A tell-all book by a (former?) UNAIDS epidemiologist.
Unsurprising surprise: much of the world's AIDS prevention work is wasted and ineffective, partly because of political interference by the US religious right and others who see this as a fight against sin rather than an attempt to reduce the frequency of transmission of a virus, partly because of structural issues of governance that ensure inefficiency, and partly because some of the bedrock principles of AIDS prevention that emerged from activism in countries like the US and UK, principles like peer counseling and “everyone is at risk,” are irrelevant or worse in other parts of the world. The book spends more time in Indonesia than anywhere else, since that's where the author spent much of her career, but it tries to give a global picture.
The more English history you know, the more you'll get out of this book. My knowledge is only OK. Certainly the parts of the book that I found most interesting were the ones dealing with events that I already knew a bit about—the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution (which the author regards as little more than a successful Dutch invasion), the American Revolution (which I mostly knew about from the American point of view), and, especially, the Napoleonic Wars, by the end of which Britain was unquestionably the world's major naval power.
The author doesn't think much of Napoleon as a naval strategist. I've tended to take at face value Napoleon's 1804 claim that “Let us be masters of the Straits for but six hours, and we shall be masters of the world,” but this book makes a persuasive argument that Napoleon's naval plans were completely divorced from reality and that there was never a realistic hope of an invasion. Fears and fantasies aside, the reality was dramatic enough! It's still sometimes hard to believe that someone like Nelson, for example, could have existed outside fiction.
In part this is a book about technological progress—occasionally in the form of dramatic new invensions, like the gunlock or copper-clad hulls, more often in the form of slow empirical refinement. More importantly, it's a book about developing the social, economic, and institutional structures that made it possible for a navy to project power everywhere in the world.
Half of the sequel to Maelstrom.
I can't imagine ever paying £105,000 for a bottle of wine, no matter how rich I was. Someone did, though! It was supposedly a 1787 Lafite, and was supposedly once owned by Thomas Jefferson. It turned out to be a bad purchase.
What the author hints at from the very beginning, but doesn't flatly say until at least halfway through the book, is that this wine, and probably many other extremely old and rare wines sold and “discovered” by the same person, were fakes. There hasn't been a confession, so we may never know the exact details of the frauds. There were probably several different techniques, some crude, others sophisticated. Some of the fakes seem incredibly crude in retrospect, and probably succeeded for so many years only because most people don't look for fraud and most people see what they want to.
What's most interesting is what this says about taste. A number of wine experts, including people like Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson, tasted bottles that were almost certainly fakes. In some cases they said the wines were exceptional. The most obvious explanation is that we taste with our eyes and minds, not just our tongues and noses, and that not even a great critic is completely immune from tasting what they expect. That's probably at least part of it. But there's another equally interesting possibility: what if Parker was right, and the fakes that he thought were great wines really were great wines? What if there really is a way to make something that tastes like a mature first growth Bordeaux from a great vintage?
Peter Watts's Web site has a blurb of sorts from James Nicoll: “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” Not quite fair, but there's enough truth there for it to be funny. One thing that's unsettling about Watts's books (all of them that I've read, anyway) is that he just doesn't write pleasant characters. Even more unsettling, though, is that whether Watts is writing about biochemistry, or software, or romance, his perspective is thoroughly evolutionary. That may not seem so very unsettling, but it is. We are products of evolution, but that doesn't mean we're used to thinking of it as the primary way of looking at everything in the world. In Watts's books humans are not what we would like to think we are, and the universe is not as comfortable a place as we might hope. I don't think the perspective in these books is the full truth, but it's hard to dismiss it as completely wrong.
A book about behavioral economics: psychological experiments to learn how people actually make economic decisions, as opposed to how idealized “homo economicus” behaves in naïve models. When Ariely came to speak at Google, for example, he gave a demonstration of the endowment effect using free copies of this book. It wasn't as dramatic a demonstration as the Duke basketball ticket experiment, but seeing it right in front of our eyes was still pretty dramatic.
