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Seth Godiin's Tribes

I've read most of Seth Godin's books and I'm a daily reader of his blog. But his latest book, Tribes, really spoke to me. When I read, I highlight or underline, make notes in the margins and, in recent years, post my favorite parts here. [Free audio version of book for non-readers]

I struggled to find one pull that captures the idea behind Tribes and decided on this one. Lots more after the jump.

"Managers manage by using the authority the factory gives them. You listen to your manager or your lose your job. A manager can't make change because that's not his job. His job is to complete tasks assigned to him by someone else in the factory.
   
Leaders, on the other hand, don't care very much for organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. They use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them." pg 22

I did my stint (17 years) in management before clawing my way down to my current job and I can say without a doubt that I have found more opportunities for leadership in my current position than my former. Read this book.

Henry's blog as book

Some months ago I mentioned to Henry that he could have his blog printed as a book. He checked out a few services, pulled out some of his favorite posts and had them crank out a hard-cover book. I think they even have a name for this, "vanity press."

I was impressed by the quality of the paper, binding, etc. The only thing that prevents me from doing one of these is having to select the posts. I'm all about digital and online and all that but I do love the smell and feel of books and it would be fun to have one on the shelf that I wrote.

Things could be a lot worse

From Victor Gischler's Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse:

"No single thing had doomed (the) planet. Rather it had been a confluence of disasters. Some dramatic and sudden, others a slow, silent decay.

The worldwide flue epidemic had come and gone with fewer deaths than predicted. Humanity emerged from that long winter and smiled nervously at one another. A sigh of relief, a bullet dodged.

That April the big one hit.

So long feared, it finally happened. The earth awoke, humped up its spine along the San Andreas. The destruction from L.A. to San Francisco defied comprehension. The earthquake sent rumbles across the Pacific, tsunamis pounding Asia. F.E.M.A immediately declared its inadequacy and turned over operations to the military. The death toll numbered in the millions, and nothing --not food nor fuel-- made it through West Coast seaports. The shortages were rapidly felt across the Midwest. Supermarkets emptied, and no trucks arrived to resupply them.

Wall Street panicked.

Nine days later a Saudi terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in a large tote bag on the steps of the Capitol building. Both houses of Congress were in session. The president and vice president and most of the cabinet were obliterated.

The secretary of the interior was found and sworn in. This didn't sit well with a four-star general who had other ideas. Civil war.

Economic spasms reached the European and Asian markets. Israel dropped nukes on Cairo, Tehran and targets in Syria. Pakistan and India went at it.
China and Russia went at it. The world went at it. It was pretty much all downhill from there."

Quotes from Anathem

"I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I am almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension." -- Neal Stephenson's Anathem (pg 543)

"All the story had been bled ut of their lives." (pg 414)

"...in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that's why we can't do anything when we're sleeping: it's when we work hardest." (pg 366)

"...we do not perceive the physical universe directly, but only through the intermediation of our sensory organs." (pg 529)

"just as the government was falling apart"

From Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, published in 1976. 22 years before Google; 29 years before YouTube; 32 years before the Bail Out/Melt Down.

"The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.

He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means. And even the word "library is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old one. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeros. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.

Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid."

The Rise of the Numerati

My bedside table is stacked with good books waiting to be read. A true poverty of riches. Joining some wonderful fiction is The Rise of the Numerati (non-fiction) by BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker. ("With the explosion of data from the Internet, cell phones, and credit cards, the people who can make sense of it all are changing our world.") From the introduction:

"When it comes to producing data, we're prolific. Those of us wielding cell phones, laptops, and credit cards fatten our digital dossiers every day, simply by living. Take me. As I write on this spring morning, Verizon, my cell-phone company, can pin me down within several yards of this café in New Jersey. Visa can testify that I'm well caffeinated, probably to overcome the effects of the Portuguese wine I bought last night at 8:19. This was just in time for watching a college basketball game, which, as TiVo (TIVO) might know, I turned off after the first half. Security cameras capture time-stamped images of me near every bank and convenience store."

I'm looking forward to discussing this one with my friend Henry who has also noticed the growing influence of databases on our lives.

American Photobooth

Boing Boing is truly "A Directory of Wonderful Things." Like American Photobooth, a new illustrated history of photobooths by photographer Nakki Goranin.

"Goranin doesn't much care for the mall's machine, which is digital—the print quality is not what it used to be. But, she says, there are only about 250 authentic chemical booths left in the United States...

