Everything all at once : how to unleash your inner nerd, tap into radical curiosity and solve any problem

293 Pages·2017·2.1 MB·English

by  Nye

We can change the world. I’m sure of it.
Let’s go.

CONTENTS
Bill’s Guide to Doing Everything All at Once
PART I: PRINCIPLES OF NERD LIVING
CHAPTER 1: The Tao of Phi
CHAPTER 2: Scout Lifeguarding
CHAPTER 3: Me Against the Rock
CHAPTER 4: When Slide Rules Ruled
CHAPTER 5: The First Earth Day and National Service
CHAPTER 6: How My Parents Quit Smoking
CHAPTER 7: Ned and the “THANKS” Sign
CHAPTER 8: Why the Bow Tie?
CHAPTER 9: Land of the Free, Home of the Nerds
CHAPTER 10: Everybody Knows Something You Don’t
PART II: NERD IDEAS INTO NERD ACTIONS
CHAPTER 11: The Joy of Constraints
CHAPTER 12: Upside-Down Pyramid of Design
CHAPTER 13: Comedy and Me
CHAPTER 14: Not Faking It
CHAPTER 15: Resonating to the Nerd Beat
CHAPTER 16: Critical Thinking, Critical Filtering
CHAPTER 17: A Vaccine Against Deception
CHAPTER 18: Destiny Be Damned—Full Speed Ahead
CHAPTER 19: Time for Measured Urgency
CHAPTER 20: A Mind Is a Wonderful Thing to Change
PART III: HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
CHAPTER 21: Are You an Imposter?
CHAPTER 22: How High Can You Go?
CHAPTER 23: Tragedy of the Traffic Accident
CHAPTER 24: Cold, Hard Facts of Ice
CHAPTER 25: West Virginians and All That Coal
CHAPTER 26: Security Through Nerdiness
CHAPTER 27: Think Cosmically, Act Globally
CHAPTER 28: Humans Control the Earth; Nerds Should Guide the Humans
CHAPTER 29: A Reasoner’s Manifesto
CHAPTER 30: Design for a Better Future
Acknowledgments
BILL’S GUIDE TO DOING
EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE
OBJECTIVE:
CHANGE the WORLD
EVERYONE you’ll ever meet knows something you DON’T.
GOOD ENGINEERING invites right use.
Constraints provide OPPORTUNITIES.
Be part of the START.
Think COSMICALLY; act LOCALLY.
QUESTION before you BELIEVE.
CHANGE YOUR MIND when you need to.
Be OPTIMISTIC; be RESPONSIBLE; be PERSISTENT.
PART I
Principles of Nerd Living

CHAPTER 1
The Tao of Phi
This is a book about everything. It is about everything I know and about
everything I think you should know, too.
I realize that may sound a little crazy, but I’m completely serious. We live in
an age of unprecedented access to information. When you pick up your phone or
open your laptop and go online, you are instantly connected to a trillion trillion
bytes of data; that’s a 1 followed by 24 zeros. Every year another billion trillion
bytes of data move around the Internet, carrying everything from those important
videos with kitty cats to the arcane but fantastic detailed results of subatomic
particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. In that sense, talking about
“everything” is easy. Everything you and I know, and everything we need to
know, is already out there for the taking.
Yet despite all those whizzing ones and zeros—the collective intelligence of
billions of human brains—I still feel that we seem awfully . . . well, stupid.
We’re not using all this shared wisdom to solve big problems. We’re not facing
up to climate change. We haven’t figured out how to make clean, renewable,
reliable energy available to everyone. Too many people die in avoidable auto
accidents, succumb to curable diseases, do not get enough food and clean water,
and still do not have access to the Internet’s great busy beehive mind. Despite
being more connected than ever before, we’re not particularly generous toward,
or understanding of, one another, preferring to hide behind denial and personal
bias. The flood of information has effectively allowed us to know something
about everything, but that knowing is clearly not enough. We need to be able to
sort the facts and put our knowledge into action, and that is why I wrote this
book.
I want to see humanity band together and change the world. I think it will take
a special kind of personality to get this done: people who can handle the modern
overflow of information, take in everything all at once, and select the parts that
matter. It requires rigorous honesty about the nature of our problems. It requires
creative irreverence in the search for solutions. The process of science and
natural laws don’t care about our politics or preconceptions. They merely set the
boundaries of what is possible, defining the outer limits of what we can achieve
—or not, should we shy away from the challenge.