I think it's fair to say that behavioral economics is marginal from the point of view of the economics profession. I've seen one economist question whether these results have any relevance to human behavior outside the lab, and another say that the most important fact about human behavior is that “people respond to incentives,” and that that's what economics is all about. Several times in this book Ariely says that economics should change to take these sorts of experimental results into account. He says a bit about what kinds of changes in societal policy he'd like to see, but not much about what kind of changes in the discipline of economics he's thinking of. Which parts of the body of theory need to be revised? What would a more modern textbook look like? How would this affect the kind of papers that economists publish? Still, I'm pretty sure that something other than dismissal is called for. A discipline that's supposed to be a science that describes one aspect of human behavior ought to be more interested in studying human behavior
I don't know if Ariely would go along with this, but one change I'd like to see is for economists to stop using the word “rational” to describe their simplified model of the way people act. I realize that simplified models are necessary for any discipline, and I also realize that every discipline has its own jargon; words like “force” and “resistance” and “memory” don't have the same meanings as technical language that they do in everyday life. Still, it's different when you're using a word whose ordinary meaning is value laden, and when you're talking about people. When you're talking about people it's always easy to slide between is and ought, between description and judgment, and using value laden language makes this easy mistake even easier. It's important to be clear about whether we're saying that we think we have an accurate model of human behavior, or that we're deliberately using a simplified model as a first approximation, or that this is how people should behave, or that society ought to be organized under the assumption that people behave this way and that if people fail to fit the model, so much the worse for them.
A while back, Janet and I were talking about alternate history stories. Janet wondered why there seemed to be so few alternate history stories that focused on World War I. My speculation was that the most obvious alternate world would be one in which there was no Great War, or at least where the war ended quickly—it's hard to avoid imagining a world that was spared a disaster so great, so unnecessary and contingent. But a story like that would seem less like “what if” than like wishful thinking. So Janet told me that I needed to read John Crowley's “Great Work of Time.” She was right.
I think this is Watts's first novel. It does have its rough spots: there are characters and subplots that seem like they're going to be important but just end up fizzling out. It's still compelling, and it's easy to see the same concerns in this book that show up in Blindsight.
As Alan Furst said when he came to speak at Google, this is a novel about someone who warned about a terrible disaster and wasn't believed. We all know the end of the story.
Furst talked a bit about why he sets all of his books in more or less the same period, the years leading up to World War II. A question he didn't discuss, and it wasn't until some time after the talk that I quite managed to formulate (too late to actually ask him), was why he chooses to write his novels about spies. Do spies actually matter? There was one group of spies in Warsaw in the 30s who mattered very much: Marian Rejewski and the rest of the Polish Cipher Bureau, who made the initial mathematical breakthroughs that enabled the work at Bletchley Park. But this book isn't about that kind of spy.
Not quite Götterdämmerung, but definitely an operatic end to the tetrology. And is it just a coincidence that the sinister ancient superweapon is called Odin?
This series is an odd mixture. There's some broad humor, and parts of the world don't really hang together unless you think of them as jokes, unless you step outside the story and see the author winking at you. Then there's just the sheer joy of invention. Cities on wheels, eating each other! Robot zombie assassins! Robot zombie birds! Dirigible air fleets! Boy pirates with submarines! But you're never far from being reminded about much darker things, like the slaves in the cities' engine rooms, or the betrayals that shape the main characters' lives, or, in the distant past, the Sixty Minutes War that destroyed the American Empire and Greater China and the rest of ancient civilization.
Nobody told the characters that the world they live in is a joke. In the very first book we meet someone who had an absolutely horrible experience as a child and was left badly scarred in both the literal and figurative sense. That character is twenty years older in this book—still unhappy, despite a seemingly stable life, still scarred, still someone that most other people recoil from, largely for good reasons. Not everyone gets a happy ending.
Cory's first YA book. In large part this is a book about what the US might become if there's another big terrorist attack, if we continue to have leaders who confuse safety with repression, or (less charitably, maybe more accurately) if we continue to have leaders who stoke fear as an excuse for repression. Partly it's a book about resistance, and partly, oddly, a tutorial on security-related topics: cryptography, anonymous routers, webs of trust, even LARP protocols. One summary might be that it's a book about why and how to resist surveillance.
It's a frightening book in parts—probably not as frightening as the reality would be. Ultimately it's a patriotic and optimistic book. I hope the optimism is justified. Perhaps if enough people read this book it'll help make sure it won't come true.
In some ways this book reminded me of Suzy Charnas's Holdfast books: how can the oppressed overthrow an intolerable system of oppression without ceasing to be human themselves? Perhaps it's not too surprising that this is reminiscent of the Holdfast books: it too is part of the "grand conversation" of feminist science fiction, and it was written not too long after Walk to the End of the World.
This book has a 21st century publication date, and I wouldn't have guessed it was written so long ago if I hadn't known; it seemed to me that this book was written with the knowledge of the ways in which the US changed after 9/11. I know that the book was updated over the decades since it was first written, but there's also the depressing possibility that Timmi just got the paranoia and authoritarianism right, without the benefit of future knowledge. [Update: yup. I asked Timmi, and all the rewriting was done before 2001.]