Before the photobooth first appeared, in the 1920s, most portraits were made in studios. The new, inexpensive process made photography accessible to everyone. "For 25 cents people could go and get some memory of who they were, of a special occasion, of a first date, an anniversary, a graduation," Goranin says. "For many people, those were the only photos of themselves that they had."

Because there is no photographer to intimidate, photobooth subjects tend to be much less self-conscious. The result—a young boy embracing his mother or teenagers sneaking a first kiss—is often exceptionally intimate. "It's like a theater that's just you and the lens," Goranin says. "And you can be anyone you want to be."

I have lots of photos of my sweety and a particular fondness for these, taken in one of the pre-digital booths. She really doesn't seem very self-conscious in these.

Many of my acquaintances are very good photographers. They have expensive equipment and take it seriously. I am way down on the other end of the spectrum. I take a lot of photos and don't worry too much about the quality. I throw 'em up on flickr (and into iPhoto) and move on. Like high school typing class, I've opted for speed over accuracy. So the old photobooth appeals to me on that level.

PS: I could not guess the hours I have spent scanning photograph during the past ten years. Every so often I burn a CD and take it to the safe deposit box. Other than our pups and Barb, I can't think of anything I value more. And I must add that the Mac --and iPhoto in particular-- has made it possible to manage all my digital images. I keep about 1,700 on this MacBook and can find an image with a minimum of effort.

PPS: Speaking of photobooths... I'm told one of the most popular applications on the Mac is Photo Booth, loosely based on the original.

Hard cover virtual reality

While we wait for the virtual reality promised by Ray Kurzweil (and others), I'll make do with with immersing myself in good books. I have two that should get me to Seattle and back:

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse by Victor Gischler

Mortimer Tate was an insurance salesman on the verge of a nasty divorce when he holed up in a mountain cave in Tennessee and rode out the end of the world. Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse begins nine years later, when he emerges into a bizarre landscape filled with hollow reminders of an America that no longer exists.

Hit and Run by Lawrence Block

Keller's a hit man. For years now he's had places to go and people to kill. But enough is enough. He's got money in the bank and just one last job standing between him and retirement. In Des Moines, Keller stalks his designated target and waits for the client to give him the go-ahead. And one fine morning he's picking out stamps for his collection at a shop in Urbandale when somebody guns down the charismatic governor of Ohio.

I'm not familiar with Gischler but he's got a knack for titles. I'm a long-time fan of Lawrence Block. If you've never been on one of Keller's hit jobs, you're in for a treat.

The technological singularity

The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence. [Wikipedia]

I'm clawing my way through Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. It's not an easy read. Lots of charts and graphs and stuff I skipped in college. But it's a wonderfully optimistic view of the near future.

"I set the date for the Singularity --representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability-- as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today."

"Despite the clear preponderance of nonbiological intelligence by the mid-2040s, ours will still be a human civilization. We will transcend biology, but not our humanity."

I'm only about a third of the way through the book but I think "transcend biology" might be good news if I'm still around in 2045. I'll be 93 and in serious need of a tune-up.

I originally posted this on 8/13/08 and re-post here with some of my a-ha's.

Body of Lies: Good book, high hopes for movie

It's a rare thing indeed when a movie lives up to the promise of the novel. The Bourne movies pulled it off and I have my fingers crossed for Body of Lies, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe. I just finished reading the novel and highly recommend it.

"...the slow swarm of spinning things..."

We don't think of what we do here as Writing. It feels more like assemblage. Pasting together the little bits and pieces of the web and life. An idea best captured in one of my favorite passages (pg. 274) from William Gibson's Count Zero, originally published in 1986. It is the middle volume of the Sprawl trilogy, which includes Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

"She caught herself on the thing's folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist's drill ... They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semiautonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundred of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.

Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past.

A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat ... Endless, the slow swarm of spinning things..."

I love the image and I love the idea of an artificial intelligence creating art. In this story, futuristic Joseph Cornell style boxes.

Novel only missed by eight years

I'm reading (for the 4th or 5th time) The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters. One of the minor characters in the novel, written in 1991, is Johathan Water, the black president of the United States. Here are a couple of paragraphs from page 120:

"President Waters had been elected in 2016, on a platform that focused on domestic renewal and on bridging the gap between the increasingly polarized elements in American society.

