Category Archives: Reviews

My Best Books of 2009

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I like to read.
Here are the best books I read this year.

Nonfiction

Born On A Blue Day & Embracing the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammet

Yes, it’s two books, but it’s really about the same subject. Daniel Tammet is an autistic gay savant synesthete. He won the unusualness lottery. The first book is his life story and the second is a tour through what he’s learned about the human mind. An amazing amount of good neuro and cognitive science in here, presented in a clear, non-technical way. You can read more about it in my earlier review.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright

It’s brilliant. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, examines all of human history through a single lens, in this case win-win games.
The thesis is that human life and all progress comes about as a series of non-zero sum interactions, games where both parties win.

It gets a bit repetitive some times – when a story begins you can start predicting how it will end because there is only one theme in the book, but it effectively demonstrates the idea and shows you the impact throughout history and applications for the future

Authentic Happiness : Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman

When I was a kid, my answer to “whaddya wanna be when you grow up” was always “Happy.” 1 I had noticed how often adults didn’t seem to be happy and how often they weren’t doing anything about it. Seligman is no snake-oil guru, he’s a past president of the APA and an experimental psychologist who worked on some of the great experiments of the 20th century. His explanations of happiness are based on actual study and experimentation and the recipes for success seem to match up with my personal experience. While I haven’t read his book on Learned Optimism, I’ve heard similar praise for it.

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater

Pure poetry. Laura uses the structure of foundational experiments in social psychology to raise deep questions about medicine, free will, obedience, and the ethics of experiments that involve conscious beings.
I’ve reconsidered long held ideas because of this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough for people who are unfamiliar with how brains work but don’t want to wade through the dry details. Where Daniel Tammet is explaining the big picture, Laura is giving you the impact of these experiments.
If Mary Roach wrote about psychology, but actually had something to say, she might write this book.
Worth reading just to learn what happened to the subjects after the Milgrim experiments in obedience to authority.

The Complete Manual of Woodworking by Albert Jackson

I’m just a beginning woodworker, but this is a great resource.
It’s full of huge, gorgeous shots of wood, cuts, examples and tools. It covers the wide range of methods and materials with great detail but remains accessible.
Reading this book is also worth it for someone uninterested in actually doing any woodworking. It shows you how the furniture and tools around you are made, how the character of wood shapes the architecture of the things around you. I certainly look at my kitchen cabinets with new eyes. You’ll find out why in this book.

Fiction

Litttle Brother by Cory Doctorow

Loved this.
Sent it to my dad. Recommending it to everyone. It’s about how smart courageous kids deal with adults giving up on freedom after a terror attack.

Well written, fast paced, and filled with real characters – something the SF genre doesn’t always get. This isn’t far future fiction, this is about right now.
The technology is all homemade and usable. Heck, they even have DIY instructions for elements of Little Brother up on instructables. Doctorow is a smart thinker about the problems of security, terrorism and politics. He’s an editor on the wonderful BoingBoing blog and is kind enough to provide you free electronic copies of Little Brother under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. That means you can give it away and make new things with it, but you’ve gotta make those shareable, give Cory credit, and share your results under a CC license.
Get it, give it to a kid, and hope.

Crystal Nights and Other Stories by Greg Egan

Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

Greg Egan can’t stop writing things I enjoy. I’ve read so many rehashes of the same ideas and Egan never does that. Every story contains at least two ideas completely foreign to me. He piles them on into a delicious meal in each story. What’s in there: completely alien life 2, the ethics of evolutionary algorithms 3 , and a hundred other things you’ve never thought about, all packaged in exciting, well plotted stories.
Egan is consistently the best hard SF writer working.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories by John Kessel

This is a little bit of weirdness that I read on my new Droid phone. It’s a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 story, so you have no excuse whatsoever for not reading it. The stories are good and whip-smart.
If you’ve ever read a certain Flannery O’Connor story, you’ve got to read this for the perfect “Every Angel is Terrifying”. Set right after the O’Connor story ends and tells you just what happens next in the smartest way.  “The Red Phone” was a delightful story of phone sex, romance, and telecommunications for the deaf
I also enjoyed a series of stories about a matriarchy on the moon. Each story opens up more and more thought into the society – a lovely little bit of world building.

