My ideal goal is to read at least one book a month, on average, or 12 per year. (Yay success in 2018, 2020-2022.) I've been very bad at this goal before but still have it. This is a mostly most-recent-first sorted non-exhaustive list of books (sometimes papers or short articles too) I've read with short 'reviews' or thoughts. There are spoilers since this list is mainly meant for myself. At the end there is a non-exhaustive non-sorted list of books I'd like to read before I die.
I may eventually sort these by subject as the list or my desire to procrastinate grows, and maybe go through change logs and memory to try and annotate when a book was actually read -- maybe even add all the books I read before I started this log, even if I don't recall the plot very well. Finally, here's a link to my Amazon Wish List in case you're looking for gifts. ;) http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/225QQLO3JIGTL
Raft - Stephen Baxter - https://www.amazon.com/Raft-Stephen-Baxter-author/dp/1473224055/
I wonder if I've heard of the Xeelee Sequence before the other day... in any case, I saw a random comment talking about how one of the books had some fun war story involving causality violations that doesn't go well, the series being fairly 'grimdark', and a brief view of the wiki page said it was hard sci fi with books spanning a huge timeline. Ok, say no more, so I dove in with the first book in the "Complete Series" (as of 2016 I think). This first book was very good, I read it basically in one sitting. The sci fi premise is a universe where G is a billion times stronger. I was also deepy amused by the way the author in some places describes Rees looking at Sheen and some of her details, exactly mirroring how I've looked at this girl I like... Might start the next book immediately, not sure. I've got a ton of non-fiction books "in progress" but I keep going back to fiction.
Dune - Frank Herbert - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/059309932X
Finally read this masterpiece. Now I can nerd-rage over the 3 adaptations too.
Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks - https://www.amazon.com/Consider-Phlebas-Culture-Iain-Banks/dp/031600538X
I liked the imagery in this one. Kind of a funny core story point of a supposedly hyper intelligent Mind getting stuck underground and being mostly helpless. Frustrating mistakes by characters who should have been smarter. The idea of needing to feel useful as a core motivation is fun to contemplate, and the themes overall. Seems I should read The Waste Land poem some day which the title references.
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye
I've had this on my queue since watching Ghost in the Shell SAC. I understand now why it wasn't required reading in my Utah school (too many swear words). I listened to an audiobook version. Overall I think it's kinda meh, not bad, overrated maybe. It's insidious for schools to make it required reading as that would take away its rebellion-yeah/fed-up-yeah message.
The Wishsong of Shannara - Terry Brooks - https://www.amazon.com/Wishsong-Shannara-Chronicles/dp/0345356365/
Still my favorite of the three. Despite killing my favorite character, Allanon, the Jachyra is a monster so cool that I still love it too... I had forgotten several details about this story, like the whole act involving Cogline/Kimber Boh/Whisper (I thought that wasn't until the next series with Walker Boh) including the Grimpond, and the bit with Stythys, and the rest of the companions to Jair besides Garet Jax. Somehow I had forgotten Slanter. I only vaguely recall the awful TV adaptation decided to bring in a gnome with the same name for some reason... Interestingly no trolls. I played the old Shannara point and click game again as well before finishing, I still like that little story too.
The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks - https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shannara-Terry-Brooks/dp/0345314255/
Mix of audiobook again. Enjoyable, a bit too long in places, a bit too on the nose for lord of the rings copying, but whatever. Writing style wise maybe the most annoying (overuse of the adjective "awesome", and so frequent verbose pronouns for characters either in narration or even in dialog). I think it improves later. Anyway, it was worth revisiting, on to my favorite next...
The Elfstones of Shannara - Terry Brooks - https://www.amazon.com/Elfstones-Shannara-No/dp/0345285549
I don't know why I've been on a revisiting old books kick for the last year or so. My first exposure to Shannara I think was the old adventure game, which fits between the first and second books, then I read this book first. I can't remember if I then read the 1st book next (I think so) and then Wishsong, or Wishsong first. Anyway, this time I listened to an audio recording here and there over the last couple months, it took a while but was enjoyable. The writing has some stylistic quirks that are a bit annoying but the overall story was still enjoyable to me. Still feel bad for Amberlee. Also man Wil is a player!
I remember watching the tv series somewhat based on this, but it wasn't very good. I don't recall it being terrible but.. just not good.
Still Alice - Lisa Genova - https://www.amazon.com/Still-Alice-Lisa-Genova/dp/1439102813
(Confession: wanted to read Algernon as sort of 'prep' for this one.) It was a beautiful and sad story, several moments of tearing up. Once again I'm reminded of an old thought, that if you have had personal experience with mental illness, either in yourself or someone close, you probably wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.
And yet like Algernon, even when the mind is ravaged, often there is still some core person there, and maybe they aren't the same person anymore, but they can still have value.
It's a shame that every Alzheimer's trial has failed, and there's even some false data in highly cited papers: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean Also disappointing for one of the pillars of SENS research and therapy direction, clearing extracellular junk (including beta-amyloid among others), as it doesn't seem to help much specifically with Alzheimer's.
I'll wait to see the movie, I'm curious how they tried to adapt it. If it does a good job, probably lots of tears too.
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf - https://www.amazon.com/Lighthouse-Virginia-Woolf/dp/0156907399
(Audibook.) What a delightful story of nonsense. Not something I could have appreciated younger (I can't remember what Woolf I tried before but I think it needs a certain mood at least). It's amusing to listen to the rambling thoughts of the characters, the way they think about things, their various faults and passions, the broader context they imagine themselves in, it's in some ways psychological.
Flowers For Algernon - Daniel Keyes - https://www.amazon.com/Flowers-Algernon-Daniel-Keyes/dp/0156030306/
I basically knew the outline of the story going in, since it's old and often cited: dumb man undergoes a procedure, becomes smart, then it reverses. Still enjoyed every page, and read it all in one go today with only minor breaks. (Jul pna'g V fhzzba guvf "gheob-nhgvfz" be jungrire fbeg bs znavn vg vf ba qrznaq?) Beautiful novel. Managed to only sniffle/cry a bit during the reunion with Charlie's mother and sister, and the final 6 or so pages. My only real complaint with the plot is that the conclusion should have been: perform this experiment on everyone! If the rate of loss is proportional to the gain, and those near the top don't gain so much, that's fine, they still gain something, and do it to enough of them they can more quickly find out a better version that is permanent...
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - J. R. R. Tolkien - https://archive.org/details/TheReturnOfTheKingAudiobook
Technically finished the main book months ago, but didn't finish the last appendix until tonight. Don't have much else to say other than it remains a masterpiece and I enjoyed my rereading.
The War of Art - Steven Pressfield - https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Winning-Creative-Battle-audio-cd/dp/1501260626
(Another audiobook, listened to over two walks.) Mixed feelings on this one. It has a certain charm, in the same way that Anti-Machiavel does, in its moralizing and absolutist tone. I'm sure it's useful for somebody. In the end I remain too much a committed reductionist to take it seriously when it goes on about the supernatural -- the map is not the territory. So I guess I didn't like it. Still, there are some fun thoughts in here, and while the map may be wrong, it may nevertheless be useful to some people under some circumstances. Treating your blockers as some external foe Resistance can be a useful framing to get you to overcome them, with or without help (including from "muses"). I don't think it's for me, unfortunately.
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin - https://www.amazon.com/Left-Hand-Darkness-Ursula-Guin/dp/0441478123
(Technically another audiobook, it was suitable listening while taking nightly walks in kind of cold weather.) Really good classic thought-experiment sci-fi, the author's introduction has some nice thoughts in it on the nature of sci-fi and sci-fi authors. The story plot was engaging, not too crazy, and I especially enjoyed the world-building via myths. I'm also a sucker for yin-yang stuff.
A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book 3 - The Wide Window - Lemony Snicket - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wide_Window
This audiobook was read by the author, who apparently does 4 and 5 before handing it back to Curry who did the first two. Good decision. This one falls apart a bit more (like the house) than the first two if you think about stuff too much, but still amusing. I get the style now, these are almost like episodes of TV cartoons. They've all been good reminders about how I dislike the way most adults treat children. Probably taking a break from the series until my next longer road trip.
A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book 2 - The Reptile Room - Lemony Snicket - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reptile_Room
Also enjoyed this one. The audio recordings go pretty quick, or maybe I'm driving too much. Funniest moment was a silly Virginia Woolf pun...
A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book 1 - The Bad Beginning - Lemony Snicket - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Beginning
Never read these as a kid, I think I was 'too cool' to read anything from someone with such a silly name. Anyway, I enjoyed it! Listened to an audiobook version while driving. Just a really funny form of grim amusement as the book tells you upfront that it's not a happy story, and keeps doing these setups where things might get better but of course don't really (though it's not that the worst possible things happen either, just, as the title, many unfortunate things.) I'll probably listen to at least one more.
The Elephant in the Brain - Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson - https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995
A fun psychology/sociology book. As a long time reader of Robin, and even watching some interviews/talks of him discussing this very book, the idea (esp. the broadest notion of signaling) of hidden motives was not new, but I enjoyed seeing it put in so much detail and in other terms than pure signals (like selfishness, conspicuousness). I think I can better talk about it with other people now, too. And maybe bring up some of the other examples in these terms besides just medicine (where the detail of 'marginal medicine' seems too complex for some people). Body language, laughter, conversation, consumption, art, charity, education, medicine, religion, politics...
My main critique is already sheepishly self-admitted by the book in the conclusion, that these sorts of social explanations often sound hollow and less convincing when applied to a 'you' (and to a self-deceiving 'I'), even if in explanatary power they can often trump more individual psychological explanations that can sound a lot more convincing (both to a 'you', especially in the context of e.g. a therapy session, and 'I', and plural 'we/they'). I would like to see something more about that. I would also like to see something about how 'unusual' brains mix into this -- call them 'neurodivergent', 'on the spectrum', 'autistic (internet-kind or otherwise)', 'nerds' -- in short, the kinds of people where these explanations systematically fail more frequently. It happens across all reserach like this -- like in the famous Milgrim experiment, I recall one somewhat recent replication which also gave insight into people's careers, and it was the lone software engineer who stopped when the collaborator asked to stop and would not budge any further. In the cognitive heuristics and biases research, you find studies (sadly many only on psych undergrads) where x% of them failed to do the right/rational thing, I always want to know what factors predict why the other y% didn't fail.
I find myself a particularly group-insensitive person, at least in adulthood, and I even actively try to avoid seeming like I identify too strongly with some group. I like to think of myself as not so strongly motivated by these hidden motives as other more normal people, much to my detriment on a gene level. Yet of course I'm not immune, I'm still human, and I can see some hidden motives (and likely am missing more), and thought of some recent ones while reading this book. (It's especially funny to consider the same motives more broadly -- like if something, e.g. an about page, has been stable for years, but suddenly changes a lot, what's a likely reason why? My guess: the author is doing something to try and attract a mate, and in the book's terms, the Press Secretary has issued an order to 'clean up' at least a few things on the chance that their prior form is too much of a red flag.) Personally I hope I can try to better see social forces (or especially the lack thereof, as maybe is my current problem in that I can mostly successfully be like a hermit) that motivate or could motivate me, and try to use some of them more to my benefit. I noticed it a long time ago that I tend to advance faster in something when I have a playfully competitive and local rival -- arguably such showing off/one-ups-manship is the whole reason I am where I am today, i.e. despite knowing nothing about the task I thought I could make a better website than my friend did, back in 2004.
Creativity: A short and cheerful guide - John Cleese - https://www.amazon.com/Creativity/dp/1529157528
Absolutely terrible, garbage book. No, I won't articulate further.
Ok, not articulating my dislike, but a few remarks for my own memory's benefit. Saw this one randomly recommended on twitter, thought maybe it'd be interesting, but had my reservations. Nope, bad book. Its only grace is that it's super short, only like 70 pages, with huge font, generous spacing between 'paragraphs' and 'sections' so there's lots of mostly empty pages, and a narrow central column layout. Pretty sure many blog posts I've read (even some I've written) are longer. Anyway, I decided to use this for my '2 pages' reading of the day, and ended up blasting through the whole thing in about 30 minutes.
On e-page 70, there was one bit of useful text, which is when asking for a second opinion on your writing, you should get answers to these four questions: "Where were you bored? Where could you not understand what was going on? Where did you not find things credible? Was there anything that you found emotionally confusing?" Getting answers to at least those should be helpful, and is anyway more useful than vague feedback like "liked it/didn't like it/just humoring you so good job have some support!".
Mini Habits - Stephen Guise - https://itig-iraq.iq/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Mini-Habits.pdf
(Expected something else? Still some appendices to finish!) Someone recommended this out of the blue, I think exactly a week ago, it was short and easy enough to read that I decided to do it over the last week. Habits are hard for me to form, so I figured hey, let's see what this book has to say about them. It doesn't even need to be as long as it is. I have a few mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it cherry picks some Science to support some of its claims -- but on the other it also highlights some disputes in the Science (like whether willpower is a limited resource or not, studies don't replicate, sometimes it matters what the person individually believes about the question, it's murky at best). So I mostly like it but I still dislike the sort of "trust me it's Science" vibe.
Now, for the main concept itself, I really liked near the beginning the request to "touch your nose". Doing so takes no effort, no willpower, even if you've had a rough day or are "burned out" (in a real sense or in the more colloquial sense this book uses). Why? Because it's such a small task, you know it'll be easy. Why not make such thinking an explicit strategy to doing stuff? That is, just like we do in professional software development where we try to break down complicated stuff into smaller chunks that go in an order towards the complete idea, break down any task you want yourself to accomplish into such micro tasks. Just by the act of starting, your brain can start carrying you forward.
It's kind of obvious when you spell it out, but I'm glad for the book doing so. Forget 'motivation', focus on willpower, but also focus on technically not needing much of either because anything you want to do should be about as stupid-easy/small as touching your nose. For the author it was initially one push-up, which is maybe a bad example because many guys are so out of shape they can't even do one pushup anymore, but still.
Mini tasks seems like a good strategy in general just to Get Things Done that you'd rather not do right now. Pointed out as a strategy is nice. So if you'd like to write a paragraph today, but you are paralyzed over such a thing for some reasons (akrasia...), maybe you can convince yourself to more easily open up a text editor? No commitment to actually writing anything, try not to even think about that, instead just think about opening a text editor, and that's it. If you do actually do it, then maybe you can ask yourself "how about you type a word? Any word? The word 'word'?" and see if you do that. And step by step you may be able to trick yourself into suddenly completing a whole paragraph or more. Or not, maybe you only got as far as opening the text editor. But hey, that's technically better than doing nothing, which you would have done under the 'old' strategy of being paralyzed and wondering why your brain won't do what you tell it to do.