The candidacy of Jonathan Water succeeded on the premise that all Americans could live together. He promised education, urban renewal, and opportunity, and he was a handsome, magnetic man, who spoke in the rhetoric of Yale rather than the Baptist Church. A campaign-season joke called him the white-man's black and the black-man's white... and he felt like the right man for the times to a bare majority of the citizens of his country. He defeated an opponent who was a foreign policy expert, but who had few domestic solutions with which to inspire a troubled nation."

Is it just me, or does that have a familiar ring to it?

"The End of the American Century"

The War in 2020 is a terrific read. I'll bet I've read it every 4 or 5 years since it was published in 1991. Wikipedia classifies the novel as "military-adventure."

"The novel begins in the year 2005, when the South African Defense Force, equipped and trained by Japan, seizes mineral-rich areas of Shaba Province in Zaire. The United States sends the XVIII Airborne Corps along with associated air and naval assets to repel the aggression. The American expeditionary force is defeated due to a combination of technological inferiority (the South Africans' Japanese equipment has such innovations as onboard battle lasers,) lax security (a squadron of USAF B-2 Spirit bombers is destroyed on the ground by South Africans and local guerillas) and poor intelligence.

The American collapse is so swift that the XVIII Airborne Corps attempts to surrender. When the surrender offer is ignored, the American President orders a nuclear strike on Pretoria, forcing a cease-fire and a South African withdrawal from Zaire. The political cost paid by the United States is very high; post-war epidemics, and economic and political conflict with Japan reduces American power and influence. These events are summarized by a newspaper headline that reads: "THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY".

Author Ralph Peters tells a great story. If you're digging Afghanistan and Iraq, you'll love The War in 2020.

"The future belongs to those who take the present for granted."

My last post on Clay Shirky's terrific book, "Here Comes Everybody." I believe and hope that we're in the midst of a revolution. Mr. Shirky makes the case far better than I ever could.

"I'm old enough to know a lot of things just from life experience. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that complicated things like software and encyclopedias have to be created by professionals. In the last fifteen years I've had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because they have stopped being true."

I've posted a few times that I have more faith in technology than people but this book has made me rethink that.

Americans don't read

Cult of Mac: "During Macworld, Steve Jobs told the New York Times that Apple will not make an e-book reader like Amazon’s Kindle because Americans don’t read any longer. He cited a specific number: 40 percent of Americans read a book or less a year, he said." [emphasis mine]

"Jobs may have been referring to a November report from the National Endowment of the Arts, To Read or Not To Read, which found that nearly 50 percent of 18-24 year-olds do not read at all for pleasure. Described as the most complete survey of reading trends, the report says Americans aged 15-24 spend two hours a day watching TV, but only 7-10 minutes reading. This includes reading for school or college."

Six out of ten Americans don't read one book a year? That amazes me and it doesn't.

T is for Trespass

If you're a Sue Grafton fan and have not read her latest Kinsey Millhone mystery, you're in for a treat. T is for Tresspass (#20 in the series) is about "identity theft; elder abuse; betrayal of trust; the breakdown in the institutions charged with caring for the weak and the dependent."

This was a real page-turner. Perfect for a snowy weekend.

"War hasn't been profitable for decades"

I recently read Halting State by Charles Stross. It's science fiction (for lack of a better description) set in 2012 (in Scotland and/or cyberspace). You can read the description on Amazon. A couple of paragraphs have been haunting me for a few days. Not sure they'll make much sense out of context, but I include them here for future reference:

"This is the twenty-first century, and we're in the developed world. You're probably thinking wars are something that happen in third-world shit-holes a long way away. And to a degree, you'd be right. Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn't really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree -- his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn't invaded Poland and france -- and it's even worse today. When the Americans tried it in Iraq, they spent nine times the value of the country's entire oil reserves conquering a patch of desert full of  -- sorry, I'm rambling. Pet hobby-horse. But anyway: Back in the eighteenth century, von Clauswitz was right about war being the continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture's changed. It's all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we're facing is a real headache -- a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon."

Who is we? That's the question you're asking yourself...

" 'We,' for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in -- call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People's Republic of China, and India. American isn't in play -- they've only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they've got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat. It's exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure --Europe's-- is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there's this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out."