The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson

This is a bit of a complement to Crystal Nights. Egan’s book is full of bright sharp ideas and this one has warm comfy stories with great characters.
Beautiful little short stories that interconnect at strange tangents. Strange booksellers, impossible books, and the first story I’ve read where information visualization plays a powerful part in the story.

I’m looking for more from this author on the basis of these stories.

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

Wonderful. A beautiful classic noir mystery set in a place where bodies are a commodity and life is cheap and possibly permanent.
Sex, death, betrayal and crime for the cyber set.
This is SF for those who thought they didn’t like it because all of the flashy SF ideas are just layered onto a really strong closed room mystery, but one that couldn’t have been done in any other setting. To check out if you think science fiction is stupid but you love Lawrence Block or Robert Parker mysteries.

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

I finished this book 24 hours after picking it up, and didn’t read anything else till I had finished. It’s fantastic.
Fastest book I’ve read since Palahniuk. Similar style and rhythm – full of secret knowledge about medicine and mobsters, great amounts of violence, pain, and gross-out.
It’s a book paced like a punk song about a hitman who becomes a doctor. Yes it’s a cliche to have a hitman who gets found by the mobsters he flipped on, but I couldn’t care less while reading this. It’s fun and furious and a damn fine read.

  1. OK, sometimes it was burglar or policeman, but generally it was happy.   (back)
  2. alien alien, not like the sexy blue elves of avatar   (back)
  3. it’s also a covert of indictment omniscient, omnipotent, but uninvolved deities.   (back)

Satoshi Kanazawa cannot think.

Incentives, Pals, Reviews, , , , , , , , , ,

That this has not proven to be a handicap for someone employed by the London School of Economics is astounding and reflects poorly on them.

I found him through the stupidest, most sexist article I have read this year.

He argues:

The power of female choice becomes quite apparent in a simple thought experiment. Imagine for a moment a society where sex and mating were entirely a male choice; individuals have sex whenever and with whomever men want, not whenever and with whomever women want. What would happen in such a society? Absolutely nothing, because people would never stop having sex! There would be no civilization in such a society, because people would not do anything besides have sex. This, incidentally, is the reason why gay men never stop having sex: there are no women in their relationships to say no.

This is the the point where I immediately knew Kanazawa cannot think. 1  Does he think that gay men do not hold jobs or have careers?  That they get nothing done?  That women do not want to have sex? 2   It takes but a moment’s reflection for any thinking person to look at that paragraph after having written it.  In a room where candles are going out from lack of oxygen one should still see the contradictions and quickly delete it.

Kanazawa cemented my opinion in the next paragraph.

This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software, in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.  There would be no civilization, no art, no literature, no music, no Beatles, no Microsoft, if sex and mating were a male choice.

Surely he is aware that gay warriors, musicians, authors, poets, artists, scientists might be a slight rebuttal to his idea?

I no longer believe that he is aware of this.  I read another article where Kanazawa advocates killing every human being in the mideast as a solution to terrorism.  His list of articles is a grand collection of logical fallacies.

I do not approve of ad-hominem arguments. However, if  Satoshi Kanazawa makes any statement, I would be biased to think the statement is wrong.

  1. I would also guess that he does not or cannot read the news, let alone know any gay people.  How else could he have missed the great number of gay men struggling for the right to marry?   (back)
  2. Later in the article he reveals that his problem is small sample size.  Women do not want to have sex with Satoshi Kanazawa, and he generalizes from that.   (back)

LibraryThing, Books, and Planning

Books, morelight, Reviews

I’ve been using the excellent librarything to keep track of my books. I’ll be building a self-hosted version of it Real Soon Now, but until then, I’m putting what I read in there. I’d gotten a bit of feedback from my vast hordes of readers that they are interested in what I read, so you can see reviews as they happen over there on the sidebar of mah blurg. Why librarything instead of GoodReads or Visual Bookshelf or the like?  Because they will export your library back out for you.

