book

Mary Roach’s latest and 4th book does not disappoint. Her characteristic wry and very often morbid humor is back. This time she is explaining the intricacies of space travel.

Packing for Mars may be a little bit of a misnomer, because to get to that point she has to get through the history of space travel and all of the insanity that that entails.

I always thought I knew a little bit about outer space, but truly I had no idea. From the first animals in space (monkey’s and dog’s I knew about but there is more), through wax covered sandwich squares, and edible spaceship parts, through barf bags and “egesta” bags as well.

I also thought I had a good grasp on what weightlessness means, but in reality I had no idea.

Last but not least, unfortunately, I think this book has put out of my mind any fancifull ideas of ever going into space myself, though I might try a ride on a parabolic flight which will only set me back $5k, though even that may have been soiled but Mary’s vivid accounts on space sickness.

Douglas Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop, is a somewhat strange and sometimes loopy romp through the nature of consciousness, specifically human consciousness. In many ways the author is desperately trying to stay on the course of scientific objectivity, and many of his arguments seem sound, but we end up with a deeply personal journey that in the end seems as if he has a personal axe to grind with his detractors.

If you stick your hand into a box full of envelopes and squeeze, you will be surprised to perceive something that feels very much like a marble in the center of the box. However, upon examination of the envelopes individually no such marble will be found. This example is the theme that permeates the book, and serves as an analogy of how in our minds we perceive a very real I-ness, we swear something is there but upon closer examination it dissolves into nothingness. How very Buddhist of him. Douglas sees the similarity to this eastern religion too, but for some reason doesn’t like the other nihilistic ideas that come with that territory.

I am readily won over, at least my scientific analytical self is, by Hofstader’s basic arguments, but apparently a lot of people need more convincing, because he spends an inordinate amount of time convincing us. With all of that I feel like the larger question remains unanswered, what separates the animate from inanimate in our universe. I feel like this is the real question, instead of trying to decide the relative amounts of hunekers, souls or consciousness particles in us all.

You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier

The line between a quack and a great thinker is very thin. I found much of this book hard to follow, but if you just let the ideas wash over you Jaron has a lot to offer. His critique of current digital trends, especially in the web 2.0 world, are definitely worth pondering. He is in direct opposition to people like Clay Shirky, whom he calls hive enthusiasts. Lanier believes The Hive will never amount to anything because of the old computer science adage: Garbage In, Garbage Out. His remarks that for all the hoopla about our “new” digital world, things are not that much fundamentally different from when he first started in this field more than 20 years ago, were interesting as well.

What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

More great and thought provoking essays. There is always a lot of fascinating stuff to learn from a Malcolm Gladwell book. This one is a collection of shorter essays, they don’t loose anything in their brevity and you get a lot more breadth. So far I was fascinated to learn why there are so many brands of mustard but really only one ketchup brand and more about the Popeil family history and their secret to success.

Death By Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A great, fun, and science filled romp through the cosmos. Not only do you get a detailed description of what happens when you fall into a black hole, you get some kind of scientific inquiry into almost any apsect of our cosmos. As an astrophysicist Neil touches on everything from our five senses, which in retrospect, seem to be very limited, all the way to the far reaches of the cosmos, which now seems even more mysterious and sublime.

p.s. some really good thoughts in this review of lanier’s book.

All I know is that it was over before I knew it, and I wasn’t really sure what happened. It’s pleasant enough, except for the transgressive stuff which is riveting also in a traffic accident kind of way.

It’s not at all postmodern in the way The New York Trilogy claims to be, there are simply some extra literary devices thrown in that make the story what it is. Without this additional twist, not sure if the story would carry it’s own weight, but perhaps as some have suggested, the narrative itself is the character.

Recently finished Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code. I think I might be in the minority as a perfect audience for this book. I learned a lot from it. But for the general audience it is probably way too technical, and for those who’ve worked on large scale programing projects before it’s probably too much of a rehashing of their very real and annoying reality. It would have been great if it was more accessible for normal folk as it would probably explain a lot for them if they were interested in understanding the peculiarities of programmers and programing in general.

The book is sort of comprised of two halves intertwined. One “half” is the history of programming, its beginnings, notable practitioners, thinkers and its possible (or impossible) futures, sprinkled with psychological forays, technical explorations, and proclamations molded into laws of programming. The other “half” is the author following a very specific large scale programming project called Chandler, and its seeming inability to ever move forward despite great amounts of time, programmers and money being thrown at it. While it’s interesting to have a real world example in the book (it’s exciting to see they’ve finally reached v1.0!), and there is much to learn from it, Rosenberg might have done better to drop this half of the book entirely.

First of all, as he himself points out repeatedly, programmers are not good at learning from history and the previous mistakes of others, but more importantly, that way even though Chandler might have taken 3+ years of work, at least reading the book wouldn’t have felt like it was taking that long.

Jeffrey Brown’s latest? graphic novel/book is more of the same great stuff I think he is known for. Quirky, short, funny, sad, bittersweet, sometimes self-deprecating, genuine, snippets of everyday life.

This one has more of a biographical arc than previous books, you get to see some more childhood glimpses and a lot more backstory from his art school days. You even get to see how clumsy came about.

I love his drawing style and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage i.e. The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers is really quite fascinating. There were two things that really stood out for me.

For one, I couldn’t believe how technologically advanced information sharing was in the late 1800’s. I never even heard of a visual telegraph and had no idea pneumatic mail tubes were so advanced back then, that one could even send a cat from Brooklyn to Manhattan by them. Add to that the electric telegraph, which is the star of the book, with which people were having online-weddings, using it with complicated encryption schemes and of course scammers and spammers were all over the technology.

Which leads me to the second revelation, I was fascinated to find out how closely the telegraph revolution mirrored our own information explosion in the age of email and the “new” internet. I think I might have to agree with Standage when he claims that Time-traveling Victorians arriving in our time would be much more bewildered by our heavier than air flying machines and space flight, “as for the Internet – well, they had one of their own,” in short, they would probably be unimpressed.

I found Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk – How Randomness Rules Our Lives to be a pretty fascinating read. It definitely fits into the pop-science category, so if you want hard-core science or even math it’s probably not for you. But with all of it’s historical interjections, sociology, psychology, gambling tidbits and surprising facts about how our brains handle randomness [hint: badly!], on the whole, it worked for me!

One random, no pun intended, no really, quote that I liked has to do with the fact that we really don’t like/understand things that are truly random. For example when iPods first came out the random playback setting truly was random, with the result that occasionally a song would get repeated or played back-to-back, but to our minds that’s not random. Apple’s response, as explained by Steve Jobs was to make the feature “less random to make it feel more random.” Sums up the human/randomness relationship in a nutshell.

However, the overall lesson I learned from this book, is one Mlodinow comes back to again and again, in different forms, throughout the book. It’s best summed up by this quote from IBM pioneer Thomas Watson: “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.” It might sound negative but really it’s an encouragement, don’t get discouraged by failure and instead respond with even more attempts. With the way success works, governed by chance more than we realize, eventually you will succeed.

wow. somewhat of a sublime experience reading this little gem. really great but also unhinges you a little.

I can’t believe I’ve never hear the story of Kaspar Hauser before. (I highly recommend you read this story first, before you look him up on the internets.) do yourself a favor go read this book, it will only take a little while and it’s worth it. thanks diane obomsawin!