Category Archives: Reading

Andrew Sullivan on blogging and essaying

Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful essay in The Atlantic on blogging and what it does for writing – his own and others’. Blogging is a substitute that frees the writer’s mind and increases the premium on orderly thinking:

A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, blogging’s gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.

Good stuff. Read it.

Education and technology – a historic view

Nice review of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz’s The Race between Education and Technology which goes into my ever-expanding pile of books to get. Main point: Income inequality decreased in the first half of the 1900s, then, after 1980, increased again. In chapter 8, available in PDF format, is the following conclusion:

Our central conclusion is that when it comes to changes in the wage structure and returns to skill, supply changes are critical, and education changes are by far the most important on the supply side. The fact was true in the early years of our period when the high school movement made Americans educated workers and in the post-World War II decades when high school graduates became college graduates. But the same is also true today when the slowdown in education at various levels is robbing America of the ability to grow strong together.

Little brother pretty fast

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (available for free download here if you don’t want to buy it) is a "young adult" book on the topic of surveillance and personal freedom and privacy. The story is about Marcus, nicked M1k3y, who after a terrorist attack hits San Francisco gets detained by the DHS, denied his rights, and decides to take revenge. This involves quite a bit of hacking, security, cryptography and subterfuge.

The purpose of this book is both to tell a story and to teach the (young) reader something about personal freedoms, critical thinking and how to preserve your privacy in an increasingly connected and digitized world. This shows – there are some quite detailed discussions of this, somewhat simplified versions of Cory Doctorow’s speeches and writings on these subjects.

I sort of liked the book – it is important from the perspective of raising a generation of youngsters that know enough about the technology to maintain some sort of privacy, and encourage creative thinking – loosely defined as demanding logic and actions in proportion to consequences from the authorities. Cory’s book has gotten to the NYT bestseller list, and deservedly so. This is something to be happy about, for Cory spreads the word of his book electronically (as well as the book) and this nicely vindicates that strategy and points towards the future for aspiring authors. And, as someone struggling to get young people to read about and be interested in technology – not just what it does and how it looks but how it works – I see the value in the book.

But I do wish the literary qualities, such as the plot and the character development, were a bit more ambitions. On the other hand, Neal Stephenson does that, and Little Brother is an excellent introduction to Cryptonomicon, which set the reader up for the Baroque Trilogy and the idea that, well, history matters.

So, highly recommended. Wonder when we will see the first Norwegian translation? (I have translated for Cory before, but am a bit under the weather here. Anyone for a "dugnad"?). It is not like anyone needs to ask permission…

(On a side note, the paper copy I got from Amazon had half of page 197/8 torn out. Rather than sending it back to be replaced (which I know Amazon would do without argument), I printed out those pages from Cory’s web site and put them inside the book. Saves work and time. Same thing as when I switched from a static web page to a wiki for my course syllabi – now the customers, i.e., my students, fix broken links without bothering me…..)

David Foster Wallace dead at 46

image This is sad news indeed. David Foster Wallace was one of my favorite writers. I never made it through Infinite Jest, but loved his essays – on television, cruise ships, and tennis (I, II and III) – with incredible humor, deep knowledge of many an arcane subject and limitless playfulness with language. Side sentences with parentheses with footnotes with footnotes, yet all of it making sublime sense.

And then he goes and hangs himself. What a loss, and what a waste.

(Via Paul Kedrosky.)

CAMRB

Mary Beard wants a campaign for real bookstores, and solicits suggestions for "real" bookstores. Here are my favorites (and woefully incomplete, I know):

  • image The Harvard Book Store, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. A must since Wordsworth disappeared. Good basement with used books and remainders.
  • The Harvard COOP, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. Managed by Barnes and Noble, but with enough sophistication and volume both for staff and clientele that the selection is good and the advice competent, unless you happen upon an employee from the days before B&N took over.
  • City Lights, San Francisco. A bit of a legend and a tad long in the underground tooth, but excellent selection and very knowledgeable staff (even if you arrive in a business suit.)
  • Tronsmo, Oslo. Small bookstore with interesting books (and really good on cartoons, which is not my thing). Truly independent, good for a surprise every time you stick your head in.
  • Blackwell's, OxfordBlackwell’s, Oxford, UK. Enormous and somewhat disorganized, but selection, selection, selection.
  • The Jeffery Amherst Bookshop, Amherst, MA. Only been there once, but liked it a lot (and so did my elder daughter.)

