A book about behavioral economics: psychological experiments to learn how people actually make economic decisions, as opposed to how idealized “homo economicus” behaves in naïve models. When Ariely came to speak at Google, for example, he gave a demonstration of the endowment effect using free copies of this book. It wasn't as dramatic a demonstration as the Duke backetball ticket experiment, but seeing it right in front of our eyes was still pretty dramatic.
A while back, Janet and I were talking about alternate history stories. Janet wondered why there seemed to be so few alternate history stories that focused on World War I. My speculation was that the most obvious alternate world would be one in which there was no Great War, or at least a war that ended quickly—the disaster was so great, so unnecessary and contingent, that it's hard to avoid thinking about a world where it didn't happen. But a story like that would seem less like “what if” than like wishful thinking. So Janet told me that I needed to read John Crowley's “Great Work of Time.” She was right.
I think this is Watts's first novel. It does have its rough spots: there are characters and subplots that seem like they're going to be important but just end up fizzling out. It's still compelling, and it's easy to see the same concerns in this book that show up in Blindsight.
As Alan Furst said when he came to speak at Google, this is a novel about someone who warned about a terrible disaster and wasn't believed. We all know the end of the story.
Furst talked a bit about why he sets all of his books in more or less the same period, the years leading up to World War II. A question he didn't discuss, and it wasn't until some time after the talk that I quite managed to formulate, was why he chooses to write his novels about spies. Do spies actually matter? There was one group of spies in Warsaw in the 30s who mattered very much: Marian Rejewski and the rest of the Polish Cipher Bureau, who made the initial mathematical breakthroughs that made the work at Bletchley Park possible. But this book isn't about that kind of spy.
Not quite Götterdämmerung, but definitely an operatic end to the tetrology. And is it just a coincidence that the sinister ancient superweapon is called Odin?
This series is an odd mixture. There's some broad humor, and parts of the world don't really hang together unless you think of them as jokes, unless you step outside the book and see the author winking at you. Then there's just the sheer joy of invention. Cities on wheels, eating each other! Robot zombie assassins! Robot zombie birds! Dirigible air fleets! Boy pirates with submarines! But you're never far from being reminded about much darker things, like the slaves in the cities' engine rooms, or the Sixty Minutes War that destroyed the American Empire, Greater China, and the rest of ancient civilization.
Nobody told the characters that the world they live in is a joke. In the very first book we meet someone who had an absolutely horrible experience as a child and was left badly scarred in both the literal and figurative sense. That character is twenty years older in this book—still unhappy, despite a seemingly stable life, still scarred, still someone that most other people recoil from, largely for good reasons. Not everyone gets a happy ending.
Cory's first YA book. In large part this is a book about what the US might become if there's another big terrorist attack, if we continue to have leaders who confuse safety with repression, or (less charitably, maybe more accurately) if we continue to have leaders who stoke fear as an excuse for repression. Partly it's a book about resistance, and partly, oddly, a tutorial on security-related topics: cryptography, anonymous routers, webs of trust, even LARP protocols. One summary might be that it's a book about why and how to resist surveillance.
It's a frightening book in parts—probably not as frightening as the reality would be. Ultimately it's a patriotic and optimistic book. I hope the optimism is justified. Perhaps if enough people read this book it'll help make sure it won't come true.
In some ways this book reminded me of Suzy Charnas's Holdfast books: how can the oppressed overthrow an intolerable system of oppression without ceasing to be human themselves? Perhaps it's not too surprising that this is reminiscent of the Holdfast books: it too is part of the "grand conversation" of feminist science fiction, and it was written not too long after Walk to the End of the World.
This book has a 21st century publication date, and I wouldn't have guessed it was written so long ago if I hadn't known; it seemed to me that this book was written with the knowledge of the ways in which the US changed after 9/11. I know that the book was updated over the decades since it was first written, but there's also the depressing possibility that Timmi just got the paranoia and authoritarianism right, without the benefit of future knowledge. [Update: yup. I asked Timmi, and all the rewriting was done before 2001.]
Odd little coincidence that distracted me a bit while I was reading this book: the most despicable of several despicable characters in this book has the same name as a rather famous theoretical computer scientist.
A new Culture book!
Somehow I managed to graduate from high school without having read this book. Well, now I have. Yes, it does deserve its reputation.