The book is mostly about how repeating these mini tasks can form mini habits after enough time. (How lonog? It varies!) This is applying the same principles of breaking stuff down to smaller bits, but not to software, or tasks per-se themselves, but to broad habits/goals. Like, this own page lists my goal of reading at least one book per month. I don't always do that. Why? Reading my books just isn't a habit for me, even though I'd like it to be, I read when I feel like it. What if instead I set a more modest goal, but something that's daily, like "read two pages of any book". That's pretty easy (even easier with one page), almost at the touch-your-nose level, and by reflecting on it daily instead of monthly I may be improving my chances that it'll actually become a habit that I don't really have to think about and just do as part of my normal stuff. I applied it to the book itself, like it suggested, and have been meeting the goal each day. So why have I finished it in ~7 days rather than the expected 62 days if I just need to read two pages per day? Basically, I ended up reading more pages than 2 most of the days. Bonus reps, the book calls them.
It's important not to make bonus reps the goal, but purely bonus. Something the book doesn't really call out but I think maybe deserves mentioning is that maybe you should explicitly not let yourself do more than your minimum goal from time to time while trying to make this into a habit. The biggest psychological trick at play here is actually feeling accomplished/like you indeed did meet your goal, just by doing the simple small thing, as silly as touching your nose. You may be able to reinforce this by explicitly choosing to only meet the minimum today, and trying your best to feel happy about it, or if that doesn't work at least forgive yourself for only meeting the minimum.
Anyway, despite my complaints (and even if I dislike some sections, others may need or find them super valuable, like needing to actually reward yourself materially like with chocolate), I like the idea of this as a strategy to overcoming akrasia. Even if habits don't ultimately form like you want, or end up just taking an absurd amount of time (like most of a year), it's at least a good reminder to break stuff down until at least the first starting piece is super easy.
I decided to go with 4 simple habits for now. They are: 1 body squat per day, 2 pages read of any book per day (academic papers count), 1 any anki card looked at per day, and 1 picking up and holding my toothbrush per day. The last one is my attempt to make me brush (and maybe floss) more, but I think so far at least half of the days have just been picking up the brush. Still, I'm happy with this for now, it's moved me closer in just a few days since sometimes I have gone on to brush and might not have otherwise. (And I might put it down in the charger so my next brush will be at full power.) If I actually keep doing these things for months, if any of them even develop into a habit and make room to let me start trying to develop other habits I'd like, I'll come back and sing the book some praises.
(Update in October, my trip has trashed all my habits-in-formation.)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - J. R. R. Tolkien - https://archive.org/details/TheTwoTowersAudiobook
The first part of this was so action-packed and made for quick reading. I like Inglis' narration too, and let him read a few chapters or some parts of some chapters to me (I like his takes on the poems/songs too) while I read most of it myself. The differences from the movies are many, more than I had remembered, and I wonder why some movie changes were made or flat out invented. In most cases the book version is better and the movie version is bizarre, but some are quite justifiable. I don't mind cutting the encounter of Gimli et al with Saruman (or his projection), and the movie overall is still great and for movie-specific reasons too (e.g. I point to the Battle at Helm's Deep as my gold standard for cinematic lighting despite a dark night such that the audience can still tell what's going on, unlike the black mess that is the last Harry Potter film or Game of Thrones battle with the dead). Having Merry and Pippin be a bit more active in the decision-making of the Ents was a nice change, rather than just being unwitting pebbles that were then along for the ride. The worst movie change is probably to Frodo's character, which stands out in contrast quite a bit during this book, for in the movie he is much more meek. The book shows his gentleness too but also has frequent reminders to beware taking that for naivety or lack of courage, and he's just much more agent-y. Faramir suffers a bit too, there's no glint of a wizard in him as Sam in the books put it, no deep lore knowledge setting him apart from his brother. The falling out of Sam and Frodo on the Stairs in the third movie is a pretty bizarre change, I would have much rather them have made an attempt at a cinematic shot of the two peacefully sleeping, Frodo's head on Sam's lap, when Gollum comes upon them and has his final chance at redemption. That's maybe the most poignant scene in this book, at least of the two hobbits. And when they start talking to each other about being put in a Tale, it's a shame the movie version is cut short, and doesn't include the bit linking it all back to the Silmarils and how it's all really just one big Tale...
Having recently played through most of the LOTRO MMO's quests during this time, I'm glad they follow the book more closely.
I also wonder how much is pressure from there originally being only two films planned. When they were able to negotiate three films, they threw out the script and rewrote, but I'm sure some compression or alteration changes still slipped in. It's hard to truly throw out work or ideas.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - J. R. R. Tolkien - https://archive.org/details/the-fellowship-of-the-ring_soundscape-by-phil-dragash
Started rereading my paperback but thought it might be interesting to do the audiobook version again. There is a version by Inglis, which I may also listen to (edit: I did), but there's also a version by Phil Dragash linked above that goes above and beyond utilizing sounds and music. It was very good. The story itself is of course still great. I read it as a kid, as a teen, and now as an adult. It's been great each time. It's interesting what details I had forgotten that the movie leaves out (it's not just Bombadil) or even alters, I've watched the movies more than three times and so of course I'm more inclined to think of them first...
Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien - https://www.amazon.com/Unfinished-Númenor-Middle-earth-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0544337999
Great stuff. I had started to read my old unread Lost Tales, realized I should read this first, both to better get in the mindset these posthumous works need, and to cover some lore I'm not very familiar with. Unlike LotR or even Silmarillion, you can't really read these as standalone tales (they are, after all, Unfinished), and must take into account the helpfully provided context around their state, revisions, and cross references. Once you have that mindset though it's fascinating to read this alongside Christopher's detailed notes. It gives me a greater appreciation for both father and son. It also is fun to consider in regards to what is rightfully 'canon', given the existence of scraps and fragments and things dating from well before LotR was conceived to after its publication, and a few contradictions or inconsistencies or just changes pointed out.
I mostly skipped the retelling of the Children of Húrin, because I have in the past read its full and final standalone version (maybe worth rereading later this year though), and had just read the shorter version in Silmarillion, however I pulled my standalone hardcover out and skimmed through it and read its supplementary material, and read the notes and appendix for it in this book. Túrin's rash speech on page 156 against the Valar, and in support of Men's courage, of victory, even in the face of certain defeat, is very moving.
I'm greatly amused to learn the Drúedain made stone statues of themselves tea-bagging Orcs.
The tale of Aldarion was great. Too bad the upcoming Rings of Power series is going to be terrible, it would be interesting if they had instead decided to just make a tale of Númenor. I like the talk with his father on how he has delayed marriage, but talk only makes him want to delay more. "Yet one day you must take a wife." "One day! But not before I must; and later, if any try to thrust me towards marriage."
A side note on this 2014 publication (black cover), it's not of high quality. Many pages (especially early on) are just poorly printed, most noticeable with many occurences of the letter 'e' not having all the ink they need and thus having gaps or blank dots. I suspect an earlier edition would have higher quality ink.
The Silmarillion - J. R. R. Tolkien - https://www.amazon.com/The-Silmarillion/dp/0008433941
I may have read this sometime in jr high, I don't remember if I finished it all back then or not though. Anyway I got a paperback copy from Canada some years ago that has some nice illustrations in it, and recently I felt more strongly like reading it. I think my subconscious is trying to seek out things of grace and valor which are so rare in the current world. Though this book is also ultimately a series of tragedies, yet perhaps it helps make things more poignant. There are lessons people could learn about the ill effects that can stem from a desire to do good (and get the power to do good).
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien - https://www.amazon.com/The-Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien-audiobook/dp/B0099SNV7I
It's the Hobbit, a classic. This time I listened to another audiobook, this one narrated by Rob Inglis in the 90s and initially available on CD. It's been a while since I've read this last, and it's still enjoyable. I'm kind of getting myself on a lotr kick again... I thought it funny to think about all the stuff the movies added. The old video game on the gamecube was more faithful (almost tempted to play it again too), but I think tonight I'll watch the fan made "Cardinal Cut" to see how it does. There's always the old cartoon if it falls short.
1984 - George Orwell - https://www.amazon.com/Audio-Cassettes-narrated-Frank-Muller/dp/B006MV4RQE/
Listened to the audio version of this, narrated by Frank Muller. It lives up to the hype. I was also curious how what I thought of as the public 'gestalt' of this book matched with the actual thing. I had predicted it'd be pretty close. I'm unsure if I should judge that right. The public gestalt primarily seems to be about pervasive surveillance and an erosion of privacy, but I think that's really just part of the backdrop. It is a supporting technology for the totalitarian regime, sure, but "The Book" within the book seems almost left out. It'd be like discussing Atlas Shrugged without mentioning Galt's Speech as a primary point, instead thinking the book is mostly about collapsing railroads or something. So yeah, 1984 has other things, some of which are still (lesser) part of the public gestalt, but some seem completely absent. The least mentioned themes are probably those of continuous war, that and the other pillars which can sustain a system like Oceania (such as the lies/negations but also covering them up or just not admitting the old version), bureaucratic explosion, necessity of destroying the family, the role of machine labor, details about Newspeak (the appendix going into more detail was pretty interesting too), the metaphysics of the self and what is real and true, power as an end and not (just) a means, the effects of emotionally manipulated rage (two minutes hate), and the normalization of cruelty and torture. One funny thing I've seen online is people who say "1984 wasn't supposed to be a manual". It's funny because it's kinda not true, in that the book contains "The Book" and other details that very much highlight the "how". The book doesn't really end on a happy note, either, there is no solution presented against this sort of thing, the only thing even offered is a cynically presented hope in the proles rising up. (My own belief is that such a system is eventually self-defeating, it will collapse and disappaer one way or another rather than be eternal. If the proles are involved, it will be as tools of someone other than the Party, trying to take power for themselves, either as a means or an end.)
Causes of Separation - Travis J. I. Corcoran - https://www.amazon.com/Causes-Separation-Aristillus-Travis-Corcoran/dp/1980437440
Finally the sequel to Powers of the Earth. The third book isn't out yet but maybe next year. This one's not as good as the first book, but still fun. The first book ends on a battle just starting, the second book resolves it and then gets into a bigger one. A continued elaboration could summarize this one, without much fundamentally new. I'm still rooting for the AI. My feelings remain exactly the same as the first book. I'm sad that the most loathsome characters lived, but it's a brilliant move by the author. I should probably read Red Mars (at least the first one in its series) before the third book of this.
Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey - https://www.amazon.com/Kushiels-Dart-Jacqueline-Carey/dp/0765342987
Another old book knocked off.. I bought the trilogy in Dec 2010, I think on recommendation from a male author as "I could never write female characters as well as Carey in this". Well, looking back, I used to roleplay a feral creature that derived a weird pleasure from pain, and that little bit of creative writing also is many orders of magnitude less good than the pleasure-pain described in this book.
It was a fun story. Perhaps a bit long, but fun, and enjoyable world-building as a mishmash of real cultures and myths. Good old light-fantasy adventuring but instead of the main character fighting, she's applying her gifts in bedrooms, and her other gifts of wit etc. Nothing super erotic (I suspect the witcher books would be similar), and written in a very high-brow fashion (insert Beavis and Butthead "heheh.. phallus.. hehe"). I'm intrigued to read the next two books, but fortunately the first ended nicely with most everything tied up so I can wait a while (hopefully less than 11 years) before getting around to them.
The Leopard - Giuseppe Di Lampedusa (translated by Archibald Colquhuon) - https://www.amazon.com/Leopard-Novel-Giuseppe-Lampedusa/dp/0375714790/
A really interesting little novel. I lack the historical knowledge to fully appreciate a lot of it, but I also learned a lot from it. Maybe the most important bits, rather than aspects of Sicilian history and character, are instead a better understanding and appreciation of the inner minds that were very well exposed on the page. This is a "the past is a foreign country" tourism kind of book, even more so for being set in the past of a foreign country. The plot isn't too strong, it is more like a slice of life series around the Prince, his family, and their Priest.
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli (Translated by James B. Atkinson) - https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Hackett-Classics-Niccolo-Machiavelli/dp/0872209199
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Anti-Machiavel - Frederick the Great - libgen
These two works are above my pay grade. Nevertheless it was a fun experience to read them side by side, and the former is improved by the existence of the latter. Two hundred years separate them. Frederick knew Voltaire who at least did editing and revision of this (I wonder if anything was much altered otherwise, especially stylistically, or perhaps it was the doing of the English translator) and lived in a time near peak Enlightenment idealism. (The Sun King Absolute had only recently passed, though.) The whole Anti- work could nearly be written today, it'd even work as a series of forum posts, though probably wouldn't receive as much attention since who hasn't written a moral screed these days.
I think Anti- would have been a better book/essay if it didn't spend so many sentences reminding us how vile, cruel, criminal, evil Machiavelli and his teachings are. Still, it isn't just moralizing, he also calls Machiavelli out on basically everything, and I'm left convinced that Machiavelli does not argue with honesty or fully valid logic. (Though I'm also left curious how many contradictions are the result of corruptions, as there's no known original The Prince...) His examples are cherry-picked (once quoting from The Aeneid or using other fables, as if fiction/drama substituted for a real example, which Frederick calls him on) and when he does use real examples he often leaves out relevant details, and entirely avoids mentioning many others. Ultimately Frederick's hero-worship of wise Marcus Aurelius seems to be a lot healthier than Machiavelli's hero-worship of the cruel César Borgia, you can probably derive both viewpoints without reading either of these works by just instead reading a biography of both those men.
Frederick has the advantage of technological progress. Much of the military ideas in The Prince had been outdated already, particularly by the rise of standing armies. (Or perhaps their return? Machiavelli considers the rare Roman and Sultan standing armies, though they were not quite the same.) The Prussian army was particularly very large with respect to the proportion of its populace (1 in 28 citizens was a soldier). Though Frederick only gets into it near the beginning, the concept of being able to just send a group of soldiers off to be stationed somewhere indefinitely, because you have a large standing army, was a neat modern invention that works a lot better for keeping a populace in line than the antiquated approaches of having to go live in different areas or engage in precision brutality and betrayal. (Of course in modern times we seem to have a reversal in what methods are called for, and should perhaps study Luttwak, whose harsh recommendations against insurgencies are reminiscent of the naked brutality suggested by Machiavelli (and whose insistence that a democracy cannot do them (so don't worry, it's just theory!) seems very weak given the many examples of brutality inflicted even by our US, let alone other democracies); it's probably even more economical to study Roger Trinquier who actually had success in counterinsurgency (FLN) -- but on the other-other hand, France did lose possession of Algeria in the end.. Again, above my pay grade.)