Other suggestions (or, by all means, leave comments over with Mary.)

Classic writing…

ACM Ubiquity re-published something referred to as a classic today, which to me came as a surprise, especially since, well, I wrote that thing in an hour or so as the result of a direct question from John Gehl, former editor. But hey, being called a classic can’t be all bad, can it?

Alternatively, cucumber season is raging across the pond…

Big data in Nature

Nature (the magazine) has an excellent special report on big data, with articles on analysis, history, data centers, and much more. Best of all, it is freely available – enjoy!

Not exactly anathema

Steven Levy goes nuts over Neal Stephenson’s latest over in Wired. And I am on my way over to Amazon….

Seagulls and Pixar

Nemo seagullsThis review (by Michael Hirschhorn) of a new book on Pixar contains the best sentence I read today: "[Intellectual property lawsuits] follow successful entertainment businesses the way seagulls trail fishing boats."

Anyone else remember the "bert, bert, bert"* “mine, mine, mine” seagulls in Finding Nemo? Imagine them with briefcases…..

*see comments…

Shared blindness

Ben Elton: Blind Faith, 2007

Ben Elton describes a society where reason is not allowed – where everything is based on faith and feeling, where everybody has to share what they are doing, where everything is ostensibly permitted, even encouraged, where everyone is famous. By law.

This world is a Web 2.0 version of 1984, nightmarish in its shallowness. Elton manages to make it both scary and believable – aside from the the inevitable screw-ups when it comes to technology (the hero creates some software that is decidedly primitive given real search-engines’ capabilities for sentiment analysis and finding links between information items.

Recommended.

Thinking about warfare, the last 100 years

Martin van Creveld: The Changing Face of War: Combat from the Marne to Iraq , Presidio 2008

Martin van Creveld gained fame for The Transformation of War, a book that should have been read by the USA before venturing into Iraq (see previous review). In this surprisingly succinct volume, he summarizes the changes in thinking about warfare "from Marne to Iraq", showing how war has changed from something conducted in a short and contained spurts by an army via the "total war" first voiced by Ludendorff to today’s prolonged insurgencies, where the perpetrators blend back into the general population and advanced weapons fired from afar only can make the situation worse.

(As a digression, he characterizes the German invasion of Norway as rather risky and badly planned – it worked largely because the Norwegians were unbelievably unprepared.)

van Creveld divides war into two main phases: Before and after the atom bomb. After the atom bomb, total war was no longer possible, since it would mean mutual destruction. Instead, war has (for the most part) become guerilla war, where a militarily equipped power is battling a much weaker enemy, and, because the enemy is weak, become weak themselves.

There is almost no instances military powers successfully fighting insurgents – though since the history of fighting insurgencies are largely written by the losers, who argue that they could have won if not hindered by politicians, the press or lack of resources.

To fight an insurgency, the power in question must be legal, i.e., treat the insurgency like a criminal activity rather than a war (much as the British did in Northern Ireland, where they, incidentally, had a local police force and spoke the language.) Either that (which takes a lot of patience) or they must use cruelly applied force, with openness and without apology (as Hafez Assad did in Syria.) Trying to fight the war from a distance leads to a quagmire, but going in to fight the insurgents with their own means leads to losses and loses the war on the home front.

The book is admirably succinct when it describes the evolution in thinking about warfare up to about 1950 (showing, among other things, the increasing use of the scientific method in weapons and, to a lesser extent, tactics evolution.) It gets a bit repetitive on the question of how to fight insurgency. But the verdict on the US’ fight in Iraq leaves no doubts about what the author thinks about the technical "revolution in warfare" and what it does:

Once the main units of the Iraqi army had been defeated and dispersed, most of the sensors, data links, and computers that did so much to aid in the American victory proved all but useless. In part, this was because they had been designed to pick up the "signatures" of machines, not people. But it was also because these sensors did not function very well in the densely inhabited, extremely complex environments where the insurgents operated. Myriad methods could be used to neutralize or mislead whatever sensors did work. Worst of all, sensors are unable to penetrate people’s minds. As a result, almost four years after the war had started, the American troops still had no idea who was fighting them: Ba’athists or common criminals, foreign terrorists or devout believers. […]

