Ceaseless Reader

Now I’m going back to the school year for a bit, because I still owe the blog a lot of posts…

This book was a bit surprising. I had assumed that the book was not as bad as was advertised. After all, if the Machiavellian stuff in it was so evil and repulsive, it wouldn’t have lasted for so long and been read by so many well-educated people. Nontheless, I was still surprised.

The man is downright pragmatic. He acknowledges that there is sometimes a conflict between honor and power. Based on this mindset, he sets out some methods for maintaining power. It’s apparent that he attempts to not bring any morality into play. And even there he fails. He mentions honor a bunch of times and when he talked about one stolen kingdom in particular he made it clear that sometimes the only acceptable action is to be honorable.

If there is a lack of ethics it is there on purpose. The book is not an opinonated piece. It is an instruction manual to power in his time and place and should only be read as such. I thought he showed a lot of insight into the way that people work both as individuals and as groups. Many of its concepts are outdated, but the insights into people remain largely unchanged. One of my favorites was that you should do your damage up front. If you must kill people - fine. Try to do it all in your first week in office. As time goes on, that feeling will fade and people will seee that their current prince is benevolent. The alternative will make people constantly worried and this sort of state is pretty much asking for rebellion or an easy war against you etc.

Recommended, but I liked the Art of War better for similar insights. Of course, they’re both fairly short so you can just read them both :).

This is a formal book with chapter after chapter of theorems, derivations, and all the other fun(?) mathy stuff you can imagine. Brown attempts to solve an issue with Boolean logic that is generally solved by simple assertions that aren’t actually based on math but happen to work. Bertrand Russel (a man some of you might recognize as my favorite writer of philosophy), thought Brown’s work was phenomenal and that it was a much better solution than the established solution that he and some other guy who was working on logic (Whitehead?) had come up with.

If you’re familiar with Euler’s formula and phasors, you’ll know that it’s possible to use imaginary numbers to directly describe oscillation - this is effectively what Brown brings into the world of Boolean algebra. By allowing there to be oscillating states, things like the liar’s paradox are solved by simply allowing their propositions to have imaginary truth values.

About the book… if you’re asking me whether I’d recommend, it the answer is no. If you’re asking me where you get it because it sounds really cool, then I’d grudgingly recommend it and suggest amazon marketplace or something as the book is out of print. I’d probably just get one that’s not in the best shape but affordable…

Controversy, controversy, controversy.

God. I wish I could split this up into a few different books. I think the part where they discuss white America (the first more than half of the book) is fabulous. They give you data, data and more data. The data is somewhat processed, but they tell you how it was processed and why. There is some speculation as to why the data is what it is, but it is clearly labeled as speculation and is not really the important part. I think the take home message is great: intellectual inequality is something we should be aware of. It is a real disadvantage that we would be silly to ignore. Concentrating on things like social class and race is not a complete picture from a sociological perspective. I feel that the case that the authors make for including cognitive capacity among the issues is pretty much airtight. And I feel many people get so upset by what follows that they want to brand everything in the whole book and everything the authors have ever touched as absolute evil. It’s silly not to learn from the good part of this book - cognitive differences are an issue that should not be ignored even if it isn’t particularly politically correct.

As for the next part of the book… well… I think you can learn something from this part too. But it is certainly more of a minefield. In this part of the book, it is clear that politics starts polayuing into it. The issues of race are brought up. And their analysis is harmed by things like coercive wording and sentence structure.

At times, reading this part of the book made me remember a standard magic trick procedure called a force. In a force, you use psychology to try to get your volunteer to choose a particular card. If they don’t, the magician hopefully has some magic trick to follow up with and find the card. But if they happened to pick the forced card then you already know the answer. You can do anything you want. Your trick options are limitless. They can shuffle the cards or even toss them through a shredder and you still know what the answer is.

So. Don’t fall for it. Don’t get forced. But, at the same time, don’t be someone who refuses to pick a card. Just be aware. They can’t actually control your mind. They can just try to channel you into one state of mind. There’s lots of crap, but there’s lots of good data. Read their opinions. Have your defenses up, but please don’t go into it armed to the teeth.

