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Category Archives: Good Reads

The 4-Hour Body Review

The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss

This is a great read, but not from start to finish.

I would say that 2/3 of the book really appeals to me, and the other 1/3 does not, and yet I feel like the $24 I spent on this 500 page beast of a book was well worth the price. From reading some reviews and discussion surrounding this book, I’ve come to realize that a lot of people really seem to hate it, and its author Timothy Ferriss. I’ve seen him being accused of hacking Amazon’s rating system (check the comments) and it’s been said that he’s just a sleazy marketer who knows how to talk up a room. As for the book, there are some people who write it off as being “nothing new” or full of unsubstantiated claims. I’d venture a guess that 99% of those people haven’t actually read it. The book does make a lot of bold claims, some which may seem unbelievable (gain 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days by only working out for 60 minutes per week? Yeah, right!) at first, but then become more plausible as you delve deeper into the book.

You don’t have to read it all

This is one of those books that has a little bit of something for everybody, and is not intended to be read from front to back. There are sections on how to build muscle, how to lose fat, how to get a 6-pack, and even how to improve your sex life.

This is one of those books that has a little bit of something for everybody, and is not intended to be read from front to back. There are sections on how to build muscle, how to lose fat, how to get a 6-pack, and even how to improve your sex life. Most of Ferriss’ ideas are based around the question “How can I get the most out of doing the least?” The minimalist approach should appeal to anyone who’s ever said, “I’m too busy to be healthy.”

What I got out of this book

I’ve learned a lot from reading this book, and one of the most important things I’ve come to realize is that what you eat, and when you eat it, matters a lot more than how many hours you spend on the treadmill. Exercise is obviously important, but ultimately it’s all about what you eat. You can go to the gym everyday, run 60 minutes on the treadmill and lift a bunch of weights, but if you go home and eat a bunch of packaged foods and drink a keg of beer, you’re going to get fat. Eating the right stuff at the right times throughout the day can really help you out, and help you reach your goals.

Some other things I’ve learned, had reconfirmed, or changed about my day-to-day life:

  • Don’t drink calories. Pop, juice and even milk are mostly just empty calories. Drink lots of water, and some green tea and a glass of red wine doesn’t hurt.
  • Eat carbs, but only after you’ve just worked out.
  • Mixed nuts such as cashews, Brazil nuts, and almonds are great snacks and are full of stuff (vitamins, minerals etc) that is good for you.
  • Vegetables should comprise the biggest chunk of your meal. Start with vegetables, then add protein.
  • Fish > Chicken > Beef
  • Eat a high-protein and carb meal within 30 minutes of finishing your workout.
  • Don’t eat (a lot of) dairy products. Cheese and milk might taste good, but they’re not all that healthy for you. You can get the calcium and vitamins from nuts and fish instead.

There’s a lot of information in this book, and it is actually a bit overwhelming. Anyone who’s spent time in the gym or has even a bit of education in human kinetics will probably find a lot of the material is just rehashing things they already know. That being said, Ferriss’ gift is that he puts it all in an easy-to-follow framework, with short chapters told through engaging stories. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in their own well-being and actually wants to think about what they eat and how to get the most out of a workout.


Are the Internets Making Us Stupid?

In summer 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a poignant and thought-provoking article, asking the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. The article explored the idea that the Internet, as it becomes our primary means of accessing information, is affecting our ability to focus on any one task that requires deep concentration, such as reading a book. Carr laments that as he spends more and more time online, he has had trouble reading more than a few pages of a book anymore, and anecdotal evidence from his friends and acquaintances seems to support the hypothesis.

In May of 2010, Carr released a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which explored the ideas of his Google article in much more detail.

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2010)

To fully understand what the Internet is doing to our brains, we must first understand our brains. Carr highlights results from a variety of iconic and more recent studies that illustrate the plasticity of our thinking organs. We see experiments ranging from the severed sensory nerves of monkeys’ hands in the 1960’s (and their brains subsequent ‘rewiring’ in response) to London taxi drivers whose posterior hippocampuses (the “part of the brain that plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial represenations of a person’s surroudings”) were much larger than normal. In short, we see plenty of evidence that the brain can reorganize itself, and is certainly not fixed in one state for all of its adult life.