I find joy only on the Internet

It just doesn't get any closer to home than this. Don't miss Scott Adams' new book, "Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Ignores Helpful Advice"

HaltinG StatE by Charles Stross

Publishers Weekly: "This brilliantly conceived techno-crime thriller spreads a black humor frosting over the grim prospect of the year 2012, when China, India and the European System are struggling for world economic domination in an infowar, and the U.S. faces bankruptcy over its failing infrastructure. Sgt. Sue Smith of Edinburgh's finest, London insurance accountant Elaine Barnaby and hapless secret-ridden programmer Jack Reed peel back layer after layer of a scheme to siphon vast assets from Hayek Associates, a firm whose tentacles spread into international economies. The theft is routed through Avalon Four, a virtual reality world complete with supposedly robbery-proof banks. As an electronic intelligence agency trains innocent gamers to do its dirty work, Elaine sets Jack to catch the poacher."

Yum!

PS: The final Harry Potter book was long(er than it needed to be), boring and depressing. Sorry, Mrs. R, I loved the others.

Email vs. F2F

"Some complain that e-mail is impersonal -- that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. some would say that's not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately."

-- Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson (pg. 800)

Surrendering the rule of law

"A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.

Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is? If you are, you let the terrorists win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. that's why the call him 'terrorist.' He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society."

-- Spook Country, William Gibson (pg. 136-137)

My Library Widget

I wouldn't have thought I'd be a widget guy but my side bar is practically bristling with the little buggers. Okay, I've only got two. My beloved Google Shared Items and a little flickr badge.

Joining them is the My Library widget. It randomly pulls covers from My Library Thing. You are what you read.

Who's reading (and who's not)

The Harry Potter buzz reminded me of an earlier post (exactly one year ago today) on American reading habits. That post linked to a bunch of stats on reading habits at ParaPublishing.com, including:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57% of new books are not read to completion.
• Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.
• Customers 55 and older account for more than one-third of all books bought.

If you can point us to more recent data, leave a comment. I want to believe these stats are wrong but have no reason to doubt them.

Spook Country by William Gibson

I've ordered the new Harry Potter book but I'm not wetting my pants in anticipation. That honor is reserved for Spook Country, the new novel by William Gibson. It comes out August 7th.

This could be a problem if Amazon gets the book to me before I leave for Gnomedex. I don't want to dilute my reading experience with an airplane/hotel read. Do I have the willpower to save the book for my return? We'll see.

Spook Country is Gibson's first novel since Pattern Recognition and you can find brief character descriptions on his website. While you're there, you might enjoy the video interview with the author.

On speaking differently

"Men who believe they are accomplishing something by speaking, speak in a different way from men who believe speaking is a waste of time." pg.372 of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

I love this book and and discover new delights every time through it.

The Dip: Knowing when to quit, and when to stick

"Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point-really hard, and not much fun at all. And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you're in a Dip -- a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it's really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try.

What really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly, while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt -- until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.

Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip-they get to the moment of truth and then give up -- or they never even find the right Dip to conquer." [Squidoo]

I don't blame Mr. Godin for wanting to make a buck, but this little "book" (about 70 tiny pages) should have been an eBook. Which I probably would not have bought, so... there you go.

But it brought back some memories.

It only took me about 3 months (in 1970) to decide I did not want to be a lawyer. I quit and I quit early. I then spent about a year as a Postal Inspector before calling it quits. I remember my boss urging me to stick it out.

I'm a Seth fan and found The Dip worth the hour it took to read. A few quotes after the jump.

Everything Is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger's latest book --Everything Is Miscellaneous-- is a philosophical look at "the power of the new digital disorder." A few nuggets:

"Individuals thinking out loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity. It's not whom you report to and who reports to you or how  you filter someone else's experience. It's how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the links.

It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence. (p.230)

"A playlist is an important means of self-expression. The motivation is to say, 'This is who I am, and you can find out who i am by knowing what I love.'" Attributed to Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. (p.159)

"Physical limitations on how we have organized information have not only limited our vision, they have also given the people who control the organization of information more power than than those who create the information. Editors are more powerful than reporters, and communication syndicates are  more powerful than editors because they get to decide what to bring to the surface and what to ignore.(p.89)

"Facts are that about which we no longer argue." (p.214)

"A span of expertise is about as long as a shelf in a library." (p.205)

Republicans and Democrats

I do love a Lucas Davenport novel. Nothing heavy, fun read. The latest --Invisible Prey-- includes a brief exchange between Lucas and his boss, Rose Marie, on the difference between Republicans and Democrats:

"Wonder why with Republicans, it's usually fucking somebody that get them in trouble. And with the Democrats, it's usually stealing?"

