thecapacity

Here’s a video review I saw on OpenCulture for two books which I really enjoyed, “Outliers” and “Talent is Overrated“.

It’s a little tongue in cheek, with a bit of profanity, but it made me laugh and remember how much I loved these books.

Both are great, and I wouldn’t want to have to pick a favorite, though I love Gladwell’s ability to make complex concepts and their implications so readable. If this is a topic you’re interested in then plan on reading them as a pair, in my case I read “Outliers” second.

Unlike the video’s humorous conclusion, that we still have the fates to blame, I ascribe to the Vaynerchuk believe that it’s up to you to “Crush It“. I also think that if you don’t “make it” then it’s less about fault and more about desire and whether or not that perceived outcome was appropriate.

Regardless of how you percieve Fate, Destiny or Karma I find it inspirational to believe “you can do it” is a creed experts think you can live by, just don’t stop.

If you’ve seen either of my recent robotics projects then you might suspect I have some slight fascination with the more exotic forms our technology can take. Which it not to say that I don’t have reservations, nor do I think there’s anything glamorous about the more sinister forms such innovations can take.

Which is why I was really interested to read Singer’s book, Wired for War.

After having seen him at TED I came to believe that he was someone who could appreciate the duality such developments bring. It’s not that I believe Skynet is near, and many of these new ‘bots are really cool. Rather, it’s actually the human side of these components which causes concerns, do we really think weapons of war should be the same as playing on your gaming system?

Singer more then delivers, both illuminating the fascinatingly secret world of military robotics as well as raising some serious moral and social implications of such situations. For example, predator drones are flown by ‘combatants’ which technically makes them valid military targets, however these operators never leave US soil and often go home to their families at night.

There’s really so much more to consider, however if you find these topics interesting then I can’t recommend this book enough and instead I’ll leave you with the following thought;

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man’s industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness
– George Bernard Shaw

I heard about this book while listening to a talk the author gave at a “Long Now Foundation” meeting via their iTunes podcast. Apparently, Stewart Brand got an early copy and it was passed around enough to gain quite a bit of popularity.

Well, after vomiting my way through an Ops Center story and a few other bad “tech fiction” books, I don’t think of myself as one to dive into the hype about a new book unless it’s from someone who’s name ends in Gibson, Bear, Stephenson or the like.

However, I really respect the Foundation (they’ve got an amazing vision and a bunch of cool members after all) so I thought this one might be interesting enough to give it a try.

Daemon is based heavily on the premise of AI and natural language parsing but what was even more interesting to me was the distributed systems approach represented in the book, I’ve always been a sucker for grid-like systems.

You can find the plot overview anywhere you like so I won’t bother recreating it here, but I will tell you, yes, it’s a good book, though it has probably been so well received due to the current economic state and fears.

At times I felt like the technical stuff was polarized between kiddy-gloved explanations or glossed over like magic. However, it’s clear the author focused on actual technological facts and didn’t suffer any “I know this!” crap or pretend hacking had visual displays.

I also thought the story spent some credibility “justifying” its realism, e.g. explicitly calling it narrow-AI (i.e. expert systems). If you have to split hairs then maybe you’re too worried about disclaimers and not focusing enough on the story, but I guarantee you that Suarez has more then enough here for a sequel.

If you take the “futuristic” parts on faith (which is required for any good sci-fi book) then you can ignore the other bits as you see fit and I’m sure you’ll be well entertained and even a little torn as to which side to cheer for!

Also, if you like this one I highly recommend giving any of the books by Charles Stross a try. Specifically Halting State, which seems to have a lot of overlapping & parallels themes and was even more enjoyabale for me, but only just

I know it’s been quite some time since I did my last review.  It’s not that I haven’t been reading, quite the opposite in fact. My wife and I have been enjoying access to a great library system. I told a friend that going online and requesting holds was like Amazon only I had go to pick them up, a relatively short drive, rather then having them delivered.

I think the reason is that I either read too fast, and move on to the next book too quickly to write a review. Or if I’m in one of my slogging phases (whether I’m busy with other things or reading a difficult book) where it just drags out too long to complete.

I’ll of course try to be better but I’d rather have a gap in my reviews and still be reading then the alternative.

So why this book, why now? Well I won’t get into the reasons that I decided to read Starship Troopers. I’ve read a few Heinlein books before and the way in which he uses “language” as a scientific concept is really interesting. However, my only exposure to this book is from the movie, and while I knew they made a second and third movie, I didn’t expect the volume of such film would reflect highly on the quality of the novel itself.

Let me assure you, this is still every bit the quick read you’d expect it would be. I finished it with just a few nights of effort. However, what I really enjoyed is that it’s much more like one of those thrash out “dialogues” you’d have in a class like “Religion and Moral Philosophy” then some sort of bug zapping hack and smash.

My minor in college allowed me to take a lot of philosophy classes, and I wouldn’t claim to be great at such abstract thinking (it’s really the act of conveying a thought that I find most difficult) but I do love the introspection and the insights you can gain from a good teacher. I happen to have had one at a Summer Scholar’s session I attended and this book brought me back to those sessions.

I think the movie does a good job of conveying the content, though the campy nature of the movie, which I enjoyed, seems opposite of the book’s flow. If you’re looking for an entertaining story which will take you back to the debating days of school then this is the one.

I’d like to take this brief interlude to make a painful admission to you. You may be asking how one could have a “.5″ book review… Well, I opened a book but actually didn’t read it!

In my youth, such a situation was cause for major turmoil, but thankfully as I’ve gotten older it’s become easier for me to admit something is a “waste” of my time and to move on without needing to turn that final page for true closure.

However, I’m still loath to perform such an action as I’m one who believes in “expanding your knowledge horizons” and I often feel aversion is a sign of successfully encountering such a stretching perspective.

Yet, in this case things were different. I won’t bore you with the positive comments on Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age since there’s plenty on Amazon to draw you to it. But I will say I’d managed to put this book out of my mind until I was cleaning out my Amazon list in preparation for the holidays.

What I did admit is that I checked this book out, read the introduction, and promptly gave up in disgust and if you’re at all intrigued by the reviews then I’d encourage you to try the intro at a local library before purchasing.

This is a book intended to remind us all to “cut free” on occasion and the review says the author “does not advocate the eradication” of technology.

However, what I found in the first pages was an obvious perspective that although technology is here to say and has many emotional benefits that the only rewarding path is to short circuit its use and circumvent it entirity.

It may be that the bulk of the book is more even keeled or I mistakenly judged too harshly, but I decided that I’m well enough versed on the perils of our technological landscape.

I do practice cutting free and try to remember to experience events and not simply record them. However, I think it speaks of false hope and misconstrued expectation to believe you can only find goodness outside of, or without. technology.

I’d love to hear about your experience with this book if anyone manages to give it a go but it certainly won’t be one I’d recommend putting on your holiday wish list.

This is the second book in a row that I’ve really enjoyed so it might be easy to say I was on a roll picking winners. Yet, to do so would negate all I’d learned from “The Drunkard’s Walk” which is a fantastic journey into “how randomness rules our lives”!

First, let me start with the ending which directly addresses the question that always springs to mind when people explain how randomness underlies most everything, even supposed patterns or successes. I’ll just mention that Leonard Mlondinow concludes his book by confronting this concept in a heartfelt manner and I can only encourage you all not to lose hope by the rest of my post.

The term “Brownian Motion” is a more polite term for the drunkard’s walk, but I’m sure many of us are familiar with the concept that we often get to where we were going without always intentionally steering ourselves there directly.

Before I started my book list entries I read “The Black Swan” based on a friend’s recommendation. It’s a good book too but I felt like it left me with more questions (although with more respect and caution, and my second book gave me a sense of how our underlying psychology can “randomly” (or not so randomly) influence our lives.

This book really seemed to pull a lot of those same concepts into both a historical and tangible set of examples.

The author, Leonard Mlodinow, brings to our attention the risks of “confirmation bias” and how often it influences our expectation of whether something is or isn’t random.

About the only point where I “disagreed” (i.e. where I wanted to have a more in depth conversation) was when he mentions that firing high level managers shows a 50% rate of improvement.

His point is that this shows that managers don’t always have any influence whatsoever but I wonder if it simply means that only roughly 50% of all managers are good.

In short I think Leonard falls prey to something he often guards against if you use statistics to generalize (as he did here) then you miss out that often results can go “counter” to the trend for the individual, i.e. instead of “breaking even” you could see a 100% improvement in you rcompoany (probably at the expense of another which ends up @ -100%).

However, given that I’m not a mathematician I’m sure I’m falling prey to the influences that we all suffer from, understanding how randomness predominates our existence. Clearly I could use some more reading on this subject but this book is a great start in that direction!

As promised in my earlier post I wanted to be more active in continuing my reviews, and this is a book worth the accolades.

In “Predictably Irrational” the author, Dan Ariely, gives us a chance face some of the most astounding incongruities of the human persona.

I couldn’t do all the examples justice but let’s take one of the “classic” observations. Assume you’re given a description of a woman who was politically and environmentally active in college. You even learn that she was arrested once for chaining herself to a tree! Then you’re asked which of these futures she’s most likely to have;

(a) Working in the finance industry as a bank teller

(b) Single parent working as a counselor for battered women

(c) Doing social work

Now I’m not the scientist Dan is but assuming I’ve not completely missed the tone, many, even most, of us might answer option (b) as being the most probable path of our fictious female.