The Shallows then explores the history of the written word and its explosion due to Gutenberg’s invention, and even further back to the argument between Socrates and Plato concerning the value of the written word. Socrates argued that if we committed all of our thoughts to paper, we would not have to remember anything. How do we know this? From the writings of Plato, of course. The soundwaves of Socrates’ voice, as wise as he was, cannot travel through time like written words can.

With the first half of the book detailing the brain’s plasticity and our species’ history with regards to the accumulation of knowledge, Carr sets up the latter half of the book perfectly, and his ideas might be grossly simplified into something like this:

P1: Experiments of brain plasticity have proven that our brains change over time.
P2: We are using the Internet for an increasing amount of our activities, including work, entertainment and commerce.
P3: The Internet is a medium that encourages distractedness and makes our brains inept at remembering.

C: We are all becoming a lot more dependent upon our digital devices, and in doing so, are increasingly distracted in everything we do, both online and off.

As I was reading this book, I was reminded many times of Mike Judge’s criminally underrated futuristic comedy, Idiocracy. Starring Luke Wilson, the film tells the tale of a mediocre Army librarian who is frozen in a top-secret military experiment. He awakens 500 years in the future to find that he is the world’s smartest man, by far, as confirmed by an IQ test. This seems to contradict the controversial Flynn effect, which shows that IQ has increased quite linearly over time from when it was first measured until now.

Idiocracy, a 2006 Mike Judge film set in 2505.

Somewhere, something went wrong, as the rising IQ scores of the Flynn effect are nowhere to be seen in Mike’s Judge’s depiction of Earth in 2505, which is a greatly dumbed down dystopian version of the world we knew in 2005. The oversaturation of cheap media (in the form of oddly familiar YouTube-esque videos), and rampant anti-intellectualism have resulted in what Wikipedia describes as “a uniformly stupid human society devoid of individual responsibility or consequences”. Adventure ensues, as our protagonist soon meets The President of the United States of America, who just so happens to be a former porn star and professional wrestler named Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. This zany, satirical look at the future certainly has its moments, and offers a bleary look into our dumbed down future.

Carr’s book is a giant caution sign on the side of the road that we ride into the increasingly digital future. The caution sign might be too far behind us already, as we’ve blazed ahead and rewired our minds to think like computers – logical, task-switching, and distracted at every second of the day. If people in their 30’s and 40’s (who may have had the Internet for approximately 25-40% of their life times) are experiencing these changes in their brains, imagine the effect the Internet is having on our youth. The Net Generation is defined to be those who have grown up with the Net for more than half their lives. There are still others who have had Internet for 100% of their life times. Imagine that, never knowing a world without the Internet. Imagine explaining to your grandchildren that you grew up in a time that didn’t have the Internet, let alone the information organizing superpower known as Google.

Will we look back at this period of transition from a print to digital culture and see it as being as momentous as the shift from an oral culture to a print culture? What would Socrates have thought? Have we become lesser human beings, inextricably tied to the addictive external memories of our computers and mobile phones?

Could it be that George W. Bush’s infamous “the Internets” quote was just a sign of the stupidness to come? Perhaps Bush was ahead of his time. Perhaps the Flynn effect is about to come to a crashing halt, as IQs peak, or maybe they already have. Could the greatest learning tool ever created be so useful that we forget how to think as we use it?

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Procrastination?

This New York Times cover story has inspired quite the debate. What effect is social media having on students? Are they too distracted by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and text messages to focus on their homework?

Don Tapscott, the author of Growing Up Digital and Grown Up Digital, had this rebuttal on the Huffington Post.

I think that this is a really interesting discussion, and from reading the comments on some of those sites, I see that it’s quite a polarized debate. We’re living at an incredibly interesting point in history, as our society shifts from a world of atoms to a world of bits. Everything seems to be going digital, and while there are obvious benefits to this digital revolution, there are also some serious limitations and potential pitfalls that we have to be careful of.