"Republicans have money. Most of them don't need more. But they come from uptight, sexually repressed backgrounds, and sometimes, they just go off. Democrats are looser about sex, but half the time, they used to be teachers or government workers, and they're desperate for cash. They see all that money up close, around the government, the lobbyists and the corporate guys, they can smell it, they can taste it, they see the rich guys flying to Paris for the weekend, and eating all the good restaurants, and buying three thousand-dollar suits. They just want to reach out and take some."

-- Invisible Prey, John Sandford (page 141)

This Perfect Day

If you're familiar with Ira Levin at all, it's probably through some of the movies based on his novels (Rosemary's Baby, The Boys from Brazil, The Stepford Wives, Sliver). My favorite Levin novel, This Perfect Day, hasn't (to my knowledge) made it to the big screen. It describes a scary future:

"Uniformity is the defining feature; there is only one language and all ethnic groups have been eugenically merged into one race called "The Family". There are only four personal names for men, and four corresponding names for women. Instead of surnames, individuals are distinguished by a nine-character alphanumeric code. Everyone eats "totalcakes", drinks "cokes" and wears exactly the same thing - every day.

The world is ruled by a central computer called UniComp which has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of regular injections so that they can never realize their potential as humans. They are told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, when to reproduce, and which job they will be trained for. Everyone is assigned a counselor who acts somewhat like a mentor, confessor, and parole agent; violations against 'brothers' and 'sisters' by themselves and others are expected to be reported at a monthly confession."

I read This Perfect Day in 1970 (the year it was published). The telecomps used by counselors to remotely connect with UniComp sound remarkably like wi-fi enabled laptops. Fortunately, instead of connecting with a single all-powerful computer, we're connecting with lots of little ones...and each other.

On a more metaphysical plane, This Perfect Day poses the question: Are we really as "awake" and "conscious" as we think we are? My latest re-read reminds me --once again-- trust yourself, don't trust governments.

Why do you want to be president?

"I'd like to be in charge for just five minutes. Balance the books. Get us out of debt. Be nice to our friends, tell our enemies to fuck off. Clean up the air and the water. Throw corporate crooks in the clink. Put dignity back in government. Fix things."

-- Randolp K. Jepperson. Boomsday by Christopher Buckley.

"In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream"

Christopher Buckley (Boomsday) gives us this wonderful play on the tagline from the 1979 scifi classic, Alien ("In space no one can hear you scream.")

More fictional software: RIP-ware

BADMAP is an acronym for Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predictor. It works like this:

" A person's DNA profile, family history, mental history, lifestyle profile, every variable --how many trips to the grocery per week, how many airplane flights, hobbies, food, booze, number of times per month you had sex and with whom, everything down to what color socks you put on in the morning-- were all fed into the software. RIP-ware would then calculate and predict how and when you'd die. In the testing, they had programmed it retroactively with the DNA and lifestyle profile of thousand of people who had already died. RIP-ware predicted their deaths with an accuracy of 99.07 percent. In a simulation, it predicted the death of Elvis Presley -- just four months from he actual date of his demise. The ultimate "killer app."

Insurance companies had been working on similar programs. What a windfall it would be for them if they could sell life insurance to someone they knew was going to live another forty years--and conversely decline life insurance to someone the computer predicted would be pushing up daisies within two years.

Another field of vast potential were the old folks' homes. typically, these demanded that a prospective resident turn over his and her entire net worth in return for perpetual care. You could live two years or twenty years; that was their gamble. But if a nursing home knew,in advance, that John Q. smith was going to have a fatal heart attack in 2.3 years while watching an ad for toenail fungus ointment on the evening news, they would much rather have his nest egg as advance payment than that of, say, Jane Q. Jones, who RIP-ware predicted would live another twenty-five years and die at the ripe old age of 105.

Page 119, Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley

Fictional Software: Spider Repellent

"You loaded the software and typed in the search words. Say you'd been arrested for drunk driving or soliciting a prostitute, or you'd been in a gossip page biting the ear of some pretty young thing in a nightclub. Or, for that matter, you had been charged by the SEC with swindling your shareholders. You typed in your name, along with "drunk driving" or "prostitute" or "ear" or "embezzling." Spider Repellent found all the references to you on the Web and --deleted them."

Page 117, Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley

Is such a thing possible? Does it already exist? No idea. Would people pay anything to get their hands on it if did exist? Oh, yes.

