“She wanted to know whether a person could die by spontaneous combustion. The odds against a letter slipped under the door slipping under the carpet as well. Ishmael’s real name. Who this “Reader” was, and why he rated knowing who married whom. Whether single men with fortunes really needed wives. What home would be without Plumtree’s Potted Meats. How long it would take to compile a key to all mythologies. What the son of a fish looked like. Where Uncle Toby was wounded. Why anyone wanted to imagine unquiet slumbers for sleepers in quiet earth. Whether Conrad was a racist. Why Huck Finn was taken out of libraries. Which end of an egg to break. Why people read. Why they stopped reading. What it meant to be “only a novel.” What use half a locket was to anyone. Why it would be mistake not to live all you can.”
Category Archives: Books
Galatea 2.2
“After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.” — Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the timeline spit out some fitful precursor. Everyone who ever lived had lived at a moment of equal astonishment. Continue reading
Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All
God damn, this was a depressing read. But it’s a good example of something I don’t have a good name for. Sort of a you-know-the-truth-when-you-hear-it. It’s a combination of details and phrasing, maybe? Are humans wired to know when someone’s lying? The guy that wrote The Art of the Deal fucked up and knows it.
“But I knew I was selling out. Literally, the term was invented to describe what I did.” Soon Spy was calling him “former journalist Tony Schwartz.”
That is a heavy weight to carry and it might get a lot heavier.
During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.
I’ll confess this is a bias of mine. I always feel a little superior to people to don’t read books. I wonder how many books (and screenplays) are in the works about Trump. I wonder if he knows the difference between famous and infamous. Or cares.
You are being tracked (The Inevitable)
“This list, instead, tallies the kind of tracking an average person might encounter on an ordinary day in the United States. Each example has been sourced officially or from a major publication.” [The 24 ways we’re tracked on a regular basis.]
- Car movements — Every car since 2006 contains a chip that records your speed, braking, turns, mileage, accidents whenever you start your car.
- Highway traffic — Cameras on poles and sensors buried in highway record the location of cars by license plates and fast-track badges. Sev enty million plates are recorded each month.
- Ride-share taxis — Uber, Lyft, and other decentralized rides record your trips.
- Long-distance travel — Your travel itinerary for air flights and trains is recorded.
- Drone surveillance — Along U.S. borders, Predator drones monitor and record outdoor activities.
- Postal mail — The exterior of every piece of paper mail you send or receive is scanned and digitized.
- Utilities — Your power and water usage patterns are kept by utilities. (Garbage is not cataloged, yet.)
- Cell phone location and call logs — Where, when, and who you call (meta- data) is stored for months. Some phone carriers routinely store the contents of calls and messages for days to years.
- Civic cameras — Cameras record your activities 24/7 in most city down towns in the U.S.
- Commercial and private spaces — Today 68 percent of public employers, 59 percent of private employers, 98 percent of banks, 64 percent of public schools, and 16 percent of homeowners live or work under cameras.
- Smart home — Smart thermostats (like Nest) detect your presence and behavior patterns and transmit these to the cloud. Smart electrical outlets (like Belkin) monitor power consumption and usage times shared to the cloud.
- Home surveillance — Installed video cameras document your activity inside and outside the home, stored on cloud servers.
- Interactive devices — Your voice commands and messages from phones (Siri, Now, Cortana), consoles (Kinect), smart TVs, and ambient micro phones (Amazon Echo) are recorded and processed on the cloud.
- Grocery loyalty cards — Supermarkets track which items you purchase and when.
E- retailers — Retailers like Amazon track not only what you purchase, but what you look at and even think about buying. - IRS — Tracks your financial situation all your life.
- Credit cards — Of course, every purchase is tracked. Also mined deeply with sophisticated AI for patterns that reveal your personality, ethnic ity, idiosyncrasies, politics, and preferences.
- E-wallets and e-banks — Aggregators like Mint track your entire financial situation from loans, mortgages, and investments. Wallets like Square and PayPal track all purchases.
- Photo face recognition — Facebook and Google can identify (tag) you in pictures taken by others posted on the web. The location of pictures can identify your location history.
- Web activities — Web advertising cookies track your movements across the web. More than 80% of the top thousand sites employ web cookies that follow you wherever you go on the web. Through agree ments with ad networks, even sites you did not visit can get informa tion about your viewing history.
- Social media — Can identify family members, friends, and friends of friends. Can identify and track your former employers and your cur rent work mates. And how you spend your free time.
- Search browsers — By default Google saves every question you’ve ever asked forever.
- Streaming services — What movies (Netflix), music (Spotify), video (You Tube) you consume and when, and what you rate them. This includes cable companies; your watching history is recorded.
- Book reading — Public libraries record your borrowings for about a month. Amazon records book purchases forever. Kindle monitors your reading patterns on ebooks — where you are in the book, how long you take to read each page, where you stop.
“It is shockingly easy to imagine what power would accrue to any agency that could integrate all these streams. The fear of Big Brother stems directly from how technically easy it would be to stitch these together. At the moment, however, most of these streams are independent. Their bits are not integrated and correlated.”
Lexicon by Max Barry
“At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics–at least not in the usual ways. Instead, they are taught to persuade. Here the art of coercion has been raised to a science. Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as “poets”, adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.” (Amazon)
I can’t say I thought Lexicon was a great read but the neurolinguistics thing was interesting. I kept hearing echoes from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash:
“As Stephenson describes it, one goddess/semi-historical figure, Asherah, took it upon herself to create a dangerous biolinguistic virus and infect humanity with it; this virus was stopped by Enki, who used his skills as a “neurolinguistic hacker” to create an inoculating “nam-shub” that would protect humanity by making it impossible to use and respond to the Sumerian tongue. This forced the creation of “acquired languages” and gave rise to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.”