Soaking up almost $450 billion a year, the mightiest war machine the world has ever seen was vainly trying to combat twenty to thirty thousand insurgents. Its ultramodern sensors, sophisticated communications links, and acres of computers could not prevent its opponents from operating where they wanted, when they wanted, and as they wanted; […] To recall the well-known, Vietnam-era song: When will they ever learn? (Ch. 6.5)

van Creveld offers few conclusions, aside from patience, people on the ground and good intelligence, all of which are hard to acquire and maintain. Otherwise, the insurgents will eventually win, if only because the military powers’ only way of winning is not participating.

Formula for spying

Mark Seal has a great article in Wired about how McLaren got hold of Ferrari’s designs and the twists and turns that followed.

What blows my mind is the size of the budgets these guys are willing to throw away. A company like McLaren spends a lot of money and develops technology that eventually goes into production cars (at least, that’s the theory), but with the hundreds of millions spent here, how can anyone recuperate it? Ferrari, at least, has a brand of car to sell, McLaren cooperates with Mercedes, but it still looks like rich man’s game to me.

Anyway, an entertaining story, showing that you better treat your employees right (how could Ferrari management not react before their chief mechanic had spilled the beans?) and do your own scanning if you are hoping to avoid betrayal or getting caught betraying.

You are what you eat, and we eat oil

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, 2006

Michael Pollan is the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, where he basically took on the flood of diet advice and replaced it with “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In this book, he discusses the problem of what to eat today, which is not something most species wonder about, either because food is scarce and they will eat everything they can lay their hands on, or because they are so specialized that they can only eat one kind of food (like koalas and eucalyptus leaves, of pandas and bamboo shoots and leaves.) This choice is faced by all omnivores, such as humans.

The book tracks down the history of three meals: One industrial, one pastoral (i.e., organically grown), and one personal, where Pollan had to make everything himself, including hunting down the meat. Or, in other words, one meal from industrial society, one from the traditionally agricultural, and one from a society of foragers. The further back you go, the more he has to fudge the experience (and the same goes for the producers/foragers, I suspect.)

The industrial part of the book talks about corn, a plant that supplies the basis for most of what we eat (from corn flakes to meat (cattle now eat corn rather than grass) to sweeteners). Corn is highly productive, but cannot exist without human intervention. The rather twisted logic here is that the productivity of the farmer destroys farm life, and may destroy food as well.

The organically grown part is based on an analysis of an organic farm (“small” organic as opposed to “big” organic such as Whole Foods) which relies on local markets, crop and species rotation, and quality rather than quantity for profits. Back-breaking work and battles with a regulatory regime set up for industrialized farming (for instance, the meat processing plant needs to have a bathroom specifically for the USDA inspector).

The foraging part, of course, verges into the artificial – Pollan hunts feral pigs, but does it by SUV and with a high-powered rifle with a scope. But it is fun, and allows for some pretty interesting discussions of our relationship to food.

The book is full of interesting viewpoints and facts, and tells you things that you did not know – for instance that “free-range” chicken means that the chicken have access to grass and air. However, since they only live 8 weeks and have access to grass and air through a door that they don’t dare venture out of, having always lived inside, this does not mean the chicken has had a life that much different from the fully industrialized chicken.

Here is one quote I liked (page 293): “The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from carbohydrates. Food faddists take note […]”

In other words, the book is the supply-side prelude to In Defense of Food. I have not read that one, but it is on my list of books to read, triggered by Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the meantime, I listen to his talk at Google, and so can you:

Cellphones against poverty

Excellent article about how cellphones reduce poverty from New York Times Magazines.

The longest love story

Audrey Nieffenegger: The Time Traveller’s Wife, Vintage, 2004

One of the favorite movies around our house, the kind that you bring out with a bottle of wine when you want to kick back and not think about anything in particular, is Groundhog Day.  The premise is rather simple: Phil, a self-important and cynical weather man, played by Bill Murray, goes to small town to do a rather boring job of reporting on the annual awakening of the groundhog. A snowstorm closes the roads, the team has to stay another night – and when Murray wakes up the next morning, it is the previous day all over again. And so it continues – every day he wakes up to the same day, nobody except him remember what has happened.

