloadable AudiobookLiving and Working With AI

False Alarm, BookHow Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

The Coddling of the American Mind, BookHow Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up A Generation for Failure

Side Hustle, eBookFrom Idea to Income in 27 Days

Feel-good Productivity, Downloadable AudiobookHow to Do More of What Matters to You

Gargantua, Booksuivi de, Pantagruel

Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?, BookPinker & Ridley Vs. De Botton & Gladwell

Lifespan, Downloadable AudiobookWhy We Age--and Why We Don't Have to

Among the Walking Wounded, eBookSoldiers, Survival, and PTSD

Chip War, Downloadable AudiobookThe Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology