Category Archives: Books

War by Sebastian Junger

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Sebastian Junger was recently a guest on The Daily Show but you really don’t get much of a feel for a book (or the author) from those segments. Not sure why I picked up War but it’s hard to put down.

The war in Afghanistan seems very… abstract to me. I know it’s going on and people are dying (although we see almost no images of that) but it doesn’t seem real. Junger’s book (and the documentary, I assume) makes it seem very real.

I can’t tell if Junger has any views about whether the war is right or wrong or if that’s even a relevant question from the perspective the people fighting it. But his account makes it difficult to imagine anything like “winning.”

“The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound –even defeat– a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. You can’t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers.” – page 83

“The moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers much, and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero. Soldiers worry about those things about as much as farmhands worry about the global economy, which is to say, they recognize stupidity when it’s right in front of them but they generally leave the big picture to others.” – page 25

“…at one mile out (an) aircraft carrier is the size of a pencil eraser held at arm’s length. The plane covers that distance in thirty-six seconds and must land on a section of flight deck measuring seven yards wide and forty-five yards long.” – page 34

“…he joined the Army because he was tired of partying and living at this mother’s house, and now he’s behind sandbags on a hilltop in Afghanistan getting absolutely rocked.” – page 67

“Once while leaning against some sandbags I was surprised to feel some dirt fly in my face. It didn’t make any sense until I heard the gunshots a second later. How close was that round? Six inches? A foot?” – page 71

“It certainly isn’t beautiful up there, but the fact that it might be the last place you’ll ever see does give it a kind of glow.” – page 71

“The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy — anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding — and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.” – page 73

“If I had any illusions about personal courage, they dissolved in the days or hours before something big, dread accumulating in my blood like some kind of toxin until I felt too apathetic to even tie my boots properly.” – page 74

“There are different kinds of strength, and containing fear may be the most profound, the one without which armies couldn’t function and wars couldn’t be fought (God forbid).” – page 74

“…an enormous amount of war-fighting simply consists of carrying heavy loads uphill.” – page 75

“If you’re not prepared to walk for someone you’re certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon.” – page 77

“(He) had some kind of crazy redneck strength that was more like hydraulics than musculature.” – page 75

“The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound –even defeat– a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. You can’t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers.” – page 83

A “Vietnam moment” was one in which you weren’t so much getting misled as getting asked to participate in a kind of collective wishful thinking.” – page 132

“…much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.” – page 140

“The enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck. Every time you drove down the road you were engaged in a twisted existential exercise where each moment was the only proof you’d ever have that you hadn’t been blown up the moment before.” – page 142

“War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know.”

“War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.” – page 144

“The moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers much, and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero. Soldiers worry about those things about as much as farmhands worry about the global economy, which is to say, they recognize stupidity when it’s right in front of them but they generally leave the big picture to others.” – page 25

“…at one mile out (an) aircraft carrier is the size of a pencil eraser held at arm’s length. The plane covers that distance in thirty-six seconds and must land on a section of flight deck measuring seven yards wide and forty-five yards long.” – page 34

“…he joined the Army because he was tired of partying and living at this mother’s house, and now he’s behind sandbags on a hilltop in Afghanistan getting absolutely rocked.” – page 67

“Once while leaning against some sandbags I was surprised to feel some dirt fly in my face. It didn’t make any sense until I heard the gunshots a second later. How close was that round? Six inches? A foot?” – page 71

“It certainly isn’t beautiful up there, but the fact that it might be the last place you’ll ever see does give it a kind of glow.” – page 71

“The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy — anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding — and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.” – page 73

“If I had any illusions about personal courage, they dissolved in the days or hours before something big, dread accumulating in my blood like some kind of toxin until I felt too apathetic to even tie my boots properly.” – page 74

“There are different kinds of strength, and containing fear may be the most profound, the one without which armies couldn’t function and wars couldn’t be fought (God forbid).” – page 74

“…an enormous amount of war-fighting simply consists of carrying heavy loads uphill.” – page 75

“If you’re not prepared to walk for someone you’re certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon.” – page 77

“(He) had some kind of crazy redneck strength that was more like hydraulics than musculature.” – page 75

“The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound –even defeat– a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. You can’t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers.” – page 83

A “Vietnam moment” was one in which you weren’t so much getting misled as getting asked to participate in a kind of collective wishful thinking.” – page 132

“…much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.” – page 140

“The enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck. Every time you drove down the road you were engaged in a twisted existential exercise where each moment was the only proof you’d ever have that you hadn’t been blown up the moment before.” – page 142

“War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know.”

“War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.” – page 144

Cognitive Surplus

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From Amazon: “For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.”

A few of my highlighted excerpts from Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky (more after the jump).

“The postwar trends of emptying rural populations, urban growth, and increased suburban density, accompanied by rising educational attainment across almost all demographic groups, have marked a huge increase in the number of people paid to think or talk, rather than to produce or transport objects.” – page 4

“Someone born in 1960 has watched something like fifty thousand hours of TV already, and many watch another thirty thousand hours before she dies.” – page 6

“…in the whole of the developed world, the three most common activities are now work, sleep, and watching TV.” – page 6

“Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. … We spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials.” – page 10

“As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible.” – page 19

“Imagine that everything says 99 percent the same, that people continue to consume 99 percent of the television they used to, but 1 percent of that time gets carved out for producing and sharing. The connected population still watches well over a trillion hours of TV a year; 1 percent of that time is mor than one hundred Wikipedias’ worth of participation per year.” – page 23

“In 2010 the global internet-connected population will cross two billion people, and mobile hone accounts already number over three billion. Since there are something like 4.5 billion adults worldwide (roughly 30 percent of the global population is under fifteen), we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens.” – page 23

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The $99 PC and cloud computing (1997)

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In 1997 Po Bronson wrote The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest. The novel was the story of some Silicon Valley types who set out to design a PC that would sell for $99. Here’s a bit of the plot from Wikipedia:

“The team finds many non-essential parts but cannot come close to the $99 mark. It is Salman’s idea to put all the software on the internet, eliminating the need for a hard drive, RAM, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and anything that holds information. The computer has been reduced to a microprocessor, a monitor, a mouse, a keyboard, and the internet, but it is still too expensive. Having seen the rest of his team watching a hologram of an attractive lady the day before, in a dream Andy is inspired to eliminate the monitor in favor of the cheaper holographic projector. The last few hundred dollars comes off when Darrell suggests using virtual reality gloves in place of a mouse and keyboard. Tiny then writes a “hypnotizer” code to link the gloves, the projector, and the internet, and they’re done.”

Does that “put all the software on the internet” part sound familiar. I mean, shoot, that was 13 years ago. Shows how long folks about been thinking about “cloud computing.”

I liked Mr. Bronson’s early work. The Nudist on the Late Shfit and What Should I Do With My Life (non-fiction) in particular.

The Facebook Effect

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The sub-title of David Kirkpatrick’s book is, “The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World.” I like the idea of connecting the world and I’m finding Kirkpatrick’s book a real page-turner. While I can’t seem to fit Facebook into my online life, I want to understand it’s brief history while watching it being made.

UPDATE: I’ve finished the book and rank it among the most interesting I have read this year. Or, in a long time. David Kirkpatrick had me on the edge of my seat from cover to cover. After the jump are some excerpts that got some highlighter.

The Facebook Effect happens when the service puts people in touch with each other, often unexpectedly, about a common experience, interest, problem or cause.” pg 7

As Facebook grows and grows past 500 million members,one has to ask if there may not be a macro version of the Facebook Effect.Could it become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the middle of environmental and economic breakdown? A communications system that includes people of all countries, all races, all religions, could not be a bad thing, could it? pg 9

“The most important investment theme for the first half of the twenty-first center will be the question of how globalization happens. If globalization doesn’t happen, then there is no future for the world. The way it doesn’t happen is that you have escalating conflicts and wars, and given where technology is today, it blows up the world. There’s no way to invest in a world where globalization fails.” — Peter Thiel pg 9

Were the growth rates of both Facebook and the Internet to remain steady, by 2013 every single person online worldwide would be on Facebook.  pg16

“I think what we’re doing is more interesting than what anyone else is doing, and that this is just a cool thing to be doing. I don’t spend my time thinking about (how to exit).” — Mark Zuckerberg  pg 139

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end and pretty quickly.” — MZ  pg 199

Facebook is founded on a radical social premise — that an inevitable enveloping transparency will overtake modern life.  For better or worse, Facebook is causing a mass resetting of the boundaries of personal intimacy.  pg 200

Facebook now sits squarely at the center of a fundamental realignment of capitalism. Marketing cannot be about companies shoving advertising in people’s faces, not because it’s wrong but because it doesn’t work anymore.”  pg 263

In seventeen countries around the world, more than 30 percent of all citizens — not Internet users but citizens  — are on Facebook. — Facebook Global Monitor  pg 275

Imagine you’re at a football game and your mobile device shows you which of your friends are also in the stadium — perhaps even where they’re sitting. Maybe it could tell you who in your section of the stands has attended exactly the same games as you in the past. Or who is a fan of the same teams as you. This may seem cool to many users. To others it may feel Orwellian.  pg 316

Facebook might even begin to function as a sort of auxiliary memory. As you walk down a street you could query your profile to learn when you were last there, and with whom. Or a location-aware mobile device could alert you to the proximity of people you’ve interacted with on Facebook, and remind you how.  pg 317

(Mark Zuckerberg) wants to rule not only Facebook, but in some sense the evolving communications infrastructure of the planet. pg 31

The closer Facebook gets to achieving its vision of providing a universal identity system for everyone on the Internet, the more likely it is to attract government attention. Facebook could have more data about you that governments do. pg 328

“Facebook Connect is basically your passport — your online passport. The government issues passports. Now you have somebody else worldwide who is issuing passports for people. That is competitive, there’s no doubt about it. But who says issuing passports is government’s job? This will be global citizenship.” — Yuri Milner, Russian FB investor pg 328

The average age of (Facebook’s) 1,400 employees is thirty-one. pg 331

Facebook is changing our notion of community, both at the neighborhood level and the planetary one. It may help us to move back toward a kind of intimacy that the ever-quickening pace of modern life has drawn away from. pg 332

“Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of society.” — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) pg 332

Facebook aims to assemble a directory of the entire human race, or at least those parts of it that are connected to the Internet. pg 333

Fictional passwords : The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

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I’m reading The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson. The final book (Larsson died in 2004) featuring Lisbeth Salander, ” the best hacker in Sweden.” I’m not spoiling anything by sharing this passage of what has to be one of the more secure log-in’s:

“She started by going to a website that advertised rather uninteresting pictures by an unknown and not especially skilled amateur photographers named Gil Bates in Jobsville, Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and confirmed that the town of Jobsvile did not exist. Nevertheless, Bates had taken more than 200 photographs of the community and created a gallery of small thumbnails. She scrolled down to image 167 and clicked to enlarge it. It showed the church in Jobsville. She put her cursor on the spire of the church tower and clicked. She instantly got a pop-up dialog box that asked for her ID and password. She took out her stylus and wrote the word Remarkable on the screen as her ID and A(89)Cx#magnolia as the password.

She got a dialog box with the text [Error–you have the wrong password] and a button that said [OK–try again]. Lisbeth knew that if she clicked on [OK–try again] and tried a different password, she would gt the same dialog box again–for years and years, for as long as she kept trying. Instead she clicked on the ‘o’ in Error.

The screen went blank. Then an animated door opened and a Lara Croft-like figure stepped out. A speech bubble materialized with the text [WHO GOES THERE?]. She clicked on the bubble and wrote Wasp. She got the instant reply [PROVE IT–OR ELSE…] as the animated Lara Croft unlocked the safety catch on her gun. Salander knew it was no empty threat. If she entered the wrong password three times in a row the site would shut down and the name Wasp would be struck from the membership list.”

Which reminded me of this password (to the CIA database) from the novel, Bangkok Tattoo:

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

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (movie)

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You’re reading a novel with a particularly good character and you think, “They’ll never find an actor who can bring this fictional person to life.” That happens to me frequently and I’m usually right.

But the Swedish producers of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did a wonderful job of casting Noomi Rapace in the role of Lisbeth Salander.

This is one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time and watching with sub-titles didn’t detract in the least. After the first few minutes I forgot I was reading the actors words at the bottom of the screen. (I should mention, however, that Barb and I had read Stieg Larsson’s novel, so that probably made it easier to keep up.)

We’re fortunate to have a theater nearby that shows foreign language films. I supose it’s possible the U.S. remake of this film could be a winner but I encourage you to see the original.

Kindel Book Reader for the iPad

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I plut the Kindel book reader on the iPad because I couldn’t find the title I wanted for the iBook. But it works fine and while re-reading William Gibson’s Spook Country, I discovered an interesting feature.