When there is history involved (particularly omitted history that the Prince doesn't mention, or doesn't mention in its entirely) Frederick does better in having a case for his arguments; similarly when advances in technology or the taming of the common man (making him less wild, through broader culture and more varied opportunities for gainful living and education (i.e. knowing how to read, having a more cultivated soul)) are important considerations. He does less well when he moralizes, and while the moralizing should be popular today and exalt principles we can easily agree with, nevertheless one should soberly consider Machiavelli's evil-seeming prescriptions rather than dismissing him and them with a tirade, because for many of them there is something there. It is probably unpleasant for a 'normie' mind to contemplate, or a particularly sensitive non-normie mind like Frederick's at least at the time.
My favorite point on which they both look a bit silly is when Machiavelli overly praises the hobby of hunting, while Frederick goes on an epic rant against it. You can make similarly silly points pro/against the curiously popular hobby of golfing among today's elite.
Prior to writing his work Frederick had a troubled and wild and gay youth, and shortly after the responsibility of rule came to him. He then went on to become The Great, whereas Machiavelli's wisdom, such as it is, is called out as best suited for only a small prince. Given the empirical success of Frederick, we should probably favor him when it comes to matters of policy, statecraft, and especially warfare, but on the other hand his admiration for e.g. a constrained king as in Britain at the time did not seem to pan out, and indeed monarchy in Europe now is dead, with the last battle being kicked off by an assassination that Frederick insisted had become so rare and an entanglement of alliances he said were so useful (and so useful to be held to). Read both critically and not as the final word on anything even in their time... (And probably don't annoy your subjects with a ban on roasting their own coffee.)
The Mikado Method - Ola Ellnestam, Daniel Brolund - https://www.amazon.com/Mikado-Method-Ola-Ellnestam/dp/1617291218
Short and sweet book. The core method is pretty simple and is explained well enough in the first part to go try and make use of it. The second part has a chapter on design principles and another appendix on technical debt that are worth reading on their own for better software development thoughts. I did a presentation to some former coworkers about it, maybe I'll add a link to the pdf here later. In short, it's a useful method, give it a go!
The Dream of the Iron Dragon - Robert Kroese - https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Iron-Dragon-Saga/dp/1983729213
Argh, I got myself in another series! Well, it looks like the next two books are done, however a 4th book is on the way to conclude the conclusion? Anyway, I enjoyed it. Good mil-sci-fi despite almost all the battles being viking style. Crazy-fun premise.
Raven Stratagem - Yoon Ha Lee - https://www.amazon.com/Raven-Stratagem-Machineries-Empire-Yoon/dp/1781085374
It was a'ight. Book 2 of 3, after Ninefox Gambit, which I read too long ago that I couldn't remember that much. Like, I had to go back and re-read a bit of the end to remind myself that no, Jedao was dead, even though the book keeps up the act almost the whole way through despite a reader (who read the first anyway) knowing otherwise. Would have been nice to have a behind-the-scenes conversation with Cheris and the AIs or something, to remind the reader.
It's very much in the fantasy side of science-fantasy, not even that great for 'military sci-fi'. The 'mathematics' and formations and everything else are just magic, treat them as magic words/spells rather than trying to think words you recognize have meaning. The characters were fun enough to keep me reading until the end. I guess I'll have to get to the third book now eventually, at least it's out.
The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin - https://www.amazon.com/Lathe-Heaven-Ursula-K-Guin/dp/1416556966
Charming sci-fi. Is it really sci-fi? I might call this taoist fiction... Throughout reading I was reminded of a quote in my quotes file... but who said it? I told myself I'd look it up when I finished. Looking at the file, there is no source, and now I remember, it was myself, lol. It is this: "Potestne mutare somnia in veritatem?" I took Latin for a few years in HS, this was my translation attempt at what surely must have been first thought in English: "Is it possible to change dreams into reality?" It sounds more impressive in Latin. I've wanted to read a Le Guin book for a while, didn't know where to start, this was a Morlock recommend. A few years ago I came across her out of context, and worried she might be ideological, though a bit further quick research made me put down the prejudgment and be willing to give her work a chance someday. It does seem that some people try to twist her work in some direction, but they'll do that with everything. A week ago I also found out she did her own translation of the tao te ching. I don't think someone so steeped in taoism can be ideological. It has a protective force to it -- one I've thought about yet again as little as a month ago, its force protected me (in many ways unwittingly) from elements of DC when I visited as a teenager.
Die You Doughnut Bastards - Cameron Pierce - https://www.amazon.com/Die-Doughnut-Bastards-Cameron-Pierce/dp/1621050556
I bought this 7 years ago after enjoying The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, read half of it, for some reason never finished it until today. None of the stories are as good as Ass, some (and I think all the poems) are just objectively bad (but fun anyway), but I was still entertained by the whole thing. I had kinda forgotten about the Bizarro genre. My favorite stories in this were "Pablo Riviera, Depressed, Overweight, Age 31, Goes to the Mall" and "Lantern Jaws".
Dark Wraith of Shannara - Terry Brooks - https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Wraith-Shannara-Terry-Brooks/dp/0345494628
Had this in my bookshelf for a long time. It's a graphic novel, and I think perhaps the first one I acquired or even looked at seriously. I remember shelving it back then because it gave me the same feeling I still have when I think about reading manga (Dragon Maid being the only manga I've completed despite the feeling) -- why can't every page be in full color? It's a childish complaint, but one bred out of enjoying colored comics and cartoons and anime. Well I'm older now, I can enjoy things despite them not fully catering to my preferences... Anyway, about the book itself, it's a simple story set after the events of Wishsong, my favorite of Brooks' books. It's an alright tale. Ultimately pointless (Paranor protects itself) as far as world-ending threats go, but a fun revisit to the world. Makes me want to reread Wishsong, and maybe I should read just any actual fantasy novel again. I don't want sci-fi to have ruined the enjoyment entirely... basically sci-fi has fewer "why not instead...? what about...? why didn't they consider..? what do they eat/where does food come from?" questions a reader can raise than fantasy. If you can supress such questions and just enjoy the ride, as I usually can do, it's fine, but then you come to a book that answers those questions (sometimes before you've even had them) in detail and continuously and it's just night and day. That's ultimately why I prefer sci-fi, I think. (But it's not a saintly genre -- all I said was fewer.)
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why - Richard E. Nisbett - https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Thought-Asians-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356
Overall a good book, recommended reading. It can help elucidate the differences one finds in direct experience with Asian people and culture, and offers some explanations for how such differences could arise. Lots of fun studies showing interesting differences that perhaps generalize to something beyond what the study tests. There is also a lot of overlap but it's not often called out as such. I nevertheless have some serious issues with the book...
My strongest one: it's published in 2003, so it can only be ignorant of advances made since then. In particular, the replication crisis is ongoing, and specifically the research on priming has been shown to be needed to be mostly tossed out, whereas this book brings it up multiple times (as other books have) giving it too much credence. Similarly with every other study the book mentions (many of them by the author), they are interesting studies but one wonders how well they would replicate and if any meta-analysis has been made about the general idea they seem to be going for. I'd like to see a review book of this that talks about what has held up, what has yet to be further examined, and what has been demolished or at least discredited.
One study that hit my smell detector found Asian and Asian American performance on puzzles while being asked to talk at the same time to be deleteriously affected, whereas for 'European Americans' there was no performance decline. This seems at odds with the success of Asians in Tech, where typically they must pass through a whiteboard hazing. And the most vocal critics of this method and admitters of the stress tend to be white, Asians are more accepting that the test is what it is and practice for it. Anyway, perhaps this result does not replicate, is my weak suggestion. I have not yet dug into Kim's work to see if there are obvious flaws or published rebuttals.
The book takes great pains to avoid using the word 'white' and to the extent it talks about IQ at all, it uses one study by the author that had a result of significantly lower scores for Asians on the Cattell Culture Fair test despite high correlations (i.e. not such a lower/higher score) on two other measurements. This is used to argue against IQ in general, with a random pot shot taken at The Bell Curve, and also the book goes to great lengths to avoid ever talking about genetics except in this one little paragraph to try and dispell its relevance at all. Yet this result (of IQ tests being culturally biased) is contradicted by many previous and subsequent studies using Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices or otherwise which show a clearly higher score by Asians, resulting in the consensus that China and Japan have higher national IQs than white countries that lack the bias the author talks about. But sure, the human genome project only completed in 2003, when this was published, so perhaps we can excuse the avoidance of genetics at all as the last squawks of a dying limited approach. (Any modern study should take into account genetics, because we have the data.)
In the first quarter or half of the book, some of the writing is gratingly too pop on the pop-sci side of things. The latter part of the book is better, focused more on studies. But this annoyance is hard to articulate. It comes across as wildly naive -- like the author relates some personal anecdote and how it was totally mind-blowing (and uses that to segway into studies about it), but it has the flavor of racist grandma trying sushi for the first time in her 80 years and finding it pleasant with mind blown about what sorts of weird Japanese cultural factors led to the creation of sushi. It's just sushi, and many other people don't go 80 years in avoidance.
This last bit is my final thought on the matter -- I see eastern modes of thought in myself and other non-easterners, and western modes of thought in easterners. I like the Tao Te Ching, but a stereotypical westerner (using the stereotypes of this book) would find it incomprehensible. But like, it's just sushi, it's just generic worldviews and approaches, man, most people are not so fixated on one and only one way of looking at things. Perhaps there is a robust difference in east and west (I do think there seems to be) for preferred thinking processes (and a few rare ones that are just alien to the other), and it must come from genetic and non-genetic sources, but it seems most people can deal with both classes of thought just fine, and these statistical differences in studies are very slight indeed. As one must point out in, say, layering two slightly shifted bell curves on top of each other, the vast majority of individual data is no different from one population or the other. Certainly some big inferences can be drawn from how different the curves are, but we must also be careful of drawing too big of inferences and generalizing too much about causes.
Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - https://www.amazon.com/Lucifers-Hammer-Novel-Larry-Niven/dp/0449208133
Crazy amount of build-up. Took a few dozen pages to really get into, but after that it was engrossing. Even after the comet you know is coming hits, the story continues, and is pretty satisfying.
Astronauts are the best of us.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect - Roger Williams - http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
(Read the paperback of this too.) This was a fun AI/Singularity story. One might think it's about the 3 Laws, but even Asimov highlighted right after introducing them their insufficiency. So you know things are going to go wrong. Taking into account when it was written (early 90s), it was pretty good. It started off with a by-now tiresome bang and felt like edgy for the sake of being edgy, but after that the backstory and main story were written out well. I disagree with the final message of the book, and it too is somewhat tiresome. Just because one person isn't satisfied with paradise or can't live without pain should not mean the rest of creation should suffer. But sure the AI-God here was not perfect, and maybe starting over and trying again was a better hope for a better god.
Blindsight - Peter Watts - https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
(I read the paperback.) This is an interesting sci-fi book. Overall, I liked it, but I found the writing style annoying. Besides the style, it was also hard to actually imagine many things -- i.e. visual details were not conveyed well in many places. I disliked the flashbacks interrupting the main plot, and thought the VR escapism sub-theme largely unnecessary. Yes, it adds character to the main character, but it wasn't necessary. The core thought-experiment itself, and some of the conclusions drawn, are old and explored better by non-fiction. The overall vision of future humanity with fun-drugs for all and eternal happiness a few neural tweaks away is boring. The aliens were the most interesting part, and why I decided to read the book to begin with, but not enough time was spent on them.
Death's End - Cixin Liu - https://www.amazon.com/Deaths-End-Three-Body-Problem-Cixin/dp/1784971650
The finale of the three body problem trilogy. Thinking about what to write here, my thoughts are a bit unfocused. Overall, I liked it, quite a bit, and it was a nice conclusion to the series. It did take about 100 pages to get into though. I also liked Dark Forest more and maybe the first book a bit less; though to be honest the first works well as a standalone tale up until the cliffhanger. I'm curious how the movie will play things -- in theory I think one could make a single movie covering everything. I liked the fairytale, it'd be fun to read it standalone without any context to a child and see what they think.
Since I liked it, maybe I'll just mention specifics about what I didn't like.
There are two technological developments that were missing that I didn't like, which were significant age/life extension (by the end the typical lifespan had only gone up to ~150) and lack of AGI (or at least lack of exploring its consequences, even that of near-human AI starting to run the show and have its own strategems against both biological species).
This book even moreso than Dark Forest treats something resembling the 'mood' of humanity as if it were a character, and easily globalizes super-majority culture and values. This lends to the grandness of the narrative, but it overall hurts the sense of immersion. Or perhaps I just don't appreciate enough the in-reality strange convergences of a subset of global elite behavior and beliefs.
This book also somewhat defeats its own dark forest premise at the end by the introduction of hyper-advanced civilizations (though it does take 10 billion years for one to send a backbone message). Surely one of them would have made a power grab, or tried to, with the result being very visible signs of conflict to the rest of the universe? Also especially when the fate of the universe rests on goodwill. The DF premise rests on technical capability having a maximum and the maximum being easy to reach, and also the maximum not being that godlike.
Last thought, but Greg Egan still does the thought experiments with weird math or physics better. The sophon unfolding/folding thing isn't explored enough, especially in this book that tries to cover different dimensional possibilities.
Behavior: The Control of Perception - William T. Powers - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FIXQE8K
This was a very interesting work of psychology. The best value for a layman like me is perhaps meta, it shows the construction of a scientific model, as is done in the hard sciences, to explain psychological phenomena. This is in stark contrast to the sometimes questionable statistical models still in fashion decades later. The model itself also seems useful to better introspect oneself, and resolves a lot of conundrums from older classic behaviorism ideas (especially on the subject of reward/punishment).
For my own notes, the model is formed from hierarchical control systems. Author proposes 9 levels: Intensity (magnitude of stimulation of some sensory receptor), Sensation (some property of sensation, vector), Configuration (pattern, arrangement), Transition (time and space changes of configurations, partial derivatives), Sequence/Event (fixed succession of other elements), Relationship (regularity in behavior of two or more independent elements), Program (network of choice-points/if branches), Principles (generalizations of lower-order perceptions; facts, heuristics (biases), laws, beliefs), and System Concepts (organized entities, models, beings). Yes, control systems just like control theory in engineering. Each level in the hierarchy has an input signal (its perception) which is the variable to be controlled, a comparator with a reference signal given to it from a higher-order system, and outputs the error difference to lower order systems or raw actuators at the first order to effect behavior that may then result in new perceptions to be controlled so as to reach the reference level. It's worth repeating: output behavior isn't what is controlled, but the input perception.