If I read Wikipedia correctly, there’s a difference between Neurolinguistics and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). The notion of someone using words and language to “program” my thinking is disturbing. This came up again for me last year when Scott Adams begin writing a long series of posts about Donald Trump using Master Persuader techniques. I was skeptical at first now I’m not so sure.
Jim Jones talks his followers into drinking poison Kool Aide? Tony Robbins convinces folks to pay him for the privilege of walking on hot coals? David Koresh, Scientology, etc etc. Are we just “moist robots” (Scott Adam’s term) that can be programmed with a few well chosen words?
And while we’re on the subject of words… I don’t remember the last time I saw an NBC newscast that didn’t include repeated references to “devastation,” “tragedy,” “terror,” and similar fear words. I’m trying to stop watching and listening to network and cable news programs because I feel (physically) bad after watching/listening. Which I’ve concluded is the point.
Thriller
I just finished a book (Lexicon by Max Barry) described by Amazon as a “thriller.” The more I thought about it the more I realized I wasn’t sure what that designation meant. What makes a book a “thriller?” And now I know.
Thriller is a broad genre of literature, film and television, having numerous subgenres. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. Successful examples of thrillers are the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Thrillers generally keep the audience on the “edge of their seats” as the plot builds towards a climax. The cover-up of important information from the viewer is a common element. Literary devices such as red herrings, plot twists, and cliffhangers are used extensively. A thriller is usually a villain-driven plot, whereby he or she presents obstacles that the protagonist must overcome.
And don’t miss the sub-genres. Whenever Wikipedia asks for some financial support, I kick in.
The Ruthless War on Stuff
I have a mental list of topics I try to avoid because — in my experience — they seem to make people a little (or a lot) crazy. Politics and Religion, of course. Apple products. And Marie Kondo, the best-selling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I read her little book and did exactly what it said I should do to “change my life.” But I try to keep what I learned to myself (like religion and politics and Steve Jobs). But this New York Times piece is too good not to share. A few excerpts:
“By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods — from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target — but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.”
The success of Ms. Kondo’s book (and system) gets a big dollop of derision and smirking: “A parody book called “The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a [expletive],” and another one called “The Joy of Leaving Your [expletive] All Over the Place.”
But the lady seems to walk the walk: “The only visible possessions in her hotel room for a two-week trip from Tokyo were her husband’s laptop and a small silver suitcase the size of a typical man’s briefcase.”
The “organizing industry” is big in the U.S. and some of the old hands are quick to dismiss Kondo’s approach. Okay, a little more than just “dismiss”:
“Somehow the extra step of thanking the object or folding it a little differently enrages them. This rage hides behind the notion that things are different here in America, that our lives are more complicated and our stuff is more burdensome and our decisions are harder to make.”
A well-written article, whatever your thoughts on, or approach to, tidying up.
Kill Process
“By day, Angie, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, is a data analyst at Tomo (think Facebook), the world’s largest social networking company; by night, she exploits her database access to profile domestic abusers and kill the worst of them. […] When Tomo introduces a deceptive new product that preys on users’ fears to drive up its own revenue, Angie sees Tomo for what it really is–another evil abuser. Using her coding and hacking expertise, she decides to destroy Tomo by building a new social network that is completely distributed, compartmentalized, and unstoppable. If she succeeds, it will be the end of all centralized power in the Internet.”
Kill Process by William Hertling
This is one of the geekier/techy novels I’ve read in awhile. The author went to great pains to get the hacker stuff right. (Or right-ish)
Reading List: Tao, Zen & Buddhism
- What Is Tao? – Alan Watts [notes]
- Tao: The Watercourse Way – Alan Watts [notes]
- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing – Marie Kondo [notes]
- Freedom from the Known – Jiddu Kirshnamurti
- This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience – Alan Watts [notes]
- The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East [notes]
- The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are – Alan Watts [notes]
- Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening – Stephen Batchelor [notes]
- The Sound of Silence: Selected Teachings of Ajahn Sumedho
- Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi [notes]
- Ten Zen Questions – Susan Blackmore [notes]
- Wherever You Go, There You Are – Jon Kabat-Zinn [notes]
- Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice – Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
- I Am That – Nisargadatta Maharaj [notes]
- Rebel Buddha: A Guide to a Revolution of Mind – Dzogchen Ponlop
- Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World – Lama Surya Das
- Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind – Shunryu Suzuki
- Living As A River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change – Bodhipaksa [notes]
- The Tao of Zen – Ray Grigg [notes]
- Buddhism Plain and Simple – Steve Hagen [notes]
- The Way of Zen – Alan Watts [notes]
- Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom – Rick Hanson [notes]
- Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation – Alan Watts [notes]
- Meditation Now or Never – Steve Hagen [notes]
- The Tao of Meditation: Way to Enlightenment – Jou Tsung Hwa
Reading list: Consciousness
- The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself – Sean Carroll | My notes
- Consciousness and the Social Brain – Michael S. A. Graziano | My notes
- What Technology Wants – Kevin Kelly | My notes
- The Ego Trick – Julian Baggini | My Notes
- The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity – Bruce Hood | My Notes
- Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman | My notes
- Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain – David Eagleman | My notes
- The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self – Thomas Metzinger | My notes
- Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness – Bruce Rosenblum | My notes
- Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe – Robert Lanza | My notes