I own a paper copy of this book, but I read it on my PDA. Given the subject of this book, it seemed more appropriate.
Incomplete (as of 2008 only half the book has been written), badly outdated in parts, hard to read, and indispensable. Everyone with a serious interest in computers needs to read this.
There are some useful insights in this book, but not enough to justify the book's length. It's repetitive and padded, and should have been half the length. It's useful to be reminded that not every probability distribution is a gaussian, to see some of the implications of power law distributions spelled out, and to see a summary of some of the recent psychological research into cognitive biases, but none of this is particularly earthshaking stuff.
This book is seriously marred by the author's tendency to use insult as a substitute for argument. Toward the end, astonishingly, he writes that “An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.” Did he read his own book? He should have listened to his own advice, and shouldn't have been so eager to sneer at everyone else for being “pompous,” or “nerds,” or the perpetrator of an “intellectual fraud,” or “narrow-minded,” or “sterile” or “dull.”
A novel about con men and gangsters and venture capitalists, set in Palo Alto at the height of the dotcom bubble.
I knew that Fielding had written a satire on Pamela. What I hadn't realized was that he'd written two different satirical responses to Pamela, just a year apart, and that Joseph Andrews was one of them. Maybe someday I should read Pamela.
One thing that occurred to me is that Joseph Andrews probably couldn't have existed if modern copyright laws, and modern interpretations of those laws, had existed in the mid 18th century. Some of the major characters in Joseph Andrews are taken directly from someone else's book, published just a few years earlier. If today we think that fanfic is legally dubious at best, it's hard to see why this wouldn't have been as well.
This is a short book. It's basic message is summed up in the first seven words of the book, repeated several times throughout and, at least in this edition, printed right on the front cover: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Food, that is, as opposed to edible foodlike industrial products.
A big part of this book is an attack on what Pollan calls nutritionism: essentially, the idea that you should think of eating in terms of getting the right balance of a small number of chemicals.
One of the blurbs on the back of the book described this as a novel. Is it one? The text itself suggests no such thing. It reads more like an extended essay, partly personal history and partly discussion. The second half seems like an expanded version of Orwell's “The Spike,” which was published as an essay.
The book is characteristically Orwell: a narrative showing exactly what extreme poverty means from moment by moment, seemingly detached at times but never truly detached because of the personal involvement, followed by a brief discussion of the moral implications—hardly more than a question like “why does this happen?,” or “who does this benefit?,” but all the more devastating for its brevity. No extended argument is necessary because you realize, reading the concluding discussion, that everything you've been reading has been the supporting argument.
Many of the details have changed in the 75 years since this was written, but I suspect that many of the essentials are the same.
Graph algorithms. Most of the book consists of graph generators, some (e.g. GB_GATES) quite whimsical. The section that I got the most out of was the one on minimum spanning tree algorithms, MILES_SPAN. I was especially interested in the Cheriton-Tarjan-Karp algorithm.
This is the fourth or fifth time I've read War and Peace. (Always in translation, alas; even when I was in college my Russian was never good enough to read Война и мир.) The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation came out last year, and has gotten glowing reviews.
I imagine I'm like most modern readers in that I identify more with Pierre than with any other character. This time, more than on previous readings, I noticed the way that he exemplified the theme of freedom and necessity that becomes so important in the epilogue. I was admiring the depiction of Pierre's feeling about his marriage to Hélène, his perception that, desirable or not, it was inevitable and necessary. Most of the important decisions in Pierre's life are similar: he doesn't always know why he does them, he isn't always sure whether they're for the best, but he feels they could not be otherwise. He doesn't feel more free after his epiphany, but his attitude about necessity becomes different.
I imagine I'm also like most modern readers in finding the epilogue disturbing and somewhat dispiriting. The commentary I've read, though, tends to focus on Natasha. She doesn't disturb me; I'm not Denisov, and I don't regret that she has grown up. Her development as a character is (leaving aside for the moment the chamber of horrors that is 19th century gender roles) entirely natural. It's Pierre that I find disturbing: not just because of the disaster that Tolstoy and his readers know is coming, but also that the Pierre who gets into a violent argument with Nikolai seems hardly different from the Pierre who made a fool of himself at Anna Pavlovna's salon in the beginning of the book. Has he really learned anything after all?