"Uncharted" by Aiden and Michel notes

You would think that by alphabetizing a romance novel, and thereby obliterating its meaning, Reimer would also eliminate everything that made the novel interesting.

must read!

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 28

The thought of reading millions of books in a split second hadn’t entered our minds.

who would think ?

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 35

But as we’ve seen, the world of words is far from normal, with a distribution of sizes that obeys a very specific, and seemingly strange, mathematical pattern.

some things are not distributed like a bellshaped curve

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 35

If your height were proportional to your bank account, and the average American household were five-foot- seven, then Bill Gates would be taller than the moon.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 38

I may have never heard of flamboozing before, but I know that if you chose to flambooze yesterday, then yesterday you flamboozed.

add "ed"

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 40

For every sneak that snuck in, there are many more flews that flied out.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 47

A rule is the tombstone of a thousand exceptions.

wonderful book on language

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 82

It lacked a comprehensive card catalog for the works that occupy its fifty-two miles of shelf space.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 82

Finding a book was a matter of knowing someone who knew someone who knew (or thought they knew) where the book was.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 83

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 83

According to our initial calculations, our friend in the office next door had enjoyed a surge in popularity during the sixteenth century. When we confronted her about this, she denied being that old.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 92

If we want to understand fame, what we need is a wind tunnel.

measure v. reality

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 115

But if you want to become famous, the worst possible thing to do is what we did: to pursue mathematics.

oh, no!

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 137

A few years after he guided the Russian Revolution that established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Lenin suffered a stroke that compromised his ability to lead.

This sort of memory-by-association effect is a major problem: It’s impossible to account for and impossible to predict.

our thinking is unpredictable

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 163

the half-life of collective forgetting.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 164

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, for example, what we now call snail mail used to arrive as often as fifteen times a day.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 178

By the meeting’s end, we realized that what we thought were our most interesting findings were boring in comparison to the latest eye-opener.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 179

Now, you would think librarians are the quiet type. That was not our experience.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 181

Mother Jones hailed it as “perhaps the greatest timewaster in the history of the Internet.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 195

Our civilization tweets more words every hour than can be found in all the surviving texts of ancient Greece.