21 Lessons for the 21st Century

I'm sort of a fan of this author. His first book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" had a couple of insightful interpretations of human history. His second book, "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" was a wild exercise of speculating the future of humanity, which sounded scary yet plausible.

The first few chapters of his latest book, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century", sounded like a much better version of my writings over these couple of years. The main thrust was to be wary of automation and AI, and beware of the few elite who own massive amounts of data. There was a paragraph in which a side by side comparison was funny enough --



For the rest of the book, I didn't quite get the focus, if there was one. It felt like were dozens of individual commentaries on different issues pasted together in one single book. It's still definitely worth reading if only for the scattered nuggets of insights here and there, but it didn't really have the kind of coherence you'd have come to expect in his earlier works.  I suppose that's fair, since the 21 lessons per the title already implies a certain amount of discreteness in the content.

Perhaps the author was trying to be subtle, but there were chapters in which he simply laid out the issues without apparently trying to propose a solution or a preferred perspective. Perhaps those issues are too sensitive these days for anyone to say anything on the subject without offending somebody. I dunno.

醃辣椒

早排買咗本 "The Art of Fermentation" ，心思思自己又試下。本書話任何菜都可以醃製發酵，咁我其實之前都試過醃大白菜，變咗啲類似酸菜嘅嘢出嚟，所以今次就試下啲新嘢，醃辣椒。

我將啲辣椒切粒，加少少鹽、醋、擺咗入容器，用橄欖油封頂，然後基本上放咗幾星期。

最近拎佢出嚟食，又真係別有一番風味。冇鮮辣椒咁霸道，但「椒香」反似更濃，用嚟伴菜，比我想像中更好食。唯一略為美中不足就係啲辣椒粒太大，如果切碎少少可能仲好。

本身啲橄欖油係為防發霉，不過封晒油又驚 botulism，好彩連續食咗幾日腸胃都冇咩唔妥，不過下次可能都係加多少少鹽同醋會安心啲。