The best blogs for me, are those that are not for the great hacker public, but for smaller audiences. Blogs about mathematics, data mining, computer vision, and so on. Coding Horror, Spolsky and the alike only talk about generalities and aren't really useful to me.
I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but if you think BG would give most of his fortune just to get recognition and attention... I think that's really unfair with him.
I experimented with lucid dreaming a few years ago, and did it for many times. I saw myself in mirrors and also in my own image of I myself sleeping somewhere. My own image was always wrong in some way, and the memories of some of those images are still completely creepy many years after the dreaming happened (I still have goose bumps for the memory of the image of one of these specific dreams... quite crazy really since it wasn't a very bad image that you wouldn't see in a bad horror movie for example).
Sometimes you just read about things you want to learn. At least that's the case of the books I talk about in this thread. For example, I'm driven by the curiosity to understand how some theories of physics work, particularly relativity and quantum theory. I've learned some extremely basic stuff about them, and I want to learn more, and more, and the more I learn, the harder it gets (it needs more mathematical tools, etc.).
Maybe a key is to read books that drive you towards a goal? I can understand your feeling, and I really appreciated your thread when it appeared in hn. But in my case the problem is different: I want to know a lot of things, and learning all of that will take me years, and a symptom of that is that I end up collecting tons of books that I keep reading slowly.
Ah, maybe that's why. When a child I was desperate for books, it was hard for me to get those (I had books, but I read them a lot faster than I could get them, I was always re-reading them). So I guess when I started having money I just started buying them, like in a rush, to compensate or something. I should realize it makes no sense anymore. Thank you.
Nice rules. I started to do something similar to your "only learn what you fall in love with". For some of the older books I bought once and I never read, now I know I will never read, because now I know better and I know they are garbage (or I know of better material now). So I won't waste my time reading those just to remove them from my todo list.