I highlight or underline passages in paper books and the the ebook readers make this nice and easy. In the example below, I highlighted a line in yellow. Curious about the dashed line under the next paragraph I clicked and got the little explanation bubble.

This feature can be turned off but I think I’ll leave it on for now. Obviously I have at least one thing in common with those other readers: this book. Interesting to see what passages they find noteworthy.

The Divine Code of Life

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According to the back flap on his book, Dr. Kazuo Murakami is “one of the top geneticists in the world and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, one of Japan’s leading research universities.”

In The Divine Code of Life, he makes his case for the idea that how we think can activate good dormant genes and switch off negative ones. Here are a few factoids that got some high-liter:

  • “For any one child, there are seventy trillion possible combinations of genes.”
  • “As far as we can tell, only about 5 to 10 percent of our genes are actually working; what the rest are doing remains unknown.”
  • “All living things use the same genetic code.”
  • “Imagine that you could collect all the DNA from the world’s population of six billion people. It would weigh only as much as a single grain of rice.”
  • “The information contained in our genes, if printed in book form, would amount to three thousand volumes each a thousand pages long.”

I can’t say that this was a fun read, but I like the idea that we can have some control over something as… basic? … as our genes. I suspect this is where some of the really big medical breakthroughs will happen. Are happening.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

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Last week I read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman. I’ve been sorting out my thoughts about the book but I’m not there yet. I think it’s going to take a while. But I want to get something down here while the story (and my impressions) are still fresh in my mind. So, this will be one of those stream-of-consciousness posts (not a real review of the book).

GMJ&TSC is fiction. It is the story (a story) about the life and death of Jesus and his twin brother Christ (hardly a spoiler since it’s the title).

I found the style of the book very different from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The book read very quickly. The chapters are very short with little or no character development.

To me it felt as though Pullman was trying to condense the stories most Christians grew up with to the bare “facts” (The Childhood of Jesus, Jesus Scandalises the Scribes, The Death of John, etc). Now that I think about it, each chapter read like a Cliffs Note.

Here’s how Pullman describes the book on the back of the dust cover:

“The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”

TRUTH and HISTORY –and the relationship between the two– is a common theme throughout GMJ&TSC:

“If the way to the Kingdom of God is to be opened, we who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.” (pg 99)

Deeply “religious” people are often offended when someone takes liberties with their story. (Jesus Christ Superstar, the Dutch cartoonist’s depiction of Mohammed, etc) And if you happen to believe that every word of the King James Bible is literally true and an exact account of the life and death of Jesus, you probably won’t find this book a good read.

If on the other hand, you aren’t ready to stop thinking about such things, you might. I know that I did. Here are some questions it raised for me:

  • If you wanted to start a religion that would last thousands of years, how would you go about it?
  • How would Jesus feel about the religion that is based on his life and death?
  • Could Christianity have taken hold if Jesus had lived at any other time or place?
  • If the story of Jesus’ life/death –as we have known it for 2,000 years– was shown to be inaccurate, would it be better to know the truth, or to allow Christianity to continue to be based on events that never happened?

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Buddha’s Brain

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Amazon: “Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, a neuropsychologist and a neurologist and both practicing Buddhists, show us just how the brain programs us to experience the world a certain way by combining information from the external world with information held in neural pathways within the brain. These pathways operate in the background of our awareness, influencing our conscious mental activity.”

This book was a bit of a struggle for me so the following notes are intended for my own reference and make little sense outside the context of the book.

The self is like someone running behind a parade that is already well under way, continually calling out: “See what I created!” (pg 212)

In the brain, every manifestation of self is impermanent. The self is continually constructed, deconstructed, and constructed again. (pg 212)

We experience “now” not as a thin sliver of time in which each snapshot of experience appears sharply and ends abruptly, but as a moving interval roughly 1-3 seconds long that blurs and fades at each end. (pg 213)

At any moment, the parts of the self that are present depend on many factors, including genetic heritage, personal history, temperament, and situations. In particular, self depends on a lot of feeling tone of experience. When the feeling tone is neutral, the self tends to fade into the background. But as soon as something distinctly pleasant or unpleasant appears, the self quickly mobilizes. The self organizes around strong desires. Which comes first: Do “I” form a desire? Or does desire from and “I?” (pg 213)

The self has no inherent, unconditional, absolute existence apart from the network of causes it arises from, in, and as. (pg 213)

The self is truly a fictional character. (pg 214)