Groundhog Day is a great movie not for that simple idea, but for how the movie manages to build on that simple premise. Aside from the one little thing of repeating the same day over and over, nothing Phil does is illogical, as he progresses from enjoyment to despair through development to, eventually, redemption. Anyone seeing it could imagine being Phil. It is a very intelligent comedy.

The Time Traveller’s Wife (the book, that is, I haven’t seen the movie) has a similar concept: The main protagonists are Henry and Clare, "who met when Clare was six and Henry thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. This can happen because Henry time-travels – involuntarily, always showing up buck naked in unexpected places, but very often around Clare. He even meets himself, at various ages. Clare and Henry have to come to terms with the misery of sometimes knowing what is going to happen in the future (which, of course, can be useful if you want to play the stock market) as well as the more practical difficulties of showing up in various places without clothes and with only a dim recollection of where you are and, especially, what time it is.

The novel succeeds for the same reasons that Groundhog Day succeeds: It manages to tell a believable story in an unbelievable setting. Clare and Henry must somehow shape a normal life out of an incredibly difficult situation, and how they do it is both funny and moving – a love story where you can never be sure of anything. At no point does Niederegger veer off into science fiction-like explanations of why Henry has this "rare condition", just as Groundhog Phil never tries to find out why he wakes up to the same day every morning. The book is also delightfully free of New Age-isms and spirituality. Instead, the focus is on the central characters and the relationship between them, how they have deal with the practicalities (stashing clothes in places Henry is likely to turn up, learning to pick pockets and locks to survive) and emotional turmoil. Both Clare and Henry learn things about each other’s futures – how do you deal with knowing that something bad is going to happen, for instance,  do you tell the person about it or not?

This is an extremely well thought out novel, at no point does the time-hopping (not to mention the oral form, where the characters tell their story in short episodes) get tedious (with a possible exception for their wedding, which gets a little contrived and sugary). It is a long love-story (76 years, to be exact) but worth the time spent.

Recommended.

(and thanks to Julie for leaving this one around the house so I could take it with me and make Frankfurt-LA seem a tad bit shorter…..).

Geronotagressiveness

John Scalzi: Old Man’s War

I don’t read much science fiction – so far I think I have managed one Heinlein novel, a thick collection of classical sci-fi short stories (some of them extremely good, such as E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops,) most of what Neal Stephenson has written, and now John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. The latter was available as a free download from Tor Books (you have to sign up for their newsletters to be allowed to download it), and as such an excellent way to check out Scalzi’s serious writing (I am a faithful reader of Whatever, his blog.)

Well, I apologize, shouldn’t-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth and so on, but this was a bit of a disappointment. The starting premise is fine, the language is straightforward, but I kept looking for a plot of some kind, and instead got a very basic picaresque about old people volunteering to be intergalactic soldiers fighting aliens in return for brand new bodies. (Not very picaresque either, since the hero becomes a highly decorated commander as the story progresses.) Entertaining and all that, competently written, the world Scalzi creates and populates is interesting, at least in the beginning, but the lack of any non-obvious plot to drive things forward makes it hard to get enthusiastic about the book.

It is obviously the beginning of a series, but still: Where are the surprises, the plot twists, the exciting insights? Not to mention, where are the personalities – these old people going out to fight a war all seem very cartoonish, without much difference in what they say and do, and certainly not much reflection about the task their are given, a few tactical shrewdnesses excepted. They all seem to shelve a lifetime of experience (and, presumably, thought) in favor of a "well, we would be dead now if it wasn’t for joining up, so dying is no big deal."

I think I know why I don’t read sci-fi so much: Most sci-fi is, to put it bluntly, to the male mind what bodice-rippers are to females. Sci-fi works best, at least for me, when it says something about our own time, which is another way of saying that it works when it takes a current phenomenon and projects it out into the future. Excellent examples include Ann Warren Griffith’s  short story Captive Audience (written in the 50s, about how every product contains advertising, a surprisingly relevant point in these adsensical times); Philip K. Dick’s Second Variety (written about 1953, too), about a future earth which has been evacuated by humans because autonomous weapon systems have taken over; or Neal Stephenson’s novels about virtuality (Snow Crash) and nanotechnology (Diamond age). This approach is hard work, for there has to be science – and thus research – in the fiction, or fiction in the science.

