Much Ado About Nothing

All right, not writing for 2 weeks isn't going to help my blogger's block problem. So excuse me readers, I am going to attempt the most dangerous act of blogging at your expense - to blog about Nothing.

What is Nothing? If we can explain what Nothing is, then Nothing is something, something is going to lead to other things and this is not really helping the situation. So I would try to explain what Nothing is NOT. In fact, Nothing is not about anything. Nothing is less than nothing else. Nothing is something that does not materialize. Nothing is everything that does not count. Nothing is no-thing, nada, nil, null, zero, zip...

When you can do Nothing, you are a noble -- not able to do anything. When you do Nothing, you pass the time but you do not do anything of significance. When you know Nothing, you are nodding all the time. When you have Nothing to say, you are whispering nothings. When you have Nothing, you are a nomad going nowhere. When you are Nothing, you are Nobody.

If anything, doing Nothing to achieve everything is something everybody is thinking about these days. In fact, I'm doing quite the opposite. I'm on the verge of doing something to achieve Nothing -- another dangerous act that I would do Nothing to recommend it.

Speed Reading

Have been reading a lot lately and trying to do it faster...

I think it's often a waste of time to read a book from cover to cover for the sake of reading every word. I am training myself to skim through a 3-400 pager in half an hour. I needed information quick and I often find the books don't have to be that thick when the key points can just be summarized in a few millimeters.

Reading a book is like fishing or hunting, you scan the water or landscape for things that catches the eye, capture it, consume it, and continue with the next target. It's kind of fun, especially when you had your daily dose of performance-enhancing drug - coffee. You can feel that your eyes are chasing the words and your brain is catching up with the eyes. At times, your brain catches up ahead of the eyes and instruct the eyes to see specific words and skip all the words that don't matter.

What you see from your eyes is the book in its physical form, with pages and pages of words in black and white. What you see from your brain is an image of the book, with pages and pages that only contain the highlighted key words, without the other meaningless words... If we put all these keywords together, the book is only a few pages thick.

I wonder if, like the director's cut of a DVD, the author of a book can highlight the keywords for us and with a special pair of spectacles, one will simply see the keywords on each page without the other meaningless words, then we'll all be reading a lot faster.