When we browse the Internet, opening tab after tab, are we really focusing on anything of any substance anymore? How does this fragmented and disjointed flow of information affect us? Do you know many people under the age of 30 who can sit down and read a book for two uninterrupted hours?

I’m about to start reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, which he adapted from his thought-provoking Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I just read the very optimistic Macrowikinomics recently, so I’m curious to see how these books compare. Tapscott and Williams mention Carr’s book near the end of Macrowikinomics, and agree that it raises some good points.

Macrowikinomics Review

Macrowikinomics Book CoverDon Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams are two men on a mission. Like another reviewer said on Amazon.ca, “this book is not an operations manual; rather, it is a manifesto.” This book provides a blueprint for the future, offering fresh ideas to help us reboot outdated and failing systems, such as healthcare, journalism and education.

The book’s scope rivals The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, its ideas and content parallel Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing, and its extreme optimism calls to mind the writings of futurist Ray Kurzweil (of The Singuarlity is Near and The Age of Spiritual Machines fame). Kurzweil uses his law of accelerating returns, based on Moore’s law of increasing technology, to make predictions about the future. Tapscott and Williams don’t have any fancy laws, but they do have plenty of examples of applications of wikinomics happening right now, all over the world in all types of industries.

The Age of Networked Intelligence

This inspiring book argues that we are in the midst of a revolution, entering a new age in history. Just like the printing press helped to provide the shift from an agrarian society to an industrial one, we are now leaving the industrial age, with the assistance of the Internet, and entering an Age of Networked Intelligence. Sound like the stuff of science fiction? Think again.

Reproduced with permission from Anthony D. Williams.

Networked intelligence is on display in all ranges of industries, at all levels. The Web 2.0 is connecting us in ways we could not have imagined ten or even five years ago. Websites and communities such as Wikipedia, Innocentive, VenCorps, and Kiva.org represent just a handful of the countless examples the authors use to illustrate the workings of the age of networked intelligence. Tapscott and Williams take us on a tour of the present world of wikinomics and the coming future, splitting the book up into sections encouraging us to Rethink the Fundamentals , Reindustrialize the Planet, and Reboot the Public Square. Other sections include a wikinomic approach to Learning, Discovery and Well-Being as well as a look at the newspaper’s demise, and the future of music, television and film in Turning the Media Inside Out. The book is split up into countless subsections, so you never read more than 3 or 4 pages without coming to a new subheading. While some readers might find this annoying, I think that it was intended with the reading habits of the Net Generation and blogosphere in mind, and I enjoyed it.

Macrowikinomics shows us astounding examples of crowdsourcing: from R&D at Proctor & Gamble, via an impressive website called Innocentive, to amateur astronomers helping to identify galaxies at Galaxy Zoo. We are treated to speculation about the future of the car (its dashboard will be an open set of APIs, connected to the Internet and able to download songs and connect to Skype) and given a great perspective on why open-access knowledge is so much more powerful than subscription model in the world of science. Quoting Peter Binfield, publisher of PLoS ONE at the the Public Library of Science: “There’s an entire 99 percent of the rest of the world that might have an interest in that content that can never access it in a subscription model,” he says. “But with a wiki model you’ve got a chance to get some useful insights out of those 99.9 percent of people that you couldn’t have got otherwise.” There are certainly some insights to be had here, to say the least.

New Paradigms

Their prequel, Wikinomics (2006) was often criticized for being too general and repetitive, with most critiques saying that while the book shows great examples, it doesn’t actually offer any concrete demonstrations of how to use wikinomics in a practical sense. I think they tried to tackle this with their chapter on Ground Rules for Reinvention: Making Wikinomics Happen in Your Organization, although it is a short chapter. That being said, I don’t think this book is intended to explicitly show you the way or fix your company with one fell swoop. It’s next to impossible to accurately predict the next big thing, and Tapscott and Williams illustrate how difficult it is to create the new in this passage, which I quote in full:

“The law of new paradigms has kicked into play: leaders of the old paradigms have great difficulty creating the new. In hindsight their record is pretty predictable, even pathetic. Why didn’t Rupert Murdoch create The Huffington Post? Why didn’t AT&T launch Twitter? Yellow Pages could have built Facebook. Microsoft had the resources to come up with Google’s business model. Why didn’t NBC invent YouTube? Sony could have pre-empted Apple with iTunes. Craigslist would have been a perfect venture for The New York Times or any regional newspaper. As the media becomes democratized and as those vested in the old paradigm fight change, a historic period of calamity is in the making. At the same time there are fresh, sometimes breathtaking new innovations in every medium – experiments and juggernauts that show us the way forward.”