I would like to spend some time in the future seeing the development of this model. This second edition is almost 20 years old, and it was mostly ignored for its first 30 years before then. Control Theory in engineering still remains a difficult topic, despite having almost 100 years of development now, what hope to the non-engineers have?
Somewhat amusingly my paperback seems to be worth a lot on Amazon for some reason... guess I shouldn't have beat it up so bad! Well, a PDF surely exists...
Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life - Richard Jones - https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Machines-Nanotechnology-Richard-Jones/dp/0199226628
Great book, contains a lot of great info on physics, chemistry, biology, bionanotechnology, neurology, engineering.. explains the machinery of life, the machinery of lab equipment like types of microscopes.. If I had something like this when I was younger I think I could have enjoyed chemistry. It's tied together a lot of separate threads of knowledge I've accumulated. There's still a lot I only partially understand and would need a more complete book + exercises + probably actual practice/experimentation to really grok, but this is still a great fusion book. I have only two complaints, one is the peculiar beef with Drexler and his approach (I plan to go through his PhD dissertation / Nanosystems at some point), and the perpetuation of "wave-particle duality" confusion. (As Feynman puts it, and this book also admits, things come in discrete energy packets -- they are particles, it's just that we use the mathematics we also use for waves for certain behavior, which is mysterious if you think they are classic particles, but they're still fundamentally particle-like.)
Valley of Sorrow: A Layman's Guide To Understanding Mental Illness for Latter-Day Saints - Alexander B. Morrison - https://www.amazon.com/Valley-Sorrow-Laymans-Understanding-Latter-Day/dp/1590380878
One of the books I inherited from my mom, I remember her telling me long ago it was useful for her. As something published in 2003, I think it's an ok introduction to mental health issues. Nothing really new for me on the scientific front. I'm largely against the religious bent, but I think for believing Mormons it could be useful, and it's interesting to see the contortions of reasoning when it addresses doctrine on free will, the existence of suffering, and the sin of suicide.
I remember when I still believed, I would pray for my brother. Even after a long time as an atheist I still get urges to pray, especially when I am mentally exhausted by whatever issue I'm contemplating; the childhood brainwashing is deep-set. But I'm not angry about it. The book suggests studying gospel will more quickly change behavior than studying behavior. This is probably true of studying philosophy and other religious documents.
It's a very "responsible" book in the sense that it urges first and foremost to put trust in professional health care providers, rather than religion. Some 20 years on and more and more people being on anti-depressants and other things I'm not sure that's good advice (I myself actively resisted suggestions by friends to do therapy etc). People are lacking foundations. I begrudgingly admit that religion can supply good-enough foundations, when properly practiced, but there's a lot of "religious" people who are nevertheless quite sinful and do not know and do not study their own doctrine. The Mormons are probably the last bastion.
The Psychology of Computer Programming - Gerald M. Weinberg - https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Computer-Programming-Gerald-Weinberg/dp/0442292643/
What a book.. it's hard to say more. Like the long-ago read The Information, I dog-eared many pages, as is my habit in most books when I come across something I think has value in revisiting. But because of so many, the whole book itself will be worth revisiting someday. It was written in 1971 (you can get a used hardcover from then, cheaply; I recommend it). This was before the PC, before so many things we programmers take for granted... Yet it's still enlightening. And the war stories are still fun. It's also interesting to read about some problem or difficulty they faced then, and that we still face now, or that we have somewhat alleviated with certain technologies. (For example, Stack Overflow as the "pool" of documentation for all sorts of things.) As the epilogue suggests, perhaps the best thing about this book is to give one a sense of seeing things from a psychological point of view, and to try to see the whole picture. This book is worthwhile for managers to read, too, and I'm always going to be amused by the first question the book poses its readers (each chapter ends with some questions for managers, and questions for programmers): "Do you read the code your programmers write?" And for programmers: "Do you read the code of your peers? Or your old code?" I would like to go through this book again with a group someday. In addition, it has a fantastic bibliography, so many books or papers just as old or much older that I think would be worth my time. Well, perhaps not immediately, but it's helping my book queue continue to grow at a faster rate than it's being consumed...
Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective - Edited by Andreas Paepcke - https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3863/Object-Oriented-ProgrammingThe-CLOS-Perspective
This book is really a big collection of papers from several authors. It covers the topics of Lisp's OOP system and some of its history, its unique features (especially some comparison chapters with C++, Smalltalk, Eiffel), its meta-object protocol (and why you'd want it), some production reports from the field on its use in helping application development, and some implementation details to ward off "surely this is sooo much slower than a plain old function call?" concerns. It's a good resource to justify the claim that Lisp's OOP system is the most powerful which can be understood by even a casual lisper, as well as to inspire what's possible with object-oriented thinking that is absent in less powerful systems like Java. It can also dispell a lot of thrust in the big anti-OOP rants (like this and this).
It also has one of the most beautiful covers. Hardcover recommended.
Successful Lisp - David Lamkins - https://successful-lisp.blogspot.com/
Got around to wrapping this up. I had kind of advanced past it from other material, but it was still useful to refresh on some things and add to my generic lisp snippets file for syntax examples. It's dated, yet of course the code works and much of the style opinions are still relevant. Its text is concise, and as the home page says, it really is geared towards getting a professional programmer up-to-speed with a lot of what Lisp offers in a short amount of time. (One could go through this little book in one or two days on the job or less.)
A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732102201/
I didn't like it. Sure I had some expectations -- it was sold to me as "the anti Clean Code" -- but not meeting that expectation (it's only a fair characterization in the difference of mentality when it comes to shallow/deep methods and classes) isn't why. Fundamentally it's just not a very good book for professionals, even if some highly paid programmers would do well to follow its advice religiously. The author has used it for classes with college students, it does seem reasonably appropriate for Freshmen or first-semester Sophomores.
From the beginning, it's on shaky foundations with its definition of simplicity/complexity by conflating it with the subjective easy/hard. Based on the cover art I was hoping for a post-Hickey (see his much-cited talk Simple Made Easy) understanding that complexity is objective, but alas. "For the purposes of this book ... complexity is anything related to the structure of a software system that makes it hard to understand and modify the system." Sorry, that's not a useful definition of complexity, and now the whole book is harder to read/easier to misinterpret ("complex?" =P) because of the custom definition. Well, at least it's explicit that it's custom.
What's agreeable is mostly only so because it's such a straightforward platitude. "Things that are not important should be hidden, and the more of them the better. But when something is important, it must be exposed." Ok? Anyone want to argue to the contrary? I was also hoping that with the book being so short it would be concise, but alas, it's full of this sort of stuff. The single page summary of design principles at the end is similar. A few of them you could quibble about, but arguments would likely just be in fully understanding the meaning of the terminology and what background contexts are assumed. (Much advice is dependent on context! Context is something not really called out much in this book. As one example there was only a very slight hint that the author is aware that writing for the code reader means a reader from a particular audience, often your co-workers, and that gives you certain affordances you wouldn't have for say random blogger.)
A lot of the author's rants seem to be snipes at Java. Fine, whatever, though Java has answers to the complaints.
I guess I was also a bit disappointed. I'm just a nobody programmer and the author has had an illustrious career (Tcl inventor for goodness sake!), but still, I expected more. A few weeks ago a happenstance tweet referencing an email thread from the late 90s with the legendary Naggum told me he also has had a long history of misunderstanding basic things like program typing. (Or perhaps I should just say, Common Lisp and the things that led to it and spread from it.) I feel like the author should know better. Maybe he does but left it out because nuance is hard? Or maybe in the following case he once knew something but forgot? I mean in a final chapter on "trends" he highlights OOP and its relationship to his philosophy. But there's a quote from him from somewhere else (not this book) that suggests a more nuanced view, but also an entire discussion mostly absent from this philosophy. "The strong typing of object-oriented languages encourages narrowly defined packages that are hard to reuse. Each package requires objects of a specific type; if two packages are to work together, conversion code must be written to translate between the types required by the packages."
The Powers of the Earth - Travis Corcoran - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1973311143/
Ayn Rand and BioShock's baby... I enjoyed it, but sadly can't say I loved it. And not because of the nitpicky (I read Worm after all) criticism that nearly all self-published works suffer from by not having an editor -- which is to say their overall verbosity and their too frequent glaring typos and broken/confusing sentence structure from a bad edit. No, I'm left feeling a bit dissatisfied because I don't really like any of the characters. One might want to compare Andrew Ryan, John Galt, and Mike Martin. The main character flaw of Mike I strongly dislike is his temper. The other two have flaws, but not that one. Anyway it's hard to find much sympathy for the other characters either. In this way it reminds me of the show Breaking Bad, which I also liked, but also in the end found exactly 0 characters to like or even find redeemable. This probably says more about me than anything. I'll add that my favorite character here is the AI, but even it stretches me because for its minor paranoia and redundancy it doesn't even have a secret fiber network backup (or primary) should its satellites fail. Favorite human is John. Favorite doggo is Rex (RIP). Favorite quote is "Consciousness cannot be implemented with map-reduce." (Edited slightly from "can not" to "cannot".) I'll probably pick up the second book at some point, but not in the next few months. Maybe when the third (of four planned--probably 5 in the end) is out. Or maybe I'll wait and see if someone can just publish a shortened version purely from the perspective of the AI, since I think its development will be the most interesting. This book is good at feeding existing misanthropy.
Thinking Forth - Leo Brodie - http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
Another one of those "started long ago" books that I never finished, but finally did. I restarted it in August, remembered why I didn't finish it when I got to a spot around 1/3 in where it gets super Forth-specific-code-heavy, but plowed ahead and finished it. It's still a great book, covering the classic lifecycle of software, software design, and thoughts to help implement robust, efficient, and readable software. It was published in 1978, and so much of modern software (and even modern language features -- e.g. Python's for..else was conceived of originally by a Forth programmer) echos in the book. The rest of this is just some highlights/lessons I want to refer back to in the future.
Prefer components over levels. Components should be able to talk to each other, regardless of what conceptual level they sit at. Hyphenated names may be a sign of bad factoring. See if you can break the hyphen and define two words. Avoid passing control flags downward -- you're asking the runtime to make a pointless decision that you knew the answer to while programming. On factoring, fruitful points include where you feel unsure about the code (complexity approaches conscious limit), and where a comment seems necessary. Avoid pronoun-like things. Be explicit. Make use of the data stack (in Forth) but not too deeply (like > 3). Applies with recursive things I think, and also for how many args a function takes even with the benefit of being named... Quote: "Some newcomers to Forth view the stack the way a gymnast views a trampoline: as a fun place to bounce around on. But the stack is meant for data-passing, not acrobatics." The book/cited Kogge highlights the virtue of functional programming before we called it that. Kogge uses the phrase "referential transparency" to describe a pure function. He all but says clearly that state is the next worse thing after GOTO. Moore highlights the choice of restoring a situation when you finish and establishing the situation when you start. He used to be on the restoration side (and I myself write lots of test code like that: get current environment state, set it, try..finally restore original). He changed though and now just establishes the state before he starts. "If I have a word which cares where things are, it had better set them. ... There are more exits than there are entrances." Forth's doer-make is an expression of the generators language feature, too. Or can be.
"This (using booleans as hybrid bool and integers 0 or 1 for logic exploits/shorter code) sort of approach is often labeled a 'trick'. In the computing industry at large, tricks have a bad reputation. A trick is simply taking advantage of certain properties of operation. Tricks are used widely in engineering applications. Chimneys eliminate smoke by taking advantage of the fact that heat rises. Automobile tires provide traction by taking advantage of gravity. ALUs take advantage of the fact that subtracting a number is the same as adding its two's complement. These tricks allow simpler, more efficient designs. What justifies their use is that the assumptions are certain to remain true. ... code can become more readable." Tricks have their dangers, but they can be very well justified. Look for them more, maybe.
A dig at programmers then, and now too. "Don't test for something that can't possibly happen. Many contemporary programmers are error-checking-happy. There's no need for a function to check an argument passed by another component in the system. The calling program should bear the responsibility for not exceeding the limits of the called component." "If you keep the user out of trouble you won't have to continually test whether the user has gotten into trouble."
Try to factor out conditions. Algorithm changes, computing instead of logic, lookups, recognizing dont-care variable values, can all help. On the other hand maybe you need a language like Prolog if your application is very logic heavy. For normal applications, a decision table might work better too (compared to a sea of if-elses).
"Fooling with the return stack (multiple possible returns per function in modern parlance) is like playing with fire. You can get burned. But how convenient it is to have fire."
Distinguish between "reading nicely in English" and "reading nicely". e.g. if something suggests an "adjective noun" phrase, but is implemented more simply as "noun adjective", the latter is worth it. And after all, other languages don't follow English's word order here. "We should be independent of details like which language we're thinking in." "It depends on your intention: simplicity, or emulation of English." Sometimes emulation is desirable.
The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu - https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Remembrance-Earths-Past/dp/0765386690
Fantastic. So many fun thought experiments. The first book is really just setup for this one.
My earlier complaint about the ending of the first book is rescinded, I'll just suspend my disbelief and allow the quantum FTL communication and chock it up to new physics. Additionally if our understanding of physics is really still so primitive, I do think this resolution of the fermi parodox is pretty compelling, though I still suspect at least one of the hunters from time to time to make a gambit for harnessing galactic-scale structures to shake up the status quo equilibrium and gain at least galaxy-wide dominance. If matter is finite, there's a lot of it out there that seems to not be put to much intelligent use at the moment, so I still think (hope) the great filter is behind us, unlike ahead of us as implied by this book. I'm looking forward to the third book.
The Expert System's Brother - Adrian Tchaikovsky - https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Systems-Brother-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/1250197562
I could not remember why I added this to my wishlist, but I received it for my birthday and being short I read it over the last couple evenings. I enjoyed it, but I suspect that if I picked at the flaws in the artificial intelligence gone amok theme here I'd enjoy it less, so all I'm saying here is it's not "hard". Anyway now that I've finished it I've gone back to try and find what caused me to wish for it, and found the reason. Basically in a thread on Chinese sci-fi there was hope that they could deliver on themes that western sci-fi had neglected, I answered among others a "Like what?" question with "An Anti-Enlightenment message". What I mean by that is dense. Anyway someone suggested this book, which "explores a back-to-basics society with hidden tech keeping it afloat", might touch on what I mean. Unfortunately it doesn't. The "hidden tech keeping it afloat" is, in part, eugenics, sure, but not in any anti-enlightenment form. So the search continues, I guess.
