Book Discovery -- The User Illusion

I found this book through tracking down a quotation:

The universe began when nothing saw itself in the mirror.

Yoiks!! Think about that one for a while and your brain will hurt. Tor Nørretranders writes about consciousness in a scientific and philosophical way. I like the marriage of those two disciplines. Thinking about these concepts takes you into the territory of physics as well as the realm of logic, and even the psychology of the human mind.

As you can imagine, with my interest in technical communication, when I found the original quote was from a book entitled The User Illusion, I had to follow that up. In a way, it is related to how we think about systems from a user's point of view.

Go buy the book, but beforehand read the full book review, which concludes with this quote from Nørretranders:

We have to face the fact we are far more than we believe ourselves to be; that we have far more resources than we perceive; that we leave our mark on more of the world than we notice.

Awesome!

Thoughts to Live By

Some of these have been co-opted by Courage Wolf, but they are not original. I have been saying most of them for years.

1. Life getting tough is a sign that God is afraid of your progress.
2. Seize the day, by the throat.
3. Fall down seven times, stand up eight.
4. Don't start fights, finish them instead.
5. Reach the finish line -- then keep going.
6. Pain is temporary -- scars are sexy.
7. If you never give up, you never lose.
8. Stand up. Fight. Repeat.
9. Don't make a scene, make a mess.
10. If you fall on your face, laugh at the ground.
11. If you're going through hell, don't stop, just keep going.
12. Better to burn out than rust out.
13. If life's a bitch -- make it your bitch.
14. It's better to take a lot of standing eight counts, than get knocked out.
    
15. Stare into the abyss -- and when it stares back, make it blink first.
16. Can't believe in yourself? Then believe in me, who believes in you.