Thank you for dying

The new novel by Christopher Buckley proposes a way to fix the Social Security mess. From the BusinessWeek review:

"As the baby boomers shuffle into their sunset years, Uncle Sam will hand them a bundle of juicy tax breaks and assorted perks in return for agreeing to a painless lethal injection at age 65. Too draconian? Not to worry. A second option would give slightly less generous benefits to those who prefer to hang around to age 70."

Only the genius who gave us Thank You for Smoking (the novel, not the movie) could make us laugh at something so serious. And, just so you know, I never trusted our government enough to think there would be anything in the fund by the time I need it and I'm not counting on it.

Oh yeah, the main character is "Cassandra Devine, a 29-year-old Washington public-relations executive by day and diva blogger by night." (talk about a great stripper name).

Jan Hindman: "There Is No Sex Fairy"

Jan Hindman is the author of "There Is No Sex Fairy," a stinging indictment of those who think not talking about sex is the best way to protect children from abuse and a how-to on "raising sexually respectful children."

"Of course we love our children. We raise them to be Baptists, Catholics and Mormons. We teach them how to do Little League, and how to make a good omelet. But when it comes to sex, we do nothing. We just hope the Sex Fairy will zap them in the crotch when they walk down the aisle to get married and magically, they will turn into sexually healthy adults."

Ms. Hindman gave one of today's keynotes at a child abuse conference in Jefferson City. I was there helping a couple of clients blog the event.

I don't have children and didn't expect to hear anything very interesting or relevant (for me) from the speakers, but Ms. Hindman blew me a-way. She was a fantastic speaker. Funny, passionate...did I mention funny? She was just damned good.

She spoke for an hour but I encourage anyone with children (or planning to have some someday) to download the file and listen. [62 min 24 meg MP3]

Ever wonder how we can have so many sick fucks in this country? Ms. Hindman explains.

One more thing. When asked how she'd like to be introduced, she answered: "I'm fun and I dance close."

Spook Country

Spook Country is William Gibson's newest novel. According to amazon.com it will be released on August 7, 2007. Fragments of the novel have been posted non-sequentially on Gibson's blog for some time now, and have led to much speculation on the content and plot of the novel.

From the US publisher Putnam's catalog:

"Tito is in his early 20s. Cuban by ancestry, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a Nolita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.

Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn’t exist yet, which is fine, she’s used to that, but it seems to be actively preventing the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they begin to exist. That would be odd, and even a little scary, if Hollis allowed herself to think about it much, which she can’t afford to do.

Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription anti-anxiety drugs, but he figures he wouldn’t survive 24 hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying the little bubble-packs. What Brown is up to Milgrim can’t say, but it seems to be military - at least, Milgrim’s very nuanced Russian is a big part of it, as is breaking into locked rooms.

Bobby Chombo is a 'producer', and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a trouble-shooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him."

Gibson is far and away my favorite author. Yet another reason to go on.

Futurism: Glancing sideways

William Gibson: "The thing that's going to be quaint about "cyberspace" (that already is, really) is the inherent assumption that it's a realm unto itself; that it's in any way elsewhere or other. Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism."

Life After Death

"A must read for everyone who will die." That's how one reviewer describes Deepak Chopra's "Life After Death." I ordered the book after seeing Dr. Chopra on The Colbert Report. The title pretty much describes the book which got a fair amount of highlighter (my measure of good non-fiction). Here's one graf from page 239:

"In spiritual terms the cycle of birth and rebirth is a workshop for making creative leaps of the soul. The natural and the supernatural are not doing different things but are involved in transformation on separate levels. At the moment of death the ingredients of your old body and old identity disappear. Your DNA and everything it created devolve back to their simple component parts. Your memories dissolve back into raw information. None of this raw material is simply recombined to produced a slightly altered person. To produce a new body capable of making new memories, the person who emerges must be new. You do not acquire a new soul, because the soul doesn't have content. It's not "you" but the center around which "you" coalesces, time after time. It's your zero point."

I've never studied or researched reincarnation, but I've always had a curiosity about and openess to the idea. In 1988 I wrote:

"As I think about the idea of a past existence, I feel a fondness for this “earlier me”. A sense of gratitude for whatever spiritual progress he was able to achieve. At the same time, I feel a sense of anticipation or expectation for my “next life”. And some responsibility to that future self. I’d like to move him (or her?) along as far as I can on this “cosmic lap.” To move him closer to…a perfect consciousness? Nirvana?"