Icons and Symmetries - Simon Altmann - https://www.amazon.com/Icons-Symmetries-Simon-L-Altmann/dp/0198555997
This has three "chapters", or sort of transcriptions of lectures. The first two were really great. It's a lot of food for thought on human progress. Why it took 8 years (!) before Orsted basically did an experiment by accident that led to wider understanding of electromagnetism. Why it took years for Hamilton's quaternions to be treated as rotation matrices, not vectors. The whole idea of polar (ordinary) vs axial vectors that I don't think I'd ever seen before.. (axial being the kind you can identify by rotating a pipe, but under reflection it has interesting properties). The difference between the icon and the object, the map and the territory, the dangers of using icons to mean multiple things (or forget certain contexts)... The third chapter was a bit hard to follow technically because I don't have a background in solid state physics, but what I did follow at the high level was still interesting. It's a short book but a really neat one on the history of science and math and how the notion of using principles to help guide you is wrought with all sorts of danger, even when you can find a (in this case "post-Curie") decent principle. In these examples, not having a full appreciation of symmetry, but at the same time being hypnotized by seemingly elegant symmetry (in the icon), both contributed to progress delays.
Spice and Wolf - Volume 1 - Isuna Hasekura - https://www.amazon.com/Spice-Wolf-Vol-light-novel/dp/0759531048
Watched the anime, wanted more, read the first light novel. A fun read, retells half the first season of the show. I also appreciate the show even more for the little changes they did. To me if animes are based on a manga or light novel, they are best when they do things a bit differently in recognition of their different medium. And the light novel was great the way it was, too. Now, how do I get my own kenrou companion...
Design It!: From Programmer to Software Architect - Michael Keeling - https://www.amazon.com/Design-Programmer-Architect-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/1680502093
This was the second office book club book. Because we didn't really do the "get your hands dirty" simulations, and skimmed the third section of the book which is mostly a reference of interesting techniques to build better architectures, I don't think we got as much out of the book as we could have. Additionally most people in the club don't have the relevant background experience to really grasp some of the lessons or be able to argue with them. Also-also our company is structured in a crazy way, but this book kind of assumes "modern" / in-fashion software practices and assumes your scope is one self-contained product. Not too useful for adding somewhat contained but necessarily complected features to a 20 year old product with PM hierarchies that keep the ICs far, far away from the customers most of the time. And no advice for how to get from some other place to the place he assumes you to be.
Anyway, I got some things out of this book, but it's not one I would have picked for myself, and I think my time would have been better used with another book. The book is very long-winded in places and has a lot of fluff. Some of it might just be due to the formatting. There are a lot of bullet point items, and it makes it seem like the book was constructed from some number of 30-60 minute slideshow presentations. I would bet at least half of the bullet points could be removed entirely. I didn't like the example project which you see revealed "progress" on at the end of each chapter. I'd have preferred a self-contained case-study chapter. For aspiring architects, I think reading Joel Spolsky would be a better use of time. And then seeing actual architecture discussions, not just this hypothetical Lionheart one (kudos to the "use system metaphors" from Kent Beck exercise in the third section which finally gave a description of the point of the Lionheart project I could readily understand) from books like The Architecture of Open Source Applications.
Common Lisp in the Wild: Deploying Common Lisp Applications - Wimpie Nortje - https://www.darkchestnut.com/book-common-lisp-application-deployment/
Good short book. I'm a professional programmer who's had the misfortune to be stuck in JavaLand for the past 4 years. I'd like to use Lisp more. I've been dabbling with it for quite a while, but until this book I hadn't really found something that I thought was sufficiently similar to the "professional" project structures I'm used to in JavaLand. (That's not necessarily a dig on Lisp -- it's flexible enough to let you get away with simpler project layouts, whereas Java practically requires a full maven experience to have sanity.) I appreciated this book giving a simple Makefile approach and showing how to use qlot (version pinning) with quicklisp (package fetcher) but also how to keep the Lisp experience in development. There's no tradeoff between structuring for development and structuring for a deployable build! Also UIOP: such a great package I never knew I had all this time.
As it says on the tin, shared libraries aren't really covered, though some advice is given that will be helpful when it comes time to deploy my game. I'd have liked to see a complete example, though. 'trivial-gamekit has support for distribution, it'd be neat to have a book-guide on how to do something like that to save the effort of looking under the hood. Another content suggestion I'd make is to take the final example of a webapp and package it in Electron or something.
Dichronauts - Greg Egan - https://www.amazon.com/Dichronauts-Greg-Egan/dp/159780892X/
Enjoyable hard sci-fi as expected. The geometry of the world is crazy and enjoyable to puzzle through (and read more about on his site) but maybe a bit much to puzzle through all the time. Still I think even someone not very interested in maths can follow along and enjoy the story itself, which was a fun alien adventure.
A Planet of Viruses - Carl Zimmer - https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Viruses-Second-Carl-Zimmer/dp/022629420X/
A brief intro to the viruses around us and their history, pretty interesting. Didn't know a lot of (most of?) the things. e.g. that a virus genome is responsible for a crucial placenta-coating protein in mammals. Only improvement I'd make would be more pictures (but fortunately google provides).
The Earth is Enough: growing up in a world of flyfishing, trout, and old men - Harry Middleton - https://www.amazon.com/Earth-Enough-Growing-Flyfishing-Pruett/dp/0871088746
Dad recommended this to me, it took me some years to actually start it... But I'm glad I've finished it. The last bit was somewhat difficult, emotional. To me this book offers a glimpse at a rather idyllic life of mountain men who took up unprofitable sustenance farming in order to fund their even more unprofitable hobby of fishing. Fishing is something else, my dad ruined me by exposing me to it as a child! =P Rainbow Trout are indeed fun to catch, even if you let them go, though I do love to eat them. Maybe one day I'll have to try flyfishing. And maybe one day I can buy my own land that not only includes some sort of well but access to a river or lake. At least I don't plan to be a farmer, I'm too modern for such labor, instead I'll keep chugging along a little bit longer with upfront work in the world of high-tech so I can subsidize my dream later.
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Uncle Bob Martin - https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882
I read this as part of my office's first book club. Yay mutual betterment of ourselves! Never have I argued with a book so much (many notes/comments I penciled in the margins) and still enjoyed reading enough to read every page.
I went in to the book feeling pretty skeptical about its ultimate value, but also wanting to give it a fair shake and adjust my priors. Good thing, too, because my priors were whack. I did gain some value from it apart from calibration, which is less interesting to talk about right now (more interesting months from now after seeing if there's a persistent change), so I'm just going to talk about my thoughts on my Bayesian update. It ended up being longer than I wanted, so maybe would have been better as a blog (this gist is supposed to be for shorter thoughts after reading), but whatever. tldr to future-me I'd recommend the book. tldr in case Uncle Bob somehow sees this, thanks for the read.
From a few popular drama-posts on the net in 2017 and maybe in prior years (not sure when the name "Uncle Bob" started registering with me, though it did ring a negative connoting bell months before I started reading the book) I had the opinion of Uncle Bob as this crufty old guy who maybe was a good programmer but was also all about discipline (somehow), bondage (when discipline is lacking), doing things the hard way back when men were men because hard is good, ignorant about better ways, and the only bit of modernism in him being that someone convinced him about the value of unit tests (but apparently, I read, he would hate non unit tests and everything else for some reason). Generally, I avoid reading people similar to that -- they do exist. But after reading this book I realized my perception was very wrong -- he's not like that -- and another point in favor of not letting people color your perceptions about other people when you haven't even read the primary source material. At some point into the book I visited his website and lo-and-behold the man uses Clojure these days. (I like Clojure.)
There was some drama about tools and formal methods and at-least-for-life-critical-stuff-like-medicine-we-should and yadda yadda and somehow Uncle Bob got characterized as "anti-tool, tools-useless except unit tests, just use your free will and be disciplined and don't screw up" position, which I don't think he actually has.
I wonder if those against him have ever seen any medical device code. Let's look at a snippet: https://twitter.com/fibromodulin/status/1046943572925329408 Don't also forget that "security" is something for tough-looking on-site med staff to look after, not medical device programmers. (There's some horror code stories from Tesla too the anti-Musk part of the industry circle jerked over for a few days, despite cars being mobile death machines, and there's little reflection that other car companies are just as bad if not worse. You think they use TLA+ extensively at Toyota? Lol.)
When you see what these "life critical" systems are up against in terms of developer incompetence, of course everyone is looking for tools to save them, but they won't, because even if a battery of tools could improve things tremendously, developers that produced such incompetent code are too incompetent to use them. Something from The Practice of Programming book, the best [tool] is the one between your ears. (That book may have said debugger, I will claim to believe the [tool] replacement even if K&P don't.) More competent developers would already be using such tools as appropriate. Hopes that we can somehow get tool use to be mandated and adequately enforced are faint as the hopes that software managers figure out how to read and integrate Deming's work. I can't even hope that the industry will find agreement on when using certain tools is appropriate or not, or ever discover a tool that is universally good with no downsides to consider in a tradeoff.
Tools that are useful are tautologically useful. But what will make you use them? Discipline. Mandate. That's it. You have to want to become a better craftsman, you have to want to produce cleaner code, before you can actually do so. The alternative is being forced to or else you lose your job. Leaving aside the challenges of successfully using force, does anyone want that? (Rhetorical, people call for the deaths of programmers for far less.)
Anyway, I don't agree with a lot of the book, but I also do agree with a lot. A lot of programmers would be better served following the book religiously than whatever chaos they do now, even if I might disagree with what I would in that circumstance view as foolish inconsistencies that would result from misplaced religious devotion.
As for the straw man advice of "Just don't screw up", I'd still like to strengthen it a bit for a position I at least want to take. In other contexts, it's perfectly reasonable to expect "don't screw up", and sound advice to give because it implies an action plan if you're afraid of screwing up. (Namely, practice, simulation.) The consequences of screwing up can range from financial to embarrassment to injury to death, either to the person who screws up and/or to the people around them. Screw ups still happen, but it's entirely possible to perform without screwing up, it happens all the time, in fact more so than screw ups (which is why civilization can progress at all). I want to encourage an attitude of "don't screw up (and implicitly, practice to make yourself better so you're less likely to screw up)" rather than "fear! uncertainty! doubt! We practice fear-driven development, but that's ok, because I have this One Cool Tool that will take away the fear without you having to actually think!" It's best not to fear at all, but when you fear, it's best not to be driven by it.
Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D - Fabien Sanglard - https://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Black-Book-Wolfenstein/dp/1539692876
A book on the internals of the game. As the back cover states, "this is an engineering book", and it delivered. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's taught me some new things (like how joysticks worked), given me some ideas for future research, and shown me lots of great tricks like the linear feedback shift register. Early on it also has the best description of floating point I've seen; I was satisfied with my academic understanding (I have a CE degree after all), but just the abstraction of seeing it as a range of base powers of two + offsets until the next power is such an efficient description for the representation and the problems that arise with precision that my previous satisfaction was shallow! I'm looking forward to the author's Doom book. (May it have a few less typos!)
Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid - coolkyousinnjya - https://www.amazon.com/Miss-Kobayashis-Dragon-Maid-Vol/dp/1626923485
So far read all the volumes that have come out in English, will continue reading as new ones are out. I haven't really read a manga before, and only have a couple others in Japanese that I've put off since translating would take a long time, but I was enchanted by the anime and entered a dragon maid craze. :) I like the manga too. Never enough Tohru! <3
Land of Lisp - Conrad Barski - http://landoflisp.com/
This book came out in 2010, and my mom got it for me for Christmas... Who knows what psychological factors come into play with the book reminding me of her and my cat, but holy cow it took me nearly 8 years to finish! I'm finally done.
Overall I liked it, especially the drawings. The main critique I'd offer would be that perhaps functional style was emphasized too much, much of the code felt like what I'd expect to see if a Scheme or Clojure programmer was forced to write in Common Lisp. (So it didn't actualy feel "sticky" to the brain and writing Lisp afterwards I still look basic things up.) Specifically, the over-frequent use of inner functions via 'labels for closure benefits rather than separate helper functions with a couple extra params (or generic methods on objects...), recursion (and often not tail-recursion) instead of various looping facilities, and raw car/cdr and their (admittedly useful) mutant forms rather than some structs or CLOS objects to help hide that. I just can't remember that the caddr of our "data structure" is always some particular thing, I'd like a get-thing that does the caadr/caddr/whatdr. But maybe that's the point, that I should have felt more free to redefine code as I saw fit rather than typing it more or less verbatim from the book. The CLISP specific functions are where I differed by necessity (calling system programs and the web server come to mind as the only ones) since I used SBCL for everything. Anyway, thank you author for the journey.
The Age of Em - Robin Hanson - http://ageofem.com/
I pre-ordered this book and have been slogging through it in chunks for the last two years (apparently there's now a revised 2018 edition with more content!) but now I'm done. I enjoyed it despite what I can only call the "dryness" of it; it's been characterized as a history book of the future which seems like both a compliment and minor insult (history books are often rather dry compared with other non-fiction, but they don't have to be). It wasn't overly dry however. I thought the first sections and last sections were the best bits, and much of the contents can be gleaned with a short time investment from watching some of the various talks the author gave when the book was coming out. The meaty middle with many details was interesting but made for slower and less exciting reading for me. The only critique I'd offer is that the frequent speculation of increased usage of prediction markets was a bit distracting. Prediction markets unfortunately don't seem to be taking over the current economy very quickly despite offering potentially huge improvements in efficiencies, so while I can agree that they're more likely in the em era due to the em era being more efficient, I still find that weak support. It probably wouldn't have bothered me if I hadn't had background of the author, being an occasional OB reader for over a decade now. But perhaps this is part of a long-game? After some initial reading about Deming, I found a mythic retelling that he went to Japan after the war, told their CEOs that his methods were the way American companies did things (they weren't), and they adopted them so that they could rival American manufacturing. Thanks to adopting them, they surpassed American companies who were in fact not practicing Deming's methods, scoring some points in Deming's favor for his predictive abilities. Perhaps prediction markets need a similar event of adopting them not directly for their efficiency gains but only to gain status and maybe compete with someone one thinks is already using them, i.e. copycatting.