However, if we step back from our human instincts we realize that (b) is actually a more “specific subset” (my words not the authors) of option (c)!! So because of it’s broader categorization picking (c) stands a better chance of being correct but because (b) appeals to our “sense of story” we tend to gravitate towards it being most probable!

Short of recreating the book in a blog post there’s no way I could do these examples and insights justice but if you enjoy learning about how we’re “mislead” (a polite term) as consumers, or why we don’t always make “logical” decisions (though they are as the title suggests “irrational in a predictable manner”) then this is the book for you!

It’s a well written book which has digestible chapters and a story like progression that make it enticingly easy and insightful to read!

You can probably tell from the picture that my wife and I have done a lot of traveling. I actually finished Superclass a few weeks ago. Yet, I’m embarrassed to admit it’s been over a month since I proclaimed my intent to review the books I’ve been reading.

However, I’m determined not to interleave reviews so let me comment on this one so I can get on with the others! In fact, I’m quite certain I can review this in far less time then it took me to complete.

I really respect the tone with which David Rothkopf approached his topic. Writing rationally about a global elite which could move mountains, especially in this day and age, is a tough line to walk.

I also think David gives well weighted credibility to debunking the “conspiracy theories” as well as highlighting the dangers that such a connected class brings whether intentionally or accidentally.

Despite his even handed approach I wish I could have found the technique as enjoyable. I’m not someone who enjoys “the name game” or following cliques and lists of “who’s who” and perhaps that made this book extra tough for me.

The first and last few chapters are pretty enjoyable but the meat of the book is was very difficult for me to make it through. I’d recommend the book to anyone who’s interested in this topic but it’s a perfect example of the benefits of your local library!

My wife and I have really been enjoying our local public library. Unfortunately, it’s nothing spectacular so the truth is that we’re really enjoying its website.

Online you can search and reserve books, so it’s a bit like Amazon meets NetFlix in a Wild West showdown!

I really wish you could queue and prioritize books and perhaps link it with my real Amazon list. However, until I figure something out (please correct me if you know where Amazon’s wishlist API is) I’m content trying to self manage.

So I thought I’d share a pick of my recent book. Combined we’ve probably managed to go through 30 since we started!

Hope you’re enjoying some reading too!

I’m a big fan of O’Reilly books, as I’m sure most of you are. They’re great technical resources for me and have cute animals my wife can really enjoy!

A friend of mine got Programming Collective Intelligence and recomended it to me, so my mother-in-law gave it to me for my birthday (yay, I’m old!). I’m stoked to see O’Reilly focused on moving “up the stack” of technology in such an approachable way.

I finally got a chance to start last night and reading the preface it was immediately apparent this was going to challenge my newly developed python skills.

e.g.

{xvii} //That’s the page #

string_list = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']

string_list[2] # returns ‘b’ #wrong it should be ‘c’

You know when they’re teaching you incorrect python that it’s going to be a fun way to learn. I worked my way up to page 11 lastnight and found about ~8+ errata. This is the first time I’ve felt completely comfortable marking up a book (oh the sacrilege!) but I do focus better when I can’t simply skim…

I expressed my recent activities on twitter, and another friend asked if I was keeping a list. So, FJ, this post’s for you and for everyone else who doesn’t want to scratch the same grove in their head that I did.

O’Reilly’s great about leveraging the collective intelligence [pun intended] and you can Submit and Find errata (perhaps I should order by frequency and say “Find and Submit”) a O’Reilly’s website for the book.

Unfortunately, the official list only has two and hasn’t been updated since the 18th of Feb!!!

I submitted mine there and there’s a ton more (but the user format is a little hard to scroll through).

So here’s my quick list till now (p11) [I'll try to add new ones as comments so you can track this post] and if anyone from O’Reilly’s reading I think I’d make a great editor, if only to actually update the official list with the good community feedback and help others out!

{xvii} string_list[2] = ‘c’

{xviii} /* first list compression should change v1>4 to v>4 */

{xix} // Chapter 2, 2nd to last line “move” should be “movie”

{9} critics['Toby'] #output is missing ‘Superman Returns’: 4.0

{10} //The results of both math functions are wrong as they use the wrong datapoints (5,4) & (4,1) which should be (1,4.5) and (2,4)

{11} //sim_distance() – the return function should be; return 1/(1+sqrt(sum_of_squares))

{11} from recommendations import critics, sim_distance #reload(recommendations) didn’t work for me. You’ll have to change the subsequent function call as well and because of the previous errata the returned # should be 0.2942 (approximately) and not 0.1481

{11} This wasn’t my find, I learned it from the user submitted errata, but someone mentioned using “si = set()” and then “si.add(item)” instead of “si[item]=1″ … Both make sense, but the set seems cleaner and was a new semantic for me.