When you think  of it this way, it makes you wonder how can anyone can possibly predict what the next big thing will be? What Macrowikinomics does is give us countless examples of how other people and organizations are utilizing wikinomics principles, in hopes of inspiring you or your organization to take those principles and put your own spin on them.

It’s called Macrowikinomics for a reason. It’s focusing on the big ideas. Macrowikinomics is not so much an operations manual or map (maybe this will come in the form of  a Microwikinomics sequel) as it is a bold blueprint of a future world which is rapidly becoming more connected, more collaborative, and more open in the age of networked intelligence. As anyone who’s ever built anything knows, blueprints can often change, and renovations can occur. Many of our industries are broken, outdated and failing, and this book, if nothing else, provides us with some ideas and inspiration to reboot them.

Bottom Line: Extremely readable, with a little something for everybody. From climate change to collaborative healthcare, from Twitter revolutions to earthquake rescue teams, this book has it all.

Check it out on Amazon.

Macrowikinomics: A book for those with short attention spans

Macrowikinomics Book CoverI attended a webinar on Discovery Education a few weeks ago which was essentially a promo for this book. Co-author Anthony D. Williams gave a 35-minute talk/slideshow laying out the scope of the book, and then fielded a few questions from the audience. I got a chance to answer a couple of questions:

“How can we enact change in the classroom if we don’t have the funds for the technology?”
He answered that it is definitely a political priority, and funding from the private sector is essential. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckrberg start buying tablets for classrooms!

“How long is it going to take for change to happen in education?”
He said that it will take a whole generation of people to enact the change, and it’s up to the 25-30 year olds to make it happen. We’re the first people to enter the workforce with at least 50% of our lives spent immersed in the Internet.

The Age of Networked Intelligence: It’s (sort of) Happening at my University

This was the first time I’d ever interacted with an author in such a manner before, and it made me realize how we really are entering into an age of networked intelligence, whether we like it or not. The companies and institutions who react and shift their ways of thinking from the relic of the Industrial age model will be the ones to succeed. It’s great to see that UBC is taking the step of encouraging the use of open-source blogging software. I think it’s a step in the right direction at least.

I gave a quick Prezi to my class at UBC about the nature of the webinar, and then we talked about how some of the principles might apply to education. In class we talked about the greatness (and pitfalls) of Wikipedia, and how it represents the true power of crowdsourcing, and a couple of newer sites such as Wolfram Alpha and Curriki.org.

Seeing as UBC is pushing us to keep a blog (using WordPress) during our year in the education program, I thought I’d keep a blog going about this book as I read it. Taking a few notes and jotting down major ideas is a good way for me to keep track of what I’m reading.

A book for those who say they can’t read books

I find it interesting to note how the book is broken down into fairly short subsections. My guess is that Tapscott and Williams are writing with digital natives in mind. They know that people are reading online more often than they read hard copy books, and online reading involves much shorter pieces of text at a time. By structuring their book in this way, they’re making it easier to read. Rarely will you read more than two or three pages without coming to a new heading or sub-heading.

To further reach the digital natives, Macrowikinomics is being presented in 12 parts on the Huffington Post. The first article is called Rebooting the Economy. I think that posting a summarized version of the book, in online newspaper form, is a really cool idea, and is spreading the message about the reboot required to change our ways of thinking.

I feel like I have a lot to say about this book and one single post for a review wouldn’t be fair, so I’m going to split it up into sections.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is written by Jeff Howe, a contributing editor to Wired magazine, where he covers the entertainment and technology industries. He discusses the rise of a number of remarkable websites which seemingly broke the rules of business. How did they do it? They utilized the power of the crowd.