I don’t know what else to say. If you read it, please be open-minded about the data. Please listen to the opinions, but keep your defenses up. Recommended to people who won’t let themselves be pushed around ideologically, but will actually thoughtfully consider the data.

Now here’s a book that I would recommend to just about anybody. If you’re into sci-fi, you’ll love the story. If you’re familiar with the concept of the technological singularity, you’ll find it intriguing. If you’ve never heard of the technological singularity, it does a good job introducing the concept. And then it follows the intro up by doing the best job I’ve seen of extrapolating beyond the singularity. It gives you a good sense of what it means for humanity to cease being the dominant life-form. It’s great. As a bonus for nerds, there a refrences to a bunch of geeky things such as Von Neuman probes, Fermi Paradox and more!

And one of the major characters is a robotic kitty. How could you not read it?

Accelerando can ordered or downloaded for free online at http://www.accelerando.org/

This book is a rarity - believable hard sci-fi that takes the time to develop characters. And it’s got a fun tone and good flow too! If you want to read one book about the singularity, my vote is with Accelerando. If you want to read two, read that and Rainbows End.

Vernor Vinge is the guy who is generally credited with solidifying the concept of the technological singularity. If you’re not familiar with it, either point yourself to wiki or read Vinge’s essay. The very short summary is that if humans get to the point where they can make a greater-than-human intelligence, this new intelligence will have greater abilities and will, logically, be able to make greater intelligences than humans can make. If such a thing does happen, then intelligence will start riding an exponential. Technology has historically already been riding an exponential despite humanities (roughly) constant intelligence. Thus, we’d expect technology made by exponentially increasing intelligences to develop extremely fast. The singularity is the point at which it becomes impossible for a normal human to predict where technology is going in the near-term.

Vinge famously said that he expected the singularity within the next 30 years and “just so that [he's] not guity of a relative-time ambiguity … [he'd] be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.”

His novel takes place around 2020 in what we can consider singularity threshold territory. Computers have evolved to be wearable interfaces that allow you to interact with  virtual environment and medical cures to diseases are being perfected but only for specific conditions. I’d throw in some vague plot architecture that wouldn’t give things away, but this s one of those stories that starts with unconnected characters, so you’ll have to read it. Terrific book, quick read

Rainbows end is available online at http://vrinimi.org/ . The related pictures are probably worth a quick look too.

Well I’ve continued to neglect this website so let’s add in the summer at least. I’ll be very promptly posting about Rainbows End, Accelerando, a bunch of Cory Doctorow, The Laws of Form and maybe more.

I got a Sony Digital Reader for my birthday this year, so you’ll notice that a lot of these books are available for free online. I’ll link to a bunch of them I’m sure. The Digital Reader, by the way, is highly recommended.

Here’s what I owe the blog:

• The Communist Manifesto (Marx)
• Uncle Tom’s  Cabin (Stowe)
• The Origin of Species (Darwin - abridged)
• The Prince (Machiavelli)
• The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

In addition, I’m pretty deep in debt to the blog if I allow technical reading… I think I’ll allow pseudo-technical but not real-technical things up here too. OK. I’ll do this at some point. I’ll even add a task to Outlook.

I just read this book for the second time.

The book is certainly solid ad it captures your attention. The Gunslinger is the beginning of SK’s explanation of his universe. If you haven’t read much SK, you’ll miss a lot in the Dark Tower series. If you have it’s incredibly rich.

That being said, The Gunslinger doesn’t make many (any?) outside references because he wrote it while he was still in college. It’s basically a solid stand-alone fantasy book.

It takes you to a parallel universe where Roland, a cold man with absurd precision and efficiency (notably in killing), is the last representative of an order of (basically) knights. It tells the story of his search for a man (the servant of the servant to the Tower’s guard) who will bring him closer to his ultimate goal the Dark Tower. The book, and actually the series, has a lot of story-telling involved - stories about what once was and what will be. At the end you get a little teaser of what’s to come. There will be three others. And death but not for Roland. And life but not for Roland.

Cute. Exciting. The series is great. But it is far, far greater with some good background in SK. For dark tower background go for The Stand, Insomnia, Salem’s Lot, Eyes of the Dragon and Desperation. I tried to keep that list short. I have a lot of SK…