"Mixed in with all of that is a sense of relief that I don’t have to complete everything in this lifetime. This is not the only shot I’ll get. And this awareness is vital because we all know --consciously or subconsciously-- that we won’t “get it all done” in a spiritual sense. We hope (and work) for progress but a single" lifetime seems hopelessly short."

Upon rereading the full post, I'm struck by how close I got (to Dr. Chopra's explanation), given my complete ignorance.

I confess I could never stretch my common sense and logic (and faith?) around many of the stories in the Bible. And my recent read of Richard Dawkins' case for atheism (The God Delusion) didn't convince me. But I really enjoyed Life After Death and will read more by Dr. Chopra.

For Dummies Book Cover Generator

I don't think of myself as "expert" in any field. If there were an area where I have some experience and might once have considered myself proficient, perhaps it would have been affiliate relations. Specifically, state radio network affiliate relations. I did a lot of that over a 17 year period, mostly with good results.

While I'll never write the book, I can at least see what the cover might look like. [Larger image] Make your own.

Wild Fire

From Nelson DeMille's latest novel, Wild Fire:

During the Reagan administration, the American government devised and put into place this secret protocol named Wild Fire. What Wild Fire is, is the nuclear obliteration of the entire Islamic world by means of American nuclear missiles, in response to a nuclear terrorist attack on America.

For Wild Fire to be a reliable deterrent, as Mutually Assured Destruction was, it cannot be kept a complete secret. In fact, since the Wild Fire plan was implemented, the heads of all Islamic governments have been notified by succeeding administrations in Washington that an attack on an American city with a weapon of mass destruction would automatically ensure an American nuclear retaliation against fifty to one hundred cities and other targets in the Islamic world.

Wild Fire is seen by the American government as a very strong incentive for these countries to control the terrorists in their midsts, to induce these countries to share information with American intelligence agencies, and to do whatever they need to do to keep themselves from being vaporized.

In DeMille's story, some right-wing loonies get their hands on some Soviet suitcase nukes and decide to blow up a couple of American cities, blame it on the terrorists, and turn Sand Land into molten glass.

I googled "Wild Fire" and found myself on the Library of Congress website, looking at Senate Report 105-200 - Department of Defense Appropriation Bill, 1999. Just search the page for "Wild Fire" and you'll find the reference but no explanation. Probably nothing but figured I'd note it here.

This is just something an imaginative writer came up with, right? Like most of DeMille's novels... Wild Fire is a thriller.

Wild Fire is a nice companion read to Scott Adams' The Religion War.

Are Bush and bin Laden on the same side?

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains "why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages." The following excerpt is from an article at Salon.com:

We're seeing a rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning theocracy in the U.S. and its allies, the theocrats in the Islamic world. They are fighting the same battle: Christian on one side, Muslim on the other. The very large numbers of people in the United States and in Europe who don't subscribe to that worldview are caught in the middle.

Actually, holy alliance would be a better phrase. Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

The Religion War

Excerpts from The Religion War, by Scott Adams:

"The Internet (is) God's central nervous system, connecting all the thinking humans, so that one good thought anywhere could be available everywhere. The head would know what the feet were feeling. It would be an upper consciousness, above what the human beings that composed it would understand." (Pg.151)

"God is everything, all the matter and empty space that now exists, or ever will exist. He expresses his preference in the invisible workings of gravity, probability, and ideas. God is that which is unstoppable, permanent, all-powerful, and by its own standards perfect. God was in no hurry. He was reforming. He didn't think in the way that humans do, as that is unnecessary for an entity whose preferences are identical to reality. Humans think in order to survive and entertain themselves. God has no need for a tool that is useful only tot he frail and unsatisfied." (Pg. 177)

Can the impact of your actions rippling into the future be considered an immortal soul? (Question to Ponder #7, at end of book)

Behinder

Just received my copy of Seth Godin's new book, small is the new big and flipped it open to page 155:

"The number of channels of communication is going to continue to increase. And either you'll have a channel or you won't. Either you'll have access to the attention of the people you need to talk with (notice I didn't say "talk at"), or you won't.

So the real question to ask isn't, "How much will I get paid to talk with these people?" The real question is, "How much will I pay to talk with these people."

The title of the book refers to a blog post from June, 2005. Godin talks about the new book in a half-hour, moderated Skypecast this afternoon at 4:00 p.m. CDT.