Jeff Howe explains how the wisdom of crowds is nothing new, but it’s only recently that we have been able to utilize the collective power of the crowd, with the widespread use of the Internet. He has the book split into three parts: a past, present, and future of Crowdsourcing, entitled How We Got Here, Where We Are, and Where We’re Going.

Howe discusses the creation of Linux and the rise of open source software. He recounts the creation stories of websites like Threadless, iStockPhoto, Wikipedia and even CincyMoms, a site where moms located in the Cincinnati area can get their local news, share cooking tips, and rate restaurants. The site received over 50,000 visitors a day just weeks after its launch, and earned $270,000 in advertising revenue in its first three months of operation. He has countless examples of Crowdsourcing in action, ranging from the value of holding public programming contests to punk bands on Warped Tour who use MySpace to have their fans do the marketing for them.

This is a really insightful book and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who’s even remotely interested in computers, technology, business trends or the Internet.

Socialnomics

I just finished reading a book a few days ago called Socialnomics, by Eric Qualman. (I find it funny that his logical email or Twitter name shortens to equalman.) The book is about social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and to a lesser extent, Youtube, and how they are impacting the way we live and do business.

It’s a pretty interesting book, and Qualman brings up some pretty solid points about the social and economic effects of social media sites. He uses a lot of hypothetical stories, which to me come off as lazy. I feel like if he’d dug a little bit, he could have come up with real accounts of interesting people who have benefited from sites like Youtube and Facebook. Instead, we get News Site A vs Blog Site B, home to Jane the Blogger. Surely Qualman could have found a similar example that actually happened, done a bit of research, a couple of interviews, and then recounted the story. Maybe he felt he could better illustrate his points with picture-perfect hypothetical examples, but to me it just seems lazy. Speaking of lazy, I’m not going to spend my time doing research to find a case that would have worked, and will move on.

Despite the nitpicking, there are a lot of insights to be had here. Qualman equates Social media to braggadocian behaviour, which he argues is a positive thing for society as it allows us to take collective stock of our lives and to monitor the social lives of our friends and colleagues more efficiently than we have in the past. He has another chapter on the Obama campaign, and how he used social media sites such as Facebook in order to build a grassroots campaign. Did you know that one of the four founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes, worked on the Obama campaign? I bet he knew how to reach a lot of people on Facebook for a small amount of money…

Overall, it’s a pretty interesting book, but I have to wonder if it had an editor. I’m not claiming to be a grammar whiz or anything, but there are numerous places in the book where you just have to scratch your head and wonder how an editor could have missed not only the first and second confusions of your and you’re or it and its, but the third and fourth as well. I’m exaggerating, but that’s not to say it’s a prize winning piece of prose.

What Would Google Do?

This book has inspired me to start posting on here again. I realized that when you’re writing in a blog, it doesn’t matter who’s reading. You’re writing it for yourself. If other people happen to like it, that’s great. If not? Oh, well.

By writing down my thoughts about a particular book, I am keeping a recollection of what the book meant to me.

In What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis, the creator of Entertainment Weekly and the originator of the Dell sucks! blog which lead to the computer company’s near-death, goes inside the world of Google. He explains how the search giant has quickly become an advertising titan which controls the organization of information.  He explains the Google Rules, what Google would do if it ruled the world, and Generation G, home to a growing amount of people who are being influenced by Google in all aspects of life: how we think, act, shop, navigate and converse.

Gmail, Google Maps, and the almighty Google search. Where would you be without them?

I’m about half way through it right now, and am hooked so far. It’s really opening my eyes to a lot of niche markets, and I sort of see the book as a spirtitual successor to Chris Anderon’s The Long Tail, which explored the new demand curve and what it meant for the lower half of the curve:  the smaller market, less than blockbuster hits – the things you can only find on Amazon, eBay, or Youtube.

Because he is such a veteran of the entertainment journalism industry, he has countless stories to recount about lunches with former bosses at TV Guide, discussions with Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, and conference exchanges with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

This books brings up a number of interesting questions, such as:

– What did Facebook do so well that it became so popular? It established elegant organization to existing networks that already existed in your social lives.