A Critique of Democracy - Michael Anissimov - https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Democracy-Guide-Neoreactionaries-ebook/dp/B00TA70R3Y
Finally finished this short guy. The title of this book should really set expectations: it is best seen as a critique of democracy. Where it ventures into replacements, it is noticeably weaker, however it provides a lot of reasons why democracy itself is pretty bad. It should provide sufficient background to use when challenging modern democratic thinkers, and suggests an ordering of the approaches as well since one could just as well start with any of them. Since I've made all these arguments before it'll help to write them all down here. The key ideas/approaches: 1) our evolutionary history primes us to want Leaders 2) Democracy tends to hyperpolarization and a competition over government resources, people don't even align on beliefs very much but rather their labels 3) Democracy and republics can be seen as a form of publicly owned government, whereas monarchies are privately owned. Private government has a lot of benefits in terms of incentives towards good governance, Hoppe's book is summarized. 4) Societies can be judged by more than just GDP (and type of government tends not to correspond with GDP growth anyway) 5) Economic Inequality isn't an issue 6) Democracy is an illusion anyway, iron law of oligarchy kicks in for everything 7) Democracy is an illusion anyway, cognitive biases and other psychology research get in the way of proposed things like "wisdom of crowds" or "voting giving people what they want".
The End of Eternity - Isaac Asimov - https://www.amazon.com/End-Eternity-Novel-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0765319195
Listened to this on audible. I liked it a lot. Great mix of time travel story with thoughts on the proper future of humanity. Nice romanticism too. I can especially see it appealing highly to young nerds who have trouble with women...
The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu - https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032
Very good hard sci-fi, I can tell why people call it China's best, it's easily better than most sci-fi worldwide... I didn't realize I had sucked myself into another trilogy until partway through and telling a friend I had started, but at least everything has been translated, so maybe I'll get to the other two this year as well! Most of the science (especially the astrophysics) was described so convincingly that I have no idea if it's actually a real thing to use the sun as an EM amplifier or not. There was only one annoyance I had and it was towards the very end, it was the introduction of faster-than-light information travel via quantum entanglement. That's not allowed by the science. But because everything else is so good, I'll allow it for narrative purposes. (Another minor complaint that might just be a translation thing, I found nothing 'superintelligent' about a particular program, it's just a rather powerful program...) I look forward to logging in again for the next book.
Beyond Happiness - Ezra Bayda - https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Happiness-Zen-True-Contentment/dp/1590309219
I didn't get that much from this. (I listened to an audio book version.) However I think the Three Questions it promotes throughout are a good mental pattern. "Am I truly happy right now?" "What blocks happiness?" "Can I surrender to what is / accept and live in the present?"
Ninefox Gambit - Yoon Ha Lee - https://www.amazon.com/Ninefox-Gambit-Machineries-Empire-Yoon/dp/1781084491
Neat science-fantasy but I'm left confused about how 'calendars' and 'formations' work apart from 'magic'. Reminded me of the taking of Iserlohn Fortress in LotGH. Battle scenes were pretty well written, I had fun reading the story even though I had to just carry on despite not understanding the significance of everything (especially the what seems to me something like Jungian archetypes people are identified with, how many there are, what the main traits of each are, the roots and their variants...). Learned the author is trans which helps explain the loose sex-gender pairings that have been going on for hundreds of years. Once machine intelligences were introduced I was cheering for them. Let the machines rule! These humans suck. The ending sets up nicely for a followup, and I learned there's a planned trilogy with the second book already out and the third coming soon. I'll probably read the second one sometime later this year.
Mort - Terry Pratchett - https://www.amazon.com/Mort-Discworld-Terry-Pratchett/dp/0062225715
This was my first Terry book, I found his writing style charming, but I can imagine it pissing a lot of people off who expect their authors to be serious! The story was interesting and well told. It hasn't left me with much to think about but it was fun while it lasted. I am kind of interested in more of the Discworld.
The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle - https://www.amazon.com/Mote-Gods-Eye-Larry-Niven/dp/0671741926/
JP died recently, I didn't know who he was, but when I learned, I figured I should read a few books he did. This one was good. The aliens feel alien, the characters are memorable. It could have been shorter, but I didn't mind.
The Enchiridion - Epictetus (via Elizabeth Carter) - http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html
Even more stoicism, this is just a different translation of the first half of Art of Living but they seem to agree pretty well. I figured I better read other versions, like I've done with the tao te ching. Still much I find myself in agreement with. My biggest disagreements are probably on what is within one's control to change (like death, or how crystalline one's assigned actor role in life is), but not so much the folly of trying to change things outside of one's control. I guess what I mean to say is that beyond the binary control or out of control, there is a continuous field of Influence, and it's important to know it.
As A Man Thinketh - James Allen - http://jamesallen.wwwhubs.com/think.htm
More stoic-like thought. The key idea is that you are your own thoughts (but what else could one be?) and that you can shape your external circumstances by shaping your internal thoughts to reflect your external vision. I don't really disagree, and I have successfully thought my way out of certain mind patterns and I see the truth in wrong thought resulting in ugliness on the outside. But there is a missing detail in all of this, which is that the ability to think, the ability to reshape one's thoughts, is not evenly distributed. Some men will find it easy to remake themselves after gaining certain insight. Others will struggle their whole lives. This isn't to say that the goal to self-evolve is impossible for anyone, but it is more challenging, and men should set their expectations accordingly. As many religions and philosophies have taught, even the simplest man can learn to accept their lot in life with grace and dignity and pursue their duties with focus and care. That isn't a bad life. It may not be the high self-actualization that could happen with a master sculptor who has sculpted their own lives and overcome their own many hellish challenges to get there, but it's still a good life.
Art of Living - Epictetus (via Sharon Lebell) - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Living-Classical-Happiness-Effectiveness/dp/0061286052
Good short book on stoic meditations. Stoic philosophy has a lot to like, only some minor disagreements from me.
The Waking Dream - Ray Grasse - https://www.amazon.com/Waking-Dream-Unlocking-Symbolic-Language/dp/0835607496
Originally I read most of this for a class in school 3 years ago, I finally got around to finishing. I remain unconvinced in any practical value of the symbolist worldview (especially when its best shot at evidence is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect) but it certainly is an interesting topic of study. I don't doubt that prior to the scientific age, symbolist ways of thinking dominated, and I think even today fragments of the whole are still in wide use which makes these elegant compositions into a unified body of Symbolism so compelling. My main objection on practicality is not just as a skeptical atheist reductionist, but on the grounds that such a worldview does not seem to produce reliable, accurate predictions, the core criteria of a belief's value regardless of if that belief was arrived at scientifically or perhaps divine inspiration. I'd recommend the book to anyone curious about symbolism and meaning or even just their history.
The Art of War - Sun Tzu - http://www.audible.com/pd/History/The-Art-of-War-Audiobook/B00URXOQ1E
I listened to this one, narrated by Littlefinger. :) While I definitely didn't get as much from it as if I had read it, it convinced me that this book's popularity is overblown. If I was in a position of military command, this book would be invaluable, but trying to apply it to every day non-military life seems like a stretch.
Models - Mark Manson - https://www.amazon.com/Models-Attract-Women-Through-Honesty/dp/1463750358
I finally powered through the last 30 pages. I got this book sort of on a whim, it was being pimped as 'an ethical pickup-artist book'. The ethical aspect is really just that it's not about game. It has some useful bits and could probably successfully red pill someone who is under the delusion that women think the same way as men, or the other delusion that women are naturally chaste and pure and innocent and should be worshipped, but if you're already red pilled the easy to see route to getting women is by acting manly. The book does have some useful tips on that beyond get in shape, be well groomed, dress sharp: the most interesting bits are about how to be confidently vulnerable, always being more invested in yourself than her, and to polarize rather than compromise or hide in dull commonality.
Unfortunately the book's biggest shortcoming is that most its advice (especially on how to escalate to sex) is rather unhelpful for anyone (like me) with sort of traditional beliefs about sex, marriage and alcohol abuse, whether religiously framed or not.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - J.K. Rowling - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0590353403
I haven't read this maybe since I was 10 or 12. It still holds up, and I'm also impressed by the movie since that is more recent in memory. The movie didn't really cut out anything important, only changed a little bit, and was a great adaptation. The book itself reads quickly, though I suspect I read it faster when I was younger -- certainly the 5th book, which was quite a bit longer, I recall staying up all night to read it... Why did I read this? I've long had the hard covers of all of the books except the first one, which I only had in soft cover. I bought the hard cover on Amazon recently to complete the collection at last, and decided to read it again too. I probably won't go through the rest of them at this time though.
In the Ruins - Greg Egan - http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/RUINS/Ruins.html
Just some fun, interesting short sci-fi I had in my tabs about where Twitter et al. may be taking us. It's pretty disturbing, I can't even. But also extremely amusing. Go spend the 15 or so minutes to read it.
A Fire Upon The Deep - Vernor Vinge - https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Upon-Deep-Zones-Thought/dp/0812515285
This sci-fi had been on my list for a long time. Maybe a year ago I read the prolog and was immediately intrigued, but then the first chapter was totally off in another part of the galaxy with lesser beings and I lost interest. This time it still took me about 100 pages to get into (out of its 600 or so). In the end it wasn't quite what I expected, but still a fun and neat story that I enjoyed quite a bit, enough to spend many hours at once just reading. The underlying magical premise of different zones of space where faster-than-light travel is permitted was interesting, too. The writing was good and I'd like to read more from Vinge.
Two things I didn't like about it: first I thought character descriptions didn't make sense until quite a while after the characters/species were introduced; second I'm generally not a fan of stories where "side A knows x, side B knows y, side C knows z, and audience knows all x,y,z but everything would go much nicer if all sides knew more than one thing." I like it when information is revealed to both the audience and the important characters that are impacted by it in a similar time frame, preferably at the same time. This happens more toward the end of the book as characters converge physically which was nice.
Learn to Play Go, Volume II: The Way of the Moving Horse - Janice Kim, Soo-hyun Jeong - http://www.amazon.com/Learn-To-Play-Go-Volume/dp/0964479621/
Continuing my Go studies, I'm getting better. Lots of useful information in this volume all the way through. In the final synthesis I scored 21/25, which is "excellent." On to volume 3!
Candide - Voltaire - http://www.amazon.com/Candide-Dual-Language-Language-Guides-French/dp/0486276252/
Actually I listened to the LibriBox recording, but I felt nothing was lost. It was a very fun story, perhaps classified as a tragic comedy, with both wit and scathing bits both in the lines and between them. What else is there to say? I bought the linked version in 2012... As the story got underway I did recall the beginning few chapters, so at least I attempted to read it back then (the linked version contains the French and a translation, and I wanted to go through the French at the time). It's worth going through the text to earmark a few choice sections (Martin is a particularly lovable cynic).
Learn to Play Go: A Master's Guide to the Ultimate Game (Volume I) - Janice Kim, Soo-hyun Jeong - http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Play-Go-Masters-Ultimate/dp/1453632891/
My coworker got me into the game of Go, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I read this book all the way through recently, it was a good read for total beginners and noobs like me. When I was almost done I played my coworker again and finally beat him (with only 5 undo moves...)! I'm looking forward to continuing the series. Maybe then I can become stronger... I'd be thrilled to reach the 9kyu stage, though that will probably take a few years if I keep at it.
Worm - Wildbow - https://parahumans.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/
Finished this behemoth in about 3 weeks. About 1.68 million words, something like 22 average length novels. I knew going in that I wouldn't be able to stop, and I cost myself some sleepless nights. But at the end of it? Would I go back in time and read it again? No. It's ultimately not worth 22 other books' worth, to me, but it was still a good story. A common critique I also knew about before going in was that it's in serious need of editing -- true, but I'm not sure editing would do that much for its overall quality. Editing is polish, it can't make something bad good, and it can't make something good great. Was Worm great? To me, not really, but it was close, it was really good, and for many parts of it I couldn't bring myself to stop reading.
Masters of Doom - David Kushner - http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture/dp/0812972155/
I never really embraced nerddom or did very nerdy things (besides perhaps doing well in school and playing Nintendo and Chess) much until puberty, around 2002. I've been playing catch up (not too quickly) in a lot of ways since on things I missed out on in the 80s and early 90s. Doom and PC gaming in general was one of those things. I played the shareware version and had fun (I didn't upgrade from a sound-less windows 95 machine to XP until 2003 or 2004...), but that was about it. At some point in my programming life of the last decade I learned a good deal about the holy John Carmack, and this book cements his legendary status in my mind along with the other John, John Romero. It's a book about a time and culture I wish I had been old enough and interested enough to be a part of, a great read. Similar to What the Dormouse Said, though I think this book reached me deeper since I am still a gamer at heart.
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXcmkSqAqTI
A fine classic, I listened to the linked audio version. Stoicism is my default-personality, so I find it easy to agree with much in this text. There are points of comfort, too, in dealing with struggles. If I am to overcome them, then do not complain, as they will soon be over, and if I am not to overcome them, then also do not complain, for I will soon be consumed by them!
As usual, I can't agree with the deathist views in this work. If I were to convince Aurelius of this in his style, I might say only: it is man's nature to overcome his nature.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Eliezer Yudkowsky - http://hpmor.com/
I forgot to update this file, but the last chapter was released on pi day, and so that was the point I finished this. It goes beyond fanfiction in my mind, a great piece of sci-fi crafted on top of a fantasy world. It was incredibly refreshing to read a fiction book where all the characters are smart. I think I've re-read this thing up to 60-80% of its content twice in its existence, I really enjoy it and recommend it pretty often to anyone who liked the Harry Potter series and who also likes sci-fi.
Schild's Ladder - Greg Egan - http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Greg-Egan/dp/0061050938
The level of "hard" to this hard sci-fi puts all others I've read to shame. It makes use of differential geometry and loop quantum gravity, mainly. Ultimately I had to skip understanding some technical details (like, I don't fully follow the 3D version of Schild's Ladder, though I grasp the 2D version) so that I could finish the great story, but hopefully one day I'll get to them and can come back to it with an even greater appreciation. Fortunately I understand basics of quantum theory like superposition and decoherence. It's taken me several days to add this book to my list, as I've been contemplating its excellence and wondering how I would rank it. In the end I enjoyed Permutation City more, but this definitely ranks up there with the sci-fi mentioned in my last review as my favorites.
For future reference, the things I need to study before attempting a reread are: Superselection, loop quantum gravity, the references at the end of the book, Egan's own Foundations, E7 (mathematics), Lie groups and Lie algebras, the paper "A new quantum so(2,2) algebra" by Herranz, orthogonal groups, differential geometry in general (but specifically affine connections and parallel transport and 'connections', holonomy, the levi-civita parallelogramoid, geodesics in 3D and in general relativity). It'd be nice to study it in the language of geometric algebra so there are the books "A New Approach to Differential Geometry using Clifford's Geometric Algebra" and "Treatise of Plane Geometry Through Geometric Algebra". Alas the last time I started studying geometric algebra I got lost in the weeds, mostly because there are two camps, and while I can with focus sometimes make sense of one or the other under consideration, translating between the two is difficult. (The camps being purely analytical forms of the math, and math that can easily be implemented on a computer and mapped to real world objects.)