Update: Poor old Seth had to introduce himself because the moderator has tech issues and was late getting into the Skype call. Looked like about 25 or 30 folks on the call and they never got around to taking questions. Typepad -- which sponsored the Skypecast-- plans to post portions of the audio on their blog.

Reading backlog

This is a good problem but mildly stressful nonetheless. I'm buying books faster than I can read them. Combine my need for instant gratification and low impulse control with Amazon One-Click purchasing... and you wind up with a bunch of books stacked up over Bedside International:

The Religion War, Scott Adams
The Corporate Blogging Book, Debbie Weil
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, David Pogue
The Macintosh iLife 06, Jim Heid
Prioritizing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen & Hoa Loranger
Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge

Non-fiction is outpacing fiction by more than 2-to-1 and that's what's causing the backlog. But I'll get to and through them all in time.

Nobody's reading books

These statistics --compiled by Dan Poynter-- explain so much. I found these on a Buzz Machine post last week and have been haunted by them since.

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57% of new books are not read to completion.
• Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.
• Customers 55 and older account for more than one-third of all books bought.

I confess to being something of book pimp. I get really jazzed about a book (a la The Long Tail) and bore the shit out of the people around me about it. And I frequently "loan" books to people who really don't want to "borrow" them (let alone read them) but they don't want to hurt my feelings by telling me so. So they take the book and put it on a shelf or in a drawer and that's as close to reading it as they get.

It isn't their fault. If they wanted to read the book, they would have gone out an bought it. So no more loaning books unless I hear these words: "May I PLEASE borrow that book? I can't find it anywhere and I'm dying to read it. I promise to get it back to you next week."

Western concept of Self

John Burdett's second novel, Bangkok Tattoo, was as good as his first (Bangkok 8). Both stories are set in (you guessed it) Bangkok, where Thai police dective Sonchai Jitpleecheep solves bizarre murders. Sonchai is a devout Buddhist and the plot is laced with Eastern religion. I especially liked this description of the Western concept of Self:

"...a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can't add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot's war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor."

Ouch. The wannabe geek in me also enjoyed this password to a CIA online database:

AQ82860136574X-Halifax nineteen [lowercase] Oklahoma twenty-2 BLUE WHALE [all uppercase] Amerika stop 783

Won't even fit on a Post-It note.

The Long Tail

I tend to rate non-fiction books by highlighters consumed. And if I really like the work, I post excerpts here so I can find them long after I've loaned the book to someone that really didn't want to read it in the first place and promptly lost it.

I'm sure I'll be boring people with references to Chris Anderson's The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, for many weeks. I've posted some of my favorite segments after the jump. And here's one to get you started:

News was the first industry to really feel the impact of the Internet, and we've now had an entire generation grow up with the expectation of being able to have on-demand news on any subject at any time for free. This may be good for news junkies, but it's been hell on the news business. (Pg. 185)

The Long Tail (Book)

If you loved Chris Anderson's Wired article (Octoboer, 2004), The Long Tail... you will love his book (same name). I'm just a couple of chapters in but finding "hmmm" nuggets on every page.

Most of the top fifty best-selling albums of all time were recorded in the seventies and eighties (the Eagles, Michael Jackson), and none of them were made in the past five years.

Anderson provides a deeper understanding of why Amazon and Netflix, et al. are so popular. This might be a two-highlighter book.

Reading Douglas Coupland's JPod

The flyleaf describes Douglas Coupland's new novel as "a lethal joyride into today's new breed of technogeeks." I very much enjoyed two of his earlier works, Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma, and offer these nuggest from the introduction to his latest novel:

Life is a contest between you and everyone else.

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless poor people.

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

You can't fake creativity, competence or sexual arousal.

Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resume.

After a week of intense googling, we've starated to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I thinkpeople in the year 2020 are going be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless. -- pg. 248

I think computers out to have a key called I'M DRUNK, and when you push it, it prevents you from sending email for twelve hours. -- pg. 386

Who was the guy that was in Wings?

Reading (3rd time) Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip. One of the main characters is a middle-aged guy that has been divorced six times. All waitresses. Part of his screening process was to ask them to name the Beatles. If they could not, the cultural gulf was probably too wide. How could you not know the names of the Beatles?

While discussing last night's American Idol performances (Taylor Hicks sang a Beatles song) with a female co-worker today, I asked if she (mid-20's) could name the Beatles. She could only come up with McCartney. Alas.