– What can be done to save the failing book industry?

– How can Hollywood use the Google Rules to capitalize on a new era of consumers in a Long Tail marketplace?

The Singularity Is Near

Just what exactly is a technological singularity? Can the universe’s history be split up into six neat epochs? What type of impact will the coming revolution in Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics have on you and me, the average person?

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near came out in 2005, and the movie releases continues to be pushed back, and is now listed as an early 2011 release. I am unsure how this movie is going to work, but I’m picturing a documentary similar in style to What the Bleep Do We Know?

Author: Ray Kurzweil

What is it about? Just as he did in 1999 with The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil once again writes about the future course of humanity and its interactions with computers and artificial intelligence by using  Moore’s Law (the amount of transistors which can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit increases exponentially, doubling every two years) as a basis for his predictions. The Singularity is described as the point in technology’s evolution when artificial intelligences surpass human intelligences as the most advanced and capable life forms on Earth. Kurzweil predicts it will occur around 2045.

Excerpts: From the section We Are Becoming Cyborgs:

“The human body version 2.0 scenario represents the continuation of a long-standing trend in which we grow more intimate with our technology. Computers started out as large, remote machines in air-conditioned rooms tended by white-coated technicians. They moved onto our desks, then under our arms, and now into our pockets. Soon, we’ll routinely put them inside our bodies and brains. By the 2030s we will become more non-biological than biological. As I discussed in chapter 3, by the 2040s nonbiological intelligence will be billions of times more capable than our biological intelligence.” – Ray Kurzweil, 2005

My Two Cents: I found this much more engaging to read than his previous book. It’s a tough read at times, especially in the very wordy Achieving the Computational Capacity of the Human Brain chapter. I particularly liked Kurzweil’s splitting of the universe’s history into six epochs:

Epoch 1: Physics and Chemistry – Begins with the Big Bang, with the elements and physical properties forming in this time.

Epoch 2: Biology and DNA – Genetic information is stored in biological molecules and evolution takes place slowly, over generations, rather than within organisms’ lifetimes.

Epoch 3: Brains – Evolutionary information is now stored in neural patterns, as life has evolved to the point where complex and fast central control centers (brains) are necessary for survival.

Epoch 4: Technology – Humans become the only species able to develop technology, which is also subject to evolution and most importantly, not restricted to biological means of storing data.

Epoch 5: The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence – The epoch which Kurzweil suggests we are beginning to enter, where technology begins to achieve the fine structures and capabilities of biological entities.

Epoch 6: The Universe Wakes Up – Human/machine civilization will expand its reach into the cosmos, saturating the universe and converting all inanimate matter into substrates for computation and intelligence.

I think this breakdown of the universe’s history (and future) into six epochs is quite revealing and interesting to think about. It shows how each successive epoch is shorter than the one before it, suggesting exponential growth. Just think, for the first 10 billion years or so, the universe expanded, elements were formed, stars were born, stars died, and then finally the Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago. It wasn’t until just 200,000 years ago that humans started to appear in the fossil record. And lastly, it wasn’t until 60 years ago that computers as we know them started to appear, and already we are approaching the point where our own technology is getting ready to surpass us!

You might like it if you like: The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Matrix, computers, technology.

The World Is Flat

“Of course the world isn’t flat. But it’s not round anymore, either. I have found that using the simple notion of flatness to describe how more people can plug, play, compete, connect, and collaborate with more equal power than ever before – which is what is happening in the world – really helps people who are trying to understand the essential impact of all the technological changes coming together today.”– from the introduction to The World Is Flat Version 3.0 (2007)

I know this book is a couple of years old, but I am reading it for the first time and finding it fascinating. As the author (Thomas L. Friedman) continuously points out, the flattening forces shaping our world are happening right under our noses, and the majority of us are oblivious to these changes. Friedman shows us the capabilities of a flat world by exploring  a variety of topics, such as Wal-Mart’s incredible supply chain, UPS’s elaborate and far-reaching tracking system, and the ascending importance of both India and China in an increasingly digital world.

So far, this book has opened my mind to a whole new way of thinking, making me acutely aware of just how connected we really are.