“In The Zone”

By the way, speaking of quote investigations, I want to figure out how this fake Cervantes quote came about:

    Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. Bishops 
    are made of men and not of stones.

The fake part is "time ripens all things." Cervantes didn't write that part in Chapter 33 of Don Quixote II. The rest is indeed said by the Duchess to Sancho. The cheesy empty word play of "time" and "ripens" struck me as odd for Cervantes and more like something that Heidegger would write in Being and Time such as "time is the ripening of temporality". As an amateur Cervantes scholar I looked it up, but I could not find any Don Quixote translation that has the phrase, yet it always appears this way in English quote collections, which all seem to quote each other. It's even in Wikiquote. I first encountered it in xkcd:

http://xkcd.com/1704/

So, who added that "time ripens all things" crap?

If you find this interesting, you may find _The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary_ [1] interesting as well. The Oxford English Dictionary was made in the mid-late 1800s and laboriously tracked down the etymology of most english words by asking for submissions and tracking them on paper. The largest contributor, Dr. W. C. Minor [2], was a rich doctor who murdered a man and, because of his class and genuine insanity, was confined to an insane asylum and left alone with his books.

I never thought the origin of a dictionary could be fascinating but I spent an entire Sunday reading this book.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dic...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor

I'd love to see a serious study of rapping, especially free styling and rappers who don't write their lyrics in advance (celebrity examples include Jay Z, Lil Wayne, Kanye). For everyone who hasn't tried to rap: it's nearly impossible to create or perform a good verse if you're not in the zone. Improvisational poetry to the beat is too demanding of your mental bandwidth if there's anything else going on in your head.

And I'd love to see this study done with both high and sober participants. Cannabis makes it significantly easier to enter flow state, and it's no coincidence that it's popular among rappers and other improvisational musicians.

In her book "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas" [1] Natasha Dow Schüll also calls "the zone" the trance-like state of mind addicted players strive to prolong.

Like in programming, it is a state of mind driven by machine interaction.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-de...

See also, "hack mode"

http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack-mode.html

Now known as a state of flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)