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Das beste Buch zum Thema Zeichnenlernen, das ich bislang in der Hand hatte. Die Autorin Betty Edwards benennt fünf Grundtechniken, die durch leicht lesbaren Text vorgestellt und durch sorgfältige Übungen erfahrbar gemacht werden: 1) die Wahrnehmen von Randlinien, 2) Wahrnehmung von Raumformen (Negativräume!), 3) die Wahrnehmung von Größenverhältnissen (u..a. Perspektive), 4) die Wahrnehmung von Licht und Schatten, 5) die Wahrnehmung des Ganzen oder des Gesamtbilds.

Daneben streut die Autorin immer wieder spannende Erkenntnisse / Theorien aus der Psychologie ein. Ihre berühmteste These ist, dass Zeichnen den "subdominanten visuellen, perzeptorischen R-Modus des Gehirns" zugänglich machen kann, indem dem "verbalen, analytischen L-Modus" Aufgaben gestellt werden, die von diesem Modus abgelehnt werden. Eine solche Aufgabe ist es zum Beispiel, eine gezeichnete Vorlage auf den Kopf zu drehen und abzuzeichnen.

Eine andere psychologische Einstreuung, die mich beeindruckt hat, ist das Thema "optische Täuschungen", wonach das Gehirn, wenn nicht hinterfragt, Fehler beim Abschätzen von Größenverhältnissen macht. Das führt zu Phänomen wie "Flachköpfen", wo das Verhältnis Gesicht zu Schädel als zu groß wahrgenommen wird.

Geniales Buch, hat mich motiviert, ein altes Hobby wieder aufzunehmen!

I read the book because Robert Seethaler was recommended to me, and in the book store this book had the most appealing blurb. Wien, Freud, the time just before the Nazis came to power in Austria.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I would have lived in the pre-Nazi time. Would I be a conformist? Would I close my eyes? Would I stand up? It is really hard to say, and the book did not bring me on a mental journey to figure that out. Or did I simply not get the main character? Why does he lie to his mother about Trnskie? Why does Franz suddenly decide to place Trnskie's trousers on the flagpole in the center of the city? This comes completely out of the blue, I mean, he does exactly what his "friend" Freud says to do. There is no explanation, no inner dialog (about this), nothing.

Also I was interested in learning something new about Sigmund Freud. Little of his work is well-received nowadays. But the book gives almost nothing on Freuds work, Seethaler uses him just as a prominent example. I think it is missleading to believe that Freud was in any way similar to the person Seethaler describes.

All in all, nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing out of the ordinary. It is well written though, has reoccurring elements like the doves or the associations with the rural life as a child. It has some wit. It is not monotone. But all that craft does not help since Seethaler has nothing to say.

To be frank, this book feels like a commissioned work: the Nazi theme, antisemitism, love, coming of age -- all nicely packaged and easy to read. An engineered smash hit.

From what I remember, Jonathan Frantzen is a fan of Alice Munro. If you don't have enough time to read a novel, read a story by Alice Munro -- that's his advice as I understood it. And that's what I did and enjoyed. A story reads in three hours, ideal for a slow afternoon in the park at the weekend.

There is probably a deep analysis, or even several, to each story. I'm not going to try to analyse the stories here in this review now. What I like, what I admire, is how Munro manages to take me out of the role of reader. The stories touch me.

I read "Dear Life" and "Too Much Happiness" in parallel. Some stories I have read several times: "Train", "Dimensions", "In Sight of the Lake" (inside?).

These books will certainly stay on my shelf and I will pull them out from time to time.

From what I remember, Jonathan Frantzen is a fan of Alice Munro. If you don't have enough time to read a novel, read a story by Alice Munro -- that's his advice as I understood it. And that's what I did and enjoyed. A story reads in three hours, ideal for a slow afternoon in the park at the weekend.

There is probably a deep analysis, or even several, to each story. I'm not going to try to analyse the stories here in this review now. What I like, what I admire, is how Munro manages to take me out of the role of reader. The stories touch me.

I read "Dear Life" and "Too Much Happiness" in parallel. Some stories I have read several times: "Train", "Dimensions", "In Sight of the Lake" (inside?).

These books will certainly stay on my shelf and I will pull them out from time to time.

The author explains entropy essentially with a dice-rolling experiment: Given N dice, e.g. all with the six on top, choose any dice (chance no. 1) and roll (chance no. 2). If the experiment is carried out often enough, the sum of the numbers on the dice approaches a value quite stably. It is very likely that the value 6N will not be reached again if N is sufficiently large.

It is clear from the experiment what is meant by (generally not directly measurable) specfic events (the numbers on the individual dice) and by (directly measurable) "dim" events (the sum of the numbers on the dice). I would have been interested to know whether the relationship between specific and measured events must always be linear.

The fact that 6N will most likely not be reached again is an illustration of the "arrow of time".
There are many more specific events that lead to a sum 3N or 4N than to 6N. This seems to me to be the main point of the book.

The author equates "entropy" with search cost, i.e. as a measure of missing information. I would have liked to see a proof of equivalence to the usual definition of entropy (sum of p log p over all p).

These are definitely important insights for me. I'm not sure if I needed to read this at this length to understand it. Why does this need to be discussed for 2, 4, 10, 100 and 10000 dices? And then again imagine that it's not numbers of dice but colours, smells, tastes or sounds?

I don't find the book entertainingly written. The examples from physics (Bose-Einstein configurations, Fermi-Dirac configurations) did not help me as a non-physicist. While reading, I had the idea that one could write a book "Entropy Mystified", where the many applications of this ingenious concept are presented.