If I decide to change over to a new system, I’ll want an easy way to get MY data back out.   Always consider your exit strategy.

What I’ve been reading in February

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February has been a banner month for reading. A bumper crop of beaming books brought me a bounty of smiles.
I started out with autism and ended with the midwest.
First I read One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey ‘The Kid’ Ungar, a biography of the best poker and gin player ever. My boss recommended it to me, and I really enjoyed it. Much of the highlights of the story were part of his pitch of the book to me, though. Stuey was almost certainly Aspergerian. He was also almost certainly a savant. He was definitely an addict, and his glory was dulled by his inability to discipline his desires. Like many who come by millions too easily, his story doesn’t end happy. I might have appreciated this story more if I played poker. If you do, you owe it to the game to read about the best ever.

I then followed up with two books by an autistic savant, Daniel Tammet. He won the weirdness lottery, as he is an autistic, synesthesic, gay, savant. I do not remember if he is also left handed. I had thought of autism as just a mild form of brain damage until I ran into two persuasive videos:
1. Daniel Tammet: The boy with the incredible brain

2. In My Language, by Amanda Baggs, also the subject of a good article on the emerging autistic rights movement in Wired.

I was wrong and my current view is that many autistics are wired differently and conduct logic, thought, emotion etc in self-consistent ways that don’t match with mine. This is very exciting, getting to know about alien psychology and cognition.

Born On A Blue Day, Tammet’s autobiography, is very nice, but is blown away by the awesomeness of Embracing the Wide Sky. This second book covers a huge realm of cognitive theory, neuroscience, and amazing things that happen in our headmeats. It is never dry, always personal and shockingly clear. I think that this is probably the best first book on the inside of your head that someone can read. It only lacks for practical applications of the knowledge the way a Mind Hackss or Tricks of the Mind provides.

When I was in Utah my pals Mike, Britt, and Brian all recommended the books of Jon Krakauer and the first one to arrive from the library was Under the Banner of Heaven. Truly excellent. It’s the story of the Mormon’s, murder, and ‘merica. It’s a stomper that flips from the genesis of Mormonism to the story of a murder intimately connected. Jon starts with the murder and weaves back to the foundation story of the Mormon’s, which is, unbelievably, crazier than the South Park Mormon story. From there, he makes a great case that the corruption and abuse is embedded right into the history of the Mormons. Don’t miss the horror of the Mountain Meadows massacre and the shameful stories of “Plural Marriage”. Of course, now I can’t even start watching “Big Love.” I hear its great, but the whole time I’d be thinking about what I read in this book, and how it would really work: Men marrying their stepdaughters and using their children to form medieval alliances.

If I had to pick one book that you should read, I would pick Embracing the Wide Sky. You’ll walk away with a profound appreciation for humanity, a sense of hope for the future, and the urge to get some cool things done. The fastest and most enjoyable read was Under the Banner of Heaven.

Books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson

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Includes a cd and some geometry lessons!Neal Stephenson’s Anathem has been called a space opera, but that seems inaccurate.  The characters eventually make it out of the atmosphere, but time is the subject of the book – not space.  Some of the best parts are about contemplation, piecing together puzzles and following the threads of deductive logic through to a conclusion.  A long character-building scene has to do with an art project where the characters recreate a famous battle by planting a garden full of weeds that will battle for dominance and advance their growth in predictable ways.  The kind of ideas where events play out over months, years and centuries hardly belong in space opera.  It is Long Now fiction.