Nevertheless, people read bodice-rippers, and I can’t say Old Man’s War was a total waste of time. It was entertaining in a potato-chip kind of way, great for boring flights and when you want some dessert. But not very filling.

Existential walkabout, in comfort

Walker Percy: The Moviegoer (1960)

Reread this one after 10 years, to see whether if I could understand better what the fuzz is about (The Moviegoer is regularly held up as a major event in American novel-writing.) The protagonist , Binx Bolling, lives a comfortable if nondescript life as a small-time stockbroker in New Orleans, going to movies and hitting on his secretaries. During most of the book goes on a "search", essentially trying to figure out what to do with himself. In the background lurks a changing society and traumatic experiences from Korea. Whether he succeeds or not is not clear by the end of the book, since the most dramatic thing happening is that he takes the train to Chicago from New Orleans and eventually figures out what to do (and whom to do it with).

I don’t know. Somehow I have read this before, be it with Crime and punishment, Age of Reason, Hunger, or even Catcher in the Rye. The main distinction is that Binx Bolling is relatively well off and competent in what he does, even if most of his family and friends do not think much of it. The overwhelming theme of the book is Bolling trying to come to term with whether this comfortable life is all there is. Perhaps the book signaled the start of a more rebellious 1960s (it is comparatively racy for that time) but I think its time, unfortunately, has passed.

Or maybe I am just missing something. Is this really all?

Wisfulness in portions

Neil Gaiman: Smoke and Mirrors

I haven’t read anything by Neil Gaiman, but one of my daughters has a copy of Coraline in her bookshelf. Nevertheless, he comes highly recommended from people I respect, so when I was picking over the airport bookstore in Orlando (admittedly not the most fertile of cultural hunting grounds) before an 18-hour flight to China, Smoke and Mirrors was a natural choice (actually, the only one).

The book is a collection of Gaiman’s early short stories, most of them realistically written with a slight twist of the supernatural. Each story at some point crosses into fairy-tale territory, but does it so discreetly that it seems natural and to be expected. I particularly liked Troll Bridge – about a young boy who meets a troll under a disused railway bridge – and Gold Fish Pond and other stories, which isn’t magical at all (it is a partly fictional reminiscence about a movie writer’s visit to Hollywood.) Gaiman’s stories have a certain wistfulness about them, they are stories about people who want, somehow, to escape their surroundings and eventually do.

The scientific method

I am currently re-reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and came across this section, which is one of the best explanations of the scientific method I know of (explained in terms of motorcycle maintenance, of course). So, here goes:

Continue reading →

The technology canon

My first real boss, Erling Iversen, used to say that there were two kinds of IT people: Those who had read Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and those who hadn’t gotten around to it yet. In his opinion, what you got out of that book said much about how you thought about technology. Which leads me to wonder – do we have a canon of technology writing?

A canon is a list of books that you have to read to consider yourself knowledgeable – or, rather, educated in the classical sense – within a field. Creating lists is always controversial, and canons are more controversial than anything (witness all the discussions when Harold Bloom wrote The Western Canon.

The list I would like to create, though, is rather specialized: It consists of the books any technology thinker should read. I am not sure what I mean by that, aside from wanting to put together a list of books I like and that have influenced me, but hopefully the criteria becomes clearer as the list grows. One criterion is that the book must have stood the test of time, to be relevant even though the technology has changed (and, consequently, a book that I will occasionally re-read). A second (or perhaps it is the same criterion) is that its lessons apply outside the technology it discusses, whihc is another way to say that it will be readable by non-technologists.

Here is a brief start, just off the top of my head:

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
  • How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
  • A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
  • Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age by J. D. Bolter
  • The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
  • The Mythical Man-month by Frederic Brooks
  • Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
  • The Control Revolution by James Beniger
  • Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation by James Utterback
  • The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton M. Christensen
  • Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
  • The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler
  • The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

…and probably others (a whole lot of Internet-oriented stuff missing here), but I am beginning to stray. Anyway, ideas for books that every technology thinker should have read.

Suggestions?