The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson - http://www.amazon.com/The-Diamond-Age-Illustrated-Spectra/dp/0553380966
Superb sci-fi. Hard sci-fi, too. My only "complaint" (and it is so very minor) is the lack of aerial tech beyond transport ships and space tech beyond satellites, but the book's world doesn't need them and makes more sense without them. I would just think to myself "I'm glad no one seems to have any drones." Unlike my experience with Banks (two more novels of his I will eventually try), Stephenson leaves me feeling quite good after finishing, like my time shouldn't have been spent with some other sci-fi, and along the way I immensely enjoyed his wordplay. I will forever think of the house of the venerable and inscrutable colonel when driving past that certain fast food joint. I kind of want to read more and to explore the ramifications of the conclusion -- but I'll be content to leave that to my imagination.
The [neo]reactionary/royalist/dark enlightenment thede (or the beginnings of a phyle as this book might put it), mostly on the internet, has been of interest to me lately. This book conveys I think a great example of a possible world humanity may be heading towards this century, and depicts why Victorian culture and morality is one of the best possible for humanity. The book is an interesting argument in favor of reactionary positions.
One last rambling thought: maybe that's why I like this book, Permutation City, and the Golden Age so much. It uses earth-humans as characters, at various points in potential earth-human future. With the Culture, it's just about 'humans' or other aliens in general. Perhaps this is shallowness on my part, or just plain familiarity. TV show sci-fi is, almost without exception, about earthlings, even if humans have scattered into the wider galaxy. And the themes explored can often be relevant to today, or our near future.
Excession - Iain M. Banks - http://www.amazon.com/Excession-Iain-M-Banks/dp/0553575376/
This is my second Culture novel... and honestly I'm left feeling much the same after I read the first. I had a good time reading the book and enjoyed the world it's set in and the tech it explored, but it felt a little thin on theme. It's not really a complaint, but it took about 400 of the 500 pages of the book for everything to finally come together. And by around page 460, I realized it wouldn't be possible to have a satisfactory ending. I feel a bit cheated out of a proper ending. I mean, I can see what the author was trying to do. The overarching theme is how a civilization deals with (and exploits) an Outside Context Problem, it's not really about the problem itself. And instead of a more clichéd ending where the outside context becomes understood and part of the inside context, it just goes away... And minus a few lives, plus a few character growths and fulfilled wishes, and the report in the Epilogue, more or less everything returns to status quo. I guess this is ultimately the way the Culture works. I did enjoy the scheming and conversations of Minds, however I never got the impression of their super-intelligence like I did in The Golden Age. I'll have to reflect on why that is.
Influence: Science and Practice - Robert B. Cialdini - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0205609996/
Quite an amazing read. Could also be titled "Compliance". I've long been aware of many of the cognitive heuristics and biases humans share, and was mostly concerned about them in myself and in others to the extent that they perform "irrationally" in some situation or another. This book is all about how compliance professionals can use our heuristics to their advantage, with the principles of consistency, commitment, scarcity, authority, and others. It's a pretty disturbing book and it goes over numerous scientific studies. It also includes defense suggestions, which on the whole are pretty helpful, but the book ends with a defense solution that while it could be effective I have my reservations about. The author suggests reacting in a belligerent way to people caught applying compliance techniques, with boycotts, nasty letters, and so on. I think a more effective solution could be a top-down level of control from a monarch, but good luck with that. The author justifies his solution by mentioning that because humans have created such a complex environment for themselves, humans will need to rely more and more on their heuristics to combat cognitive overload and general fatigue, and so it is very important that such heuristics are accurate and don't get taken advantage of. My reservation with this is that such heuristics still serve as big biases, and it would be Gnon who takes advantage of us rather than other humans. A future-looking solution is to augment human cognition such that we can function effectively and without tire in a fully rational, deep-thinking mode of thought in all our activities, where indeed we would have the computational power to reflect "I just heard a sound that is possibly a hungry tiger, perhaps I should start running and verify later" and not be eaten midway through the thought, and avoid the pitfalls that come from our present knee-jerk responses to such stimuli.
This is probably the most important psychology book I've read, though The Moral Animal was pretty high up there too, and Judgment Under Uncertainty, while I haven't finished it, is a solid read... I would definitely recommend this one as a first pick. It has cartoons! Especially if you ever thought "Are there things about human nature as or more disturbing than what the Milgram Experiment shows?"
Death is Wrong - Gennady Stolyarov II - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0615932045/
Recent family deaths have encouraged me to pick this book up and support the author and his goal. It was a very quick read. I'm not sure if I would classify this as a kid's book... maybe if the kid was between 10-12 (or a teenager), or as smart and penetrating as the author was at age 4+. The illustrations are neat. It's very much like an information pamphlet in that it contains the basics of what one needs to know, with links to more in-depth work at SENS. While it doesn't take an argumentative tone, it successfully gives some basic and good counter-arguments to simplistic reasons people offer when they defend death. The examples from other species on earth of long-lived animals and trees and biologically immortal jellyfish are particularly good to know about. I wish more literature on this subject was published and wide-spread. If I live to see death conquered, it is going to be both a joyous and heartbreaking time for humanity. Those of us still left will remember those who have departed, and remember the emotion of someone leaving existence forever. We will feel terrible for not doing more to hasten the defeat of death. I already feel bad for not being able to convince anyone to sign up for cryonics -- and have yet to do so myself, though my only remaining excuse is soon no longer available. (Student, no job, now graduated, and soon employed.) Is there balm in Gilead? Will post-death humanity's oldest beings manage, will they be forgiven by each other and by themselves?
A few reasons for doubting the inspiration of the bible - Robert Green Ingersoll - http://www.amazon.com/dp/1578849500/
Entertaining, but nothing new here. It's also focused entirely on the Old Testament, I wish it had picked at a few New Testament absurdities. Only 17 e-pages, very short. The Brick Testament online is "better" because it's actually a lego-illustrated guide to the Bible (both Old and New) with direct quotes, not just references, and while the Brick Testament doesn't make any authorial remarks on the absurdity, disgustingness, or falseness of the Bible as this manuscript does, I really think those are self-evident...
I don't think this will help make an atheist of anyone who is only religious as far as having a "personal god" and who just use the Bible to cherry-pick nice-sounding passages here and there.
Skunk Works - Ben Rich - http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003/
Truly a book for engineers, this is chuck full of the stories around the creation of three of the most impressive aerial vehicles ever: the F-117A stealth fighter, the U2 spy plane, and the Blackbird. Note: stay away from dealings with the Navy. As a mere programmer ("Software Engineer"), soon with a degree in Computer Engineering that I feel has really only enabled me to tinker at a graduate-student level, I find myself feeling totally inadequate in breadth of skill and ability to do quick mental estimates compared to this book's highlighted real engineers. Perhaps one day there will be a MOOC for Mechanical Engineering...
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World - Interviews and Selections by Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill, with Ali Wyne - http://www.amazon.com/Lee-Kuan-Yew-Insights-International/dp/0262019124/
The title of the book delivers. Lee Kuan Yew is a great man who speaks and writes with clarity.
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry - John Markoff - http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769
Modern computer history at its finest. This book is packed with information on "the who" of the computer revolution, focused on individuals and their immediate organizations, with a clear separation between funding and building, explorations of the individual's motivations and philosophies and conflicts that arose between great men. It also sheds light on the role that mind-altering drugs and hippie culture brought to the table, especially on making Personal Computing into the force it became. One could take any of the names mentioned in this book and spend a long time researching the individual beyond what's presented -- it's almost dizzying to think of the intellect and talent and capability for work that the group of people as a whole held. It would have been radical to have been a part of.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm
I'm going to try some of his suggestions. Ideally in a few months I can change the preface to this reading queue. (Update: no such luck. But the lessons are important, especially on consistently doing just a tiny amount in order to preserve your self-respect instead of setting an ambitious goal for consistency of a large amount that you will inevitably fail at.)
Patriarcha - Robert Filmer - http://www.constitution.org/eng/patriarcha.htm (now https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/filmer-patriarcha-or-the-natural-power-of-kings#toc)
This document makes a great case for the right of Kings to be divine or natural, not necessarily as a whim or allowance of "the People". Locke apparently attacked this document by taking literally the claim that authority comes from Adam and that no King can prove they are one of Adam's heirs. If this is a true summary of Locke's view, it is surely a ridiculous one. First of all, if you allow for a First Human, then we are all his heirs. Each of us has inside us the blood of the original king. So there is nothing on that ground for a king to show that he is related to Adam. Second, the use of Adam is to elaborate on the fatherly nature of power and its precedent even up to the beginning of mankind. (Foseti remarks the use is also to prove his point on religious grounds, given some of his opponents tried to use religious arguments against monarchy.) For Filmer's argument is all about fatherhood being the natural source of Kingly power, which I can agree with.
He also makes a very convincing case (in a very boring-for-reading way) that absolute Kings are the historical status quo and a stable government should continue with that. His case is made by pointing at history, with names of rulers and their actions I have no real idea about but I take Filmer's word for it. He also makes a convincing case that a King cannot be bound by his laws, only by his will, and any contradiction between his will and his laws will inevitably favor his will. This is an important point in modern affairs in that a sovereign entity is not subject to any law, it is only subject to its own will (or the will of a foreign sovereign that is stronger).
I do not agree with Filmer that subjects should unconditionally obey. I'm just too modern for that.
http://foseti.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/review-of-patriarcha-by-robert-filmer/ makes some further interesting remarks on this text.
Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control - Jürgen Altmann - http://www.amazon.com/Military-Nanotechnology-Applications-Preventive-Contemporary/dp/0415407990
This book covers a lot of ground. It discusses what sorts of research projects are being done worldwide (mostly in the US, mostly military funded (though a lot medically motivated and funded)) on nanotechnology, how much money is being spent on them, and lists specific technologies that are on the horizon for 5-20 years or longer. It also discusses the challenges/benefits of molecular nanotechnology. It's amazing how close to reality sci-fi can be...
Perhaps the most interesting section of the book breaks down and evaluates military applications under the criteria of preventive arms control. Broadly, there are three categories:
Effective arms control, disarmament, and international law; Maintain and improve stability; Protect humans, environment, and society.
The applications include, again broadly:
Electronics, photonics, magnetics; Computers, communication; Software/artificial intelligence; Materials; Energy sources, energy storage; Propulsion; Vehicles; Propellants and explosives; Camouflage; Distributed sensors (Generic, Battlefield, Treaty verification); Armor, protection; New conventional weapons (Metal-less arms, Small guidance, Armor piercing, Small missiles); Soldier systems; Implanted systems, body manipulation; Autonomous systems (Unarmed, Armed); Mini-/micro-robots incl. bio-technical hybrids (No weapon function, Target beacon/armed); Small satellites/space launchers; Nuclear weapons (Auxiliary systems, Computer modelling, Very small weapons); New chemical weapons; New biological weapons; Chemical/biological protection/neutralization.
Happily, most of these likely military NT advances are neutral or only slightly dangerous in the categories of arms control, except the subarea of stability that involves arms races and proliferation for pretty much everything. There is the suggestion that a country might not want to develop certain technologies because that would incite others to do so as well, and that just increases the likelihood that a terrorist group would get a hold of any of them. Another exception is that new chemical and biological weapons are all-around dangerous. The author has a lot to say about how to effectively have preventive arms control depending on the area of technology and the area of control. There is no need for pessimism all around, especially because there is precedent with biological warfare bans etc. However the book does recommend a complete ban on small arms, light weapons, and munitions that contain no metal. I think this is interesting in that in the US at least, 3D printing has made possible such weaponry, and the State seems to have no interest in shutting it down. (And by now it may be too late.) I think the US's history of individualism and its present state of government dysfunction (in all areas, but particularly in law enforcement) will create a lot of problems for control in the civilian sector. It doesn't even have to be NT, it could be standard microsystems technology (MST) that has become such a commodity as the case has become for 3D printing, robotic parts, and powerful microcontrollers.
Molecular nanotech is on a completely different playing field. Fortunately it's still far out, but as it becomes more feasible, there is a huge incentive to be the first entity to build and control a universal molecular assembler or in general self-replicating devices. Arms control over this seems unlikely.
The author did a talk a while back that I think is a nice prelude to the specifics found in the book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MANPyybo-dA
Friendship is Optimal - Iceman - http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal
Does fanfiction count here? Whatever. It was fun for the ideas it looked at, none of which were new to me. I'm indifferent to the story, critical in some parts, but in the end it was interesting enough to make my way through. I'm working through several nonfiction books right now, I promise.
Inheritance - Christopher Paolini - http://www.amazon.com/Inheritance-Vault-Souls-Christopher-Paolini/dp/0375856110
Well, I had read the previous three, so I had to finish it. And.... I liked it overall despite is flaws. (The actual writing was sometimes annoying but I got over it -- I've read and probably written worse.) I didn't like the ending. I still don't particularly like the system of magic they have, and it would be interesting to see a fanfic/alternate telling done by someone with a scientific mind, and with rational characters in the style of Methods of Rationality. Is the energy law still proportional to 1/r^2 in Alagaësia? How come no magician has ever thought of a gun before?
The Wind Through the Keyhole - Stephen King - http://www.amazon.com/The-Wind-Through-Keyhole-Tower/dp/1451658095
I think this is the first SK book I've read, I enjoyed it. I guess I got it for my dad and he recommended it. It's three stories nested together decently. It makes me want to look at the other Dark Tower books. I'm left wondering how much is 'magic' or how much is just 'sufficiently advanced technology' left from the old ages. And radiation sure does weird things.
The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks - http://www.amazon.com/Player-Games-Culture-Iain-Banks/dp/0316005401
Another sci-fi book, but it was a good ride. It took about 100 pages for me to get into, but after that I thoroughly enjoyed it. The writing itself is superb. On a more meta-level, the claim I've seen elsewhere that the Culture is the utopia we have to do better than is now laughable to me--I would rather live in the Golden Oecumene than the Culture, though they both have problems.
The Golden Transcendence - John C. Wright - http://www.amazon.com/The-Golden-Transcendence-Last-Masquerade/dp/0765349086
After taking forever to arrive, I teared through this last novel in three or four evenings. Fantastic! The frustration with Phaethon's stupidity of the previous novel is mostly gone, happily. There is small frustration with the stubbornness of Silver-Grey philosophy... it reminds me heavily of Objectivism--but, the better, reasonable parts of Objectivism. The book also doesn't beat the reader over the head with it, and there is plenty alternate philosophy explored for contemplation. The trilogy isn't about the philosophy, after all. That's part of why it is a fantastic trilogy, with a fantastic finisher. I think I may like this third one the best of the three, but the trilogy as a whole is very complete and is by quite a bit my favorite trilogy ever.