Odd little coincidence that distracted me a bit while I was reading this book: the most despicable of several despicable characters in this book has the same name as a rather famous theoretical computer scientist.
A new Culture book!
Somehow I managed to graduate from high school without having read this book. Well, now I have. Yes, it does deserve its reputation.
I own a paper copy of this book, but I read it on my PDA. Given the subject of this book, it seemed more appropriate.
Incomplete (as of 2008 only half the book has been written), badly outdated in parts, hard to read, and indispensable. Everyone with a serious interest in computers needs to read this.
There are some useful insights in this book, but not enough to justify the book's length. It's repetitive and padded, and should have been half the length. It's useful to be reminded that not every probability distribution is a gaussian, to see some of the implications of power law distributions spelled out, and to see a summary of some of the recent psychological research into cognitive biases, but none of this is particularly earthshaking stuff.
This book is seriously marred by the author's tendency to use insult as a substitute for argument. Toward the end, astonishingly, he writes that “An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.” Did he read his own book? He should have listened to his own advice, and shouldn't have been so eager to sneer at everyone else for being “pompous,” or “nerds,” or the perpetrator of an “intellectual fraud,” or “narrow-minded,” or “sterile” or “dull.”
A novel about con men and gangsters and venture capitalists, set in Palo Alto at the height of the dotcom bubble.
I knew that Fielding had written a satire on Pamela. What I hadn't realized was that he'd written two different satirical responses to Pamela, just a year apart, and that Joseph Andrews was one of them. Maybe someday I should read Pamela.
One thing that occurred to me is that Joseph Andrews probably couldn't have existed if modern copyright laws, and modern interpretations of those laws, had existed in the mid 18th century. Some of the major characters in Joseph Andrews are taken directly from someone else's book, published just a few years earlier. If today we think that fanfic is legally dubious at best, it's hard to see why this wouldn't have been as well.
This is a short book. It's basic message is summed up in the first seven words of the book, repeated several times throughout and, at least in this edition, printed right on the front cover: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Food, that is, as opposed to edible foodlike industrial products.
A big part of this book is an attack on what Pollan calls nutritionism: essentially, the idea that you should think of eating in terms of getting the right balance of a small number of chemicals.
One of the blurbs on the back of the book described this as a novel. Is it one? The text itself suggests no such thing. It reads more like an extended essay, partly personal history and partly discussion. The second half seems like an expanded version of Orwell's “The Spike,” which was published as an essay.
The book is characteristically Orwell: a narrative showing exactly what extreme poverty means from moment by moment, seemingly detached at times but never truly detached because of the personal involvement, followed by a brief discussion of the moral implications—hardly more than a question like “why does this happen?,” or “who does this benefit?,” but all the more devastating for its brevity. No extended argument is necessary because you realize, reading the concluding discussion, that everything you've been reading has been the supporting argument.
Many of the details have changed in the 75 years since this was written, but I suspect that many of the essentials are the same.
Graph algorithms. Most of the book consists of graph generators, some (e.g. GB_GATES) quite whimsical. The section that I got the most out of was the one on minimum spanning tree algorithms, MILES_SPAN. I was especially interested in the Cheriton-Tarjan-Karp algorithm.
This is the fourth or fifth time I've read War and Peace. (Always in translation, alas; even when I was in college my Russian was never good enough to read Война и мир.) The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation came out last year, and has gotten glowing reviews.
I imagine I'm like most modern readers in that I identify more with Pierre than with any other character. This time, more than on previous readings, I noticed the way that he exemplified the theme of freedom and necessity that becomes so important in the epilogue. I was admiring the depiction of Pierre's feeling about his marriage to Hélène, his perception that, desirable or not, it was inevitable and necessary. Most of the important decisions in Pierre's life are similar: he doesn't always know why he does them, he isn't always sure whether they're for the best, but he feels they could not be otherwise. He doesn't feel more free after his epiphany, but his attitude about necessity becomes different.
I imagine I'm also like most modern readers in finding the epilogue disturbing and somewhat dispiriting. The commentary I've read, though, tends to focus on Natasha. She doesn't disturb me; I'm not Denisov, and I don't regret that she has grown up. Her development as a character is (leaving aside for the moment the chamber of horrors that is 19th century gender roles) entirely natural. It's Pierre that I find disturbing: not just because of the disaster that Tolstoy and his readers know is coming, but also that the Pierre who gets into a violent argument with Nikolai seems hardly different from the Pierre who made a fool of himself at Anna Pavlovna's salon in the beginning of the book. Has he really learned anything after all?