The Setup

In a world far far away, the monasteries are a place where mathematicians, scientists, and rhetoricians have sequestered themselves away from the working world.  They practice a method of separation that allows for regulated exchange of ideas between the monasteries (called concents) and the outer world.  Each concent has a series of gates and subdivisions, all regulated by an enormous clock designed to run on a millenial scale.  For some, the gate opens once a year for a week.  For others, the time between openings is 10 years, 100 years, or even 1000.  This lets the secluded folks work away at their ideas without being interrupted or polluted by popular culture.  The setting projects timelessness, order, safety and ritual.  Obviously, that isn’t going to last, but it’s an idyllic sort of world for nerds, one where you can devote yourself to a higher purpose, abandon ambition, and be recognized solely for the worth of your mental work.  There are analogues between much of what monks do and what these guys do, and lots of the same sort of psychological motivation.

The Gripes

Actually, let’s take a moment to discuss the biggest failing of the book.  The vocabulary is tedious.  There’s a lot of vocabulary and world building going on here, and most of it is a waste, a distraction from the ideas and the characters.  Sure, it’s set in a faraway world and they have different word’s for different things.  But why?  In the end, there’s no real need for this story to take place on a different planet: if set here on Earth you’d have a history for free, you could reference the work ideas of folks like Plato or Pythagoras directly and you’d only need to invent new words for concepts that are actually new.  Too much of the book is set on giving alternate histories for ideas like Platonic ideals, too little on explaining the actual new ideas in the work.  Stephenson’s books are generally not great storehouses of characterization – they are a box of whizzy fireworks for your brain to set off.   That’s great – it’s fun.  But if that’s what you are going for, get to it.  The reader doesn’t benefit from learning that in this world the science monks are called “avout” rather than “devout” and their convents are called “concents”.   With so many analogues between the avout and the monastaries that we know, why not just use those words and explain the differences?  Stephenson’s path means he’s got to explain both the similar and the dissimilar, which draws the plot to a stop.  That’s why it takes a third of the book before our hero gets moving and the action starts forward.

The Push

Or rather, it shoots off like a rocket.  Once things start moving, they pulse on for 600 pages.  Ah, there you go.  That’s the rush you were waiting for.  Once it starts moving you’ve got dashing stories of survival, ninjas, instructional parables of math and geometry, explorations of Graham-Everett-Wheeler Cosmology, etc.  There’s a lot going on.  Like “Snow Crash” or “The Diamond Age”, Stephenson’s technique is to ramp up the book in a hyperbolic fashion.  Picture an asymptotic curve where there is a long flat head as the book builds the world and characters it needs, then a sudden rising motion when the real story begins to show. As you near the end, the drama, intensity and stakes have risen to staggering heights.  Unlike the previous books, this one actually seems to end.  With a real ending.  And there is resolution for the characters.  This is a pleasant surprise, given the past performance of Stephenson’s novels.

The Good

Once the action begins, it kicks hard and continuously.  Danger and excitement are ever-present, the nature of reality is challenged, exploded, put back together, and then smashed to bits again.

The Bad

You have to read 300 pages of setup.  This isn’t unpleasant, in fact these are some thoroughly written stories and they lay a great foundation for the rest of the book.  The vocabulary choice is also grating.

The Ugly Conclusion

I dug it, but I’m a fan of everything the guy’s written.  Some of the best bits of the book surface once you’ve completed it.  The length and complexity speak to the ideas of the Long Now, which apparently inspired the book.  The constant mapping between concepts and words of our culture and the book world brings to mind the Godelian mappings that  I finally began to understand in Doug Hofstadter’s “I am a Strange Loop”.   Also, no, Enoch Root doesn’t appear in this book.

Books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson

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I finished the book and put up a longer review of Anathem
When I got home from going San Francisco and the Caymans this Sunday I had a pleasant surprise. I had a nice advanced reader’s copy of “Anathem”, the upcoming novel by Neal Stephenson*. I’d heard reports that it was either post-apocalyptic or a space opera, but neither seems an apt description 100 pages in. So far it seems to be another new genre: Long Now Fiction. You’ve got a monastic (“mathic”) order where different sects sequester themselves away from the ever changing world outside for periods of a year, a decade, a century or a millennium.