The Phoenix Exultant - John C. Wright - http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Exultant-Golden-Paperback/dp/0765343541
In some ways worse (at least near the beginning, when Phaethon seems uncharacteristically stupid for a 3000+ year old), in some ways better, than the first book, but a very kickass book altogether. I ready it much more quickly than the first book, which indicates I liked this one even more. A lot more of the book world's philosophy for its powers is exposed which I found fascinating and suitable. The plot has thickened and it will be interesting to see how it gets resolved. Amazon, ship me the next one faster! It wasn't Prime-eligible. :(
Thunder in the Sky - Translated by Thomas Cleary - http://www.amazon.com/Thunder-Sky-Secrets-Acquisition-Exercise/dp/157062660X
This is actually two texts. The first is The Master of Demon Valley, the second is The Master of the Hidden Storehouse. The first is related to the Taoist classic I've read below, Chuang-tzu, but it's actually from a school of thought called Tsung-heng hsueh. "Vertical and horizontal learning." "The learning of freedom of thought and action." "Control others without being controlled by others." "The science of letting all hell break loose." The school was either a splinter of Taoism or profoundly influenced by Taoism or the Taoists simply cannibalized the work. The work elaborates a science of power. It is a very subtle work, one more subtle than the Tao Te Ching (which the translator references many times in his notes to help in understanding the work). It's very psychological. I will be reading it again sometime in the future, because I do not understand it all.
The second work, The Master of the Hidden Storehouse, is fully Taoist (and possibly apocryphal) but startlingly clear, potent, and wise. Some truths it has written are eternal, but some do not fit the present age. (Which is okay--the book was created in a different season, to apply all of the things we do in winter when it is summer outside would be unwise.) This book should be required reading for any sage-king in training, or anyone who wants to understand the proper role of government, leadership, war, education, and wisdom.
The Golden Age - John C. Wright - http://www.amazon.com/The-Golden-Age-Book/dp/0812579844
This is my new favorite sci-fi. It explores a not-too-unrealistic and fascinating hypothesis for what a not-optimally-positive-but-not-negative Singularity might look like for humanity, and is heavy on futuristic tech.
Probabilistic Logic Networks: A Comprehensive Framework for Uncertain Inference - Ben Goertzel, Matthew Iklé, Izabela Freire Goertzel, Ari Heljakka - http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Logic-Networks-Comprehensive-Framework/dp/0387768718
Profound, practical, difficult. I bit off more than I could chew by selecting this as a research project for a Game AI class. Nevertheless, I powered through it and apart from the backwards chainer (admittedly the 'meat' of the framework, I just hardcoded the solution because my demo was due... with maybe 4-8 more hours I could probably have had a basic chainer working great) got a neat clone of their Fetch example to work by implementing a very basic subset of PLN and whipping up a quick game world.
The book successfully convinced me that it's the right approach to the things it's useful at doing, and the general OpenCog project is pretty damn awesome with lots of neat stuff in it. (The OpenCog wiki also has a nice list of errata in the book.) Maybe in a year or so I'll be ready to tackle something like this again and be successful at it. I think a "PLN Basics" for other people would be useful in itself even if it wasn't practical for production purposes...
Signal Processing First - McClellan, Schafer, Yoder - http://www.amazon.com/Signal-Processing-First-James-McClellan/dp/0130909998
I dare you to resist the kitty! Anyway, I read this book and did its exercises for a digital signal processing course. It's a great undergrad book. It's missing a few pieces like filter design (e.g. butterworth filters) that we covered outside the book, but it covers the fundamentals in a clear way. It's best to go through it at a top-level first and get the big picture before delving in. The class was probably my favorite mostly-theoretical class I've had so far, and I'll put the methods into practice next year.
Ready Player One - Ernest Cline - http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/030788743X
This was assigned reading for an English class, so I got it out of the way with the start of the semester. It's a simple book, telling a simple story with simple language, but it's a good story and kept me entertained. There are references galore. My main criticism is that it required an annoying suspension of disbelief at the very beginning before about 1/3 through the book giving out an explanation that made such a suspension unnecessary, and then it required an even more annoying suspension of disbelief for the latter third's tale of corporate incompetence. Still, these are minor criticisms. If you liked Harry Potter, you'll probably like this.
Dr. Francia - Thomas Carlyle - http://www.thejach.com/public/dr_francia.pdf
Great essay about a Dictator and his labors on dramatically improving Paraguay. It gives rise to several thoughts that go against modern lore: a good dictator is exponentially superior to any democracy, the manner of punishment is more important than the punishment itself, but death is a valid punishment, disorder is the enemy. Are these things true? What evidence would support them? There are many other insights to be gained from this pseudo-biography.
Information Theory in Statistical Mechanics: Equilibrium and Beyond - Benjamin Good - http://benjamingood.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/noneq.pdf
A short, interesting paper showing the power of approaching statistical mechanics from a basis in probability theory, specifically using MaxEnt.
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood - James Gleick - http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/0375423729
This is perhaps the best book I've read in the past five years. It's completely engrossing with a history of information, that little physical quantity we take for granted but few of us ever seem to study. I often tell people to learn a little about information theory, probability theory, and decision theory, this book covers the why for the first two as one of its many gifts. As a history book alone it's worthwhile--learn about when and why logarithms were invented/discovered and how they were so crucial for the world before computers. Learn about the development of computers and computing theory, try to get in the frame of mind of the greats of centuries past struggling to comprehend what it means to program, or process data, or extract meaning from information. Learn about the difficulties in comprehending codes that eventually led to Morse Code. Learn about the history of spidernetics. The author delivers some great layman explanations for so many crucial 20th century discoveries that are completely ignored by the vast majority of the populace, yet he doesn't shy away from giving the simple equations when they're enlightening for their simplicity. This book is chock full of great stuff. Go read it.
The Practice of Programming - Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike - http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Brian-W-Kernighan/dp/020161586X
This is what a general purpose programming book should look like. Enlightening, engaging, it has actual code examples! And not stupid or trivial ones either, I was impressed by their introduction of markov chains so soon and ending with a perfect climax on the key ideas of JIT compilers. It was a treat to learn from two masters, I'm sad I never read this earlier when it would have been even more valuable to me. My only criticism is that their implementation of binary search was broken, just like 99% of them pre-this-article: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman - http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041
I actually listened to this in audiobook form, which I think I might try doing more often for my non-technical books. (If I can find the audio forms anyway.) Listening seems to take a lot less effort than visually reading and holding a book and turning a page, or in the case of ebooks, I can still do stuff on my computer while listening. (I also listen at times 2 speeds.) This was a collection of often hilarious stories showing more of Feynman's character and his commentary on science, education, and other things. He did a lot more than just physics. I read his QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) sometime last year I think, which was a very good introduction to the science without delving into the math.
Everyone should read this book, or listen to it. It's not technical, it's not even pseudo-technical, it's more like an autobiography in the form of an adventure story. Very inspiring. Feynman's one of my heroes.
How to Read a Book - Mortimer Adler & Charles van Doren - http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/0671212095
Most people don't know how to read. Sure, they can "read" as in see words on a page and grasp their meaning for the moment, but they don't know how to really read. They can't remember what they've read, they don't know how to ask the book questions (and find answers), they don't know there are levels of reading beyond what is done in public schools. This book is not about how to read faster (which is just a matter of stopping your sub-vocalization and not using the auditory cortex), it's about how to read. In summary, three levels beyond elementary reading are inspectional reading (with systematic skimming, superficial reading..), analytic reading, and finally syntopical reading. (Not every book deserves anything above inspectional, but the inspectional stage is necessary to determine that.)
On the subject of analytical reading, I found myself largely prepared for the rules it suggests. I found that interesting. Basically, there is a generalization to some of the rules, which can be found here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/ (including all sub-linked posts). If you're in school and you read one book over the summer between semesters, this is probably the one.
Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity - Joel Spolsky http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590593898
This is a fun and great book for any programmer, though probably the most surprising thing I got from it: I no longer hate Microsoft. Oh sure, I still don't like Windows, or any MS products really (except their keyboards and mice), but I can't really hate the company. I'll still be bitter, probably, and as they continue to do things I don't like I might get more bitter. But if they offered me a 6-digit salaried job, I might not turn it down... am I going crazy?
Anyway, if you're in the software business at all this is a fun book. Parts of it are dated (ew CVS mentions), others still ring true.
The Book of Five Rings - Thomas Cleary (translator) http://www.amazon.com/Book-Five-Rings-Miyamoto-Musashi/dp/1590308913
Miyamoto Musashi describes the school of Two Swords through a series of scrolls on military science. It's a fascinating read and a nice insight into the minds of Japanese culture, as there is a lot of that embodied in the text. There is a lot of "this must be considered carefully" in there, which I enjoy, reminds me of some math books that say "convince yourself" or "verify that this is true". He makes it clear not to just follow him blindly, but to read and think and find if you come to the same conclusions.
A great motif is to always be in the mindset of killing. Parrying, dodging, etc., those should be done for the goal of killing, not for themselves. Every move should be with the intent to cut down the enemy. There is also a lot said about remaining unbiased. Don't favor the huge swords above all, don't favor the tiny swords above all, win by whatever means using whatever weapons, and it turns out two swords (long and short) tend to lead to better outcomes in battle.
I'll leave you with this, from the Scroll of Emptiness: "As long as they do not know the real Way, whether in Buddhism or in worldly matters, everybody may think their path is sure and is a good thing, but from the point of view of the straight way of mind, seen in juxtaposition with overall social standards, they turn away from the true Way by the personal biases in their minds and the individual warps in their vision."
Chuang Tzu: Basic Wrtings - Burton Watson http://www.amazon.com/Chuang-Tzu-Writings-Burton-Watson/dp/0231105959
This text is significantly more advanced than the Tao te Ching, yet the translator does an excellent job of providing footnotes noting where the translation was difficult, corrupted, possibly fraudulent (e.g. inserted by some later author with an agenda), and noting other translations or interpretations. Without that helpful guide parts of the text would have been very startling. There are also many references to folk tales and cultural idioms which the translator graciously provides background for.
The book is filled with humor and wisdom, there are many great quotes to take from it, and in general it's a great supplement to the Tao te Ching for learning (or not-learning as it were) about the Tao and becoming a better person. Highly recommended, though I'd suggest rereading for further understanding. Having read the Tao te Ching multiple times, I can always grasp a little more each time, my understanding becomes more complete. So it should be with Chuang Tzu's writing, I'll reread it sometime. (If you want my notes on the Tao te Ching, check out http://www.thejach.com/view/tags/taoism )
Parallel Universes - Max Tegmark - http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302131
I read this paper I don't know how many years ago, but I'm beginning to think it ought to be mandatory reading in every introductory science class. Why? Purely for the enlightened view that a scientific model can predict unobservable entities. Just because there are unobservable entities does not make a theory unscientific! A somewhat classic version of this is: "imagine a space ship leaves from earth and travels very close to lightspeed for enough time that, due to the expansion of the universe, they are no longer physically able to return to earth even at lightspeed and cannot even in principle interact with the earth. Do they still exist? Our best theories as well as Occam's Razor as well as common sense says yes."
Philosophy: Tao Te Ching
Fictional Philosophy: Anthem, Atlas Shrugged
Western: Haunted Mesa
Fantasy: Redwall works, LoTR and other Tolkien works, most Shannara works, Harry Potter, Eragon series
Required School: Scarlet Letter, Kill a Mockingbird, Siddhartha, Heart of Darkness [garbage book], Lord of the Flies, Tale of Two Cities, Fahrenheit 451, ...
Elementary school: Holes, Walk Two Moons, several Boxcar Children works, ...
Pre schooling: Goodnight Moon, Little Tupin, The Man Who Cooked For Himself, ...
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Ending Aging
Mathematical Go -- Chilling Gets the Last Point
The Way To Go
Making Good Shape
A Handbook of Traditional Living (50% done)
Power of Now
Iron Kingdom
Patriots
Clever Algorithms
Quantum Computing Since Democritus
Ancient Rome
Roll, Jordan, Roll (50%)
Red Mars
Three New Deals
Cutting the Fuse
Artificial Intelligence for Games
Men Among the Ruins
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Age of the Pussyfoot
Proofs from the book
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't
Probabilistic Graphical Models
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Storm of Steel
The 10,000 Year Explosion
Morals by Agreement
Hacker's Delight
Game Engine Architecture
The Awakening of Intelligence
The Art of Special Effects Animation
Mathematics in India
Philosophy in the Flesh
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
The Corporations that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational
Others in Mind
The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940
The Master Switch
The Little Schemer
Hackers and Painters
Planning Algorithms
More Asimov stuff
Introduction to functional programming with Lambda Calculus (Read about 1/5 of it.)
How to Solve It
Div, Grad, Curl and all that (Read sections to help with various classes.)
Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial
Bearers of the Black Staff
Modern Quantum Mechanics (Tried reading, gave up.)
Principles of Uncertainty (Chapter 1, one of the final chapters on why hypothesis and significance testing are crap.)
Modern Cosmology
Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases
Real Time Rendering (Paused at chapter 4, the Math Chapter of Matrices)
C++ Database Development C++ Database Development (Most of the book is source code. Skimmed the rest.)
Probability Theory (Finished through chapter 2.)
Causality
Purely Functional Data Structures (I think I stopped after functional red-black trees.)
Let Over Lambda
Reading in the Brain
Kushiel's Chosen Kushiel's Avatar
Feynman Lectures on Physics (The electromagnetism sections were great for helping me in my class. Death to Giancoli textbooks!)
Calculus Made Easy (I'm good at Calc, just want to see a different approach to it.)
Timeless Decision Theory
The End of Faith (I got maybe 50 pages into this. It's not a very good book.)
Watership Down (I don't know why but I stopped reading at around the 75% mark and returned it to the library. I'd probably have to start over.)
The Art of Happiness
A Thousand Splendid Suns
USB Complete
Some Arabic books
The Best of H.P. Lovecraft
Timeless Reality
Princess Bride
The Science of Fractal Images (read chapter 1-2, I think)
Game Programming with Python (last read maybe 1/2 of this in high school)
The Mythical Man-Month (finishing...)
My System
Human Action (last read maybe 1/3 of this in high school)
Programming Collective Intelligence
Phantoms in the Brain