There’s an awful lot of worldbuilding words to keep track of, which is a bit annoying, and it is starting off slow. That’s fine, though. Stephenson’s books generally don’t move like other books that have a slow rising action to a climax. Stephenson’s books tend to be first immersion in a world for a few 100 pages, then a radical spiraling climax that is vertically asymptotic against the presence of the end of the book. It’ll get exciting soon enough.

The book isn’t due out till September 30th, and assuming that I’ll finish the massive thing by then, do let me know if you’d like it next.

*Apparently I’m quite the lucky duck.  I got this through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program and was one of the 25 recipients out of the 1375 requesters. 

Surveil me better

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I’ve joined the travel site dopplr. It’s pretty simple. Put in trips, connect through them. Useful for the frequent flying types that I’m supposed to become soon. You can see the little badge over there on the left telling you that I’ll be in Mount Snow this weekend.

Except that it tells you West Rutland, because neither Mount Snow or West Dover are understood as places by Dopplr. I picked a town near Killington, but that seems a bit lame to me.

Books: Supercapitalism

Books, Economics, Incentives, Reviews, Save.the.world

Robert Reich wrote a very surprising book on the interplay of capitalism and democracy. His argument is that we’re seeing a lot of problems in our democracy because we have demanded too much of corporations. If, instead, we strip away some of our fiction that corporations are people, we won’t expect them to be noble, or fair, or honorable.

Instead, we should see corporations for what they are. They are legal contractual agreements between groups of people in order to generate profits. They have no purpose or concern other than the flow of capital and profit. Just as we don’t ask a gun to distinguish between good directions to shoot in or bad directions to shoot in, we shouldn’t ask corporations to do anything but obey our laws and generate as much money as they legally can.

At the same time, we shouldn’t allow corporations any entrance into democratic policy, since they aren’t people. Corporations shouldn’t have the ability to sue to overturn laws or any rights to free speech. Since they are legal agreements without morals, without any concept of right or wrong, corporations have no business participating in democratic politics. They aren’t, after all, people.

People can say things like: “I quite like cheap sneakers, but I don’t want to allow anyone to employ children to make them.” Corporations can’t do that. So people can get together and decide what rules corporations play by.

Now, this is good. It’s a good thing to have a book that connects the dots between corporate influence on politics, the changing marketplace, the economics of globalization and the legal concepts underlying corporations. I just wish it didn’t take so long. The last chapter, “A Citizen’s Guide to Supercapitalism” contains the only real proposals and it is 16 pages. The previous 208 pages are all lead-in. Frankly, I got it early on. The book didn’t need quite that much paper.

To be fair, I did have some good insights while reading.

  • A good portion of the decrease in economic security resulted from container ships and other technological advances which led to a decrease in the security of large corporate profits that supported the deals between labor and management.
  • People want to live on charming Main streets, but the people who work there can’t afford to live there. My neighborhood, Cobble Hill, is fantastically charming, but I couldn’t work there and afford to live there. On the flip side, I can afford to pay rent there, but I couldn’t afford to buy there. I earn around 5 times my first salary, but I can’t afford to purchase in the neighborhood I rent in. Oh, how I’ve worked the numbers but it ain’t happening.
  • Fascinating nugget: Sam is a City employee, and her pension is administered by William Thompson, the city comptroller. He has heavily invested in the Fremont Mining Corporation which owns open pit gold mines in Papua New Guinea. They seem to dump toxic waste in fragile river ecosystems, which is legal since they seem to bribe the local officials to make it legal. This sucks, and Sam would never support it but Bill Thompson (he’s now a potential mayoral candidate) just is in charge of maximizing Sam’s pension.

Movies: Black Sheep

Movie, Reviews

Dear Internet,

I am watching a random horror movie called “Black Sheep” that is the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages. It’s a New Zealand horror film about horrible mutant carnivorous sheep. Their bites turn victims into were-sheep.

Were-sheep. The bottom rung of horror monsters.

Also, the acting – it is surprisingly good for a concept this ludicrous. Much better than Peter Jackson’s “Bad Taste” and a thousand times funnier.