It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be

This is a quirky little book by egomaniac advertising man Paul Arden. I've bought it twice now, which I think is an interesting lesson in memory. The first time, I bought it at a little shop in Edinburgh. I read it on the flight back, and one little section spoke to me so well, and connected with what I was trying to create with Gamesprout at the time, that I wrote a long blog post about it, in my short-lived game design blog.
I bought my second copy at the gift shop of the Carnegie Art museum. Upon seeing it, I thought, "Oh look -- a second book by that advertising guy." I thumbed through it, and it looked completely different from the first Arden book I read, and so I bought it, looking forward to new insights. But when I sat down to read it, I got to the "Thou Shalt Not Covet" section, and realized that this was the exact same book I had bought before.
The book has lots of interesting lessons, but what lesson have I learned this time? Partly, I think, that when things are in lots of disconnected little sections, like this book is, they are hard to remember. Secondly, we remember most what connects to our lives. At the time, the Thou Shalt Not Covet section was directly relevant to something I cared about. It is remarkable how much we forget.

Nobody is Perfick

I read this book of little vignettes by Bernard Waber over and over again when I was in first grade. I can remember exactly where it was on the shelf in the Denville Library. I find myself thinking of it often, but I never remember it very well, so I found a copy online. And there it all was -- children having frustrating and ironic emotional adventures, all capped off with the twilight zone tale of Peter Perfect, who does everything right, and everyone envies, until, well, that would be a spoiler.

How Much is that Doggie in the Showcase?

I found this fun little book, by Michael C. Getlan, in the Breakpoint Books display at IAAPA 2017. I've had a lifelong fascination with arcades and redemption games, and this book tries to give a rundown of best practices for someone running redemption at a family entertainment center. It makes an interesting argument that it is not the games, but rather the prizes in the redemption center are the core engine of desire that makes the entire place run, and as such, choosing the right prizes and displaying them properly is the key to success. It made me think back to my own experiences when I was younger with redemption centers. My experiences were mostly in arcades on the Jersey shore. I loved pinball, loved skee-ball, and loved the other weird ticket giving games. It is easy to chalk up redemption centers as a scam -- after all, buying the same prizes with cash money would cost a lot less than "earning" them by playing games. But the book points out that doing so is not nearly as fun, and suggests that the more fun a ticket-giving game is, the fewer tickets it should give out. Less fun, less time, more tickets. I still remember a glorious week I spent at the shore with a junior high friend where we visited a certain arcade once or twice a day for a long week. I had $40 to spend on the trip, and I believe I spent almost all of it there. During that time, I mastered Ladybug, which is an incredibly good arcade game, and my friend mastered Monaco GP. I also played a lot of skee-ball, very carefully and thoughtfully, and also a slot machine type game, the kind where you can stop the reels when you want to, making it a skill based game. I brought home a fancy painted beer stein and a bunch of toys and things, and I was very proud of my haul. I got disappointed looks from my parents, but I didn't really care. I had a great time, learned a ton about game design, and even got to know the proprietor a bit. I still look back on that week fondly to this day.
Anyway, this book isn't a masterpiece by any means, but it gives some good insight into the realities of running an FEC... or the realities of running one in 2007... some of the recent advancements in automated FECs haven't really been taken into account. I wonder if I'd want to run an FEC one day? I'm not sure. I sure do like the games, though!

The Human Mind

Saw this book by Karl Menninger at the library, and picked it up. It is a psychology book from the thirties, which was updated over a few decades. I had hoped for insights about the workings of the mind, but this is really a "negative psychology" book, very much about psychological ailments and their causes. It is somewhat frightening to see the state of psychology in the early 20th century. Homsexuality is described as a "perversion of affection" in the "distorted emotion" section, and symptoms that describe Asperger's Syndrome are lumped under "schizoid personality." It has some good quotes, though. My favorite is Horace: Quae laedunt oculos festinas demere; si quid est animum, differs curandi tempus in annum. (If anything affects your eye, you hasten to have it removed; if anything affects your mind, you postpone the cure for a year.)

It continues to amaze me that so much of psychological literature is about "cures for problems" and so little is about how the mind actually works.

Now: The Physics of Time

I am very interested in the nature of time. I often have the feeling that some things are predestined, or at the very least, that the future is speaking to us, urging us in certain directions. I often wonder if the many-worlds hypothesis is true, that somehow future worlds are urging us to choose one or another in some way, by sending some kind of signals from the future.

So I was certainly interested to read this book by physicist Richard Muller about the nature of time, and specifically about the nature of "now." It is a pleasing book, written for the layperson, with many amusing stories from the history of physics. It provides a guided tour of Einstein's insights about time, as well as some of the problematic aspects of quantum physics when it comes to time -- particularly the collapse of the wave function, which seems to happen faster than light through space. He talks quite a bit about Feynman's interpretation of antimatter as traveling backward in time, and makes much of Dirac's misinterpretation of what positrons are. He also spends a lot of time beating up on Eddington's theory that time is really just entropy increasing. It is a problematic theory, because it can't be verified or falsified, and it has some obvious things that don't feel right about it.

But in the end (finally) Muller gets to his big theory (spoilers ahead): Unlike some physicists who believe that now is an illusion, and that spacetime is a block, Muller believes that now is very special indeed. He argues that time moves forward because like space, time is expanding, as a result of the big bang and the accelerating growth of the universe. In this view, the past cannot be changed, and the future does not exist yet, because time is being generated as the universe expands along the time axis. This takes some thinking to get one's head around, but there is no obvious way to refute it that I can see. He argues that perhaps it could be shown experimentally by looking at the light from old galaxies -- since the universe's growth is accelerating, he argues that time must be accelerating too, and this might be observable as "extra" red shift on older objects in the universe. He also suggests something complicated about time being generated around black holes that might be observable.

This feels like a very personal argument he is making. He seems frustrated that many physicists seem to take for granted that there is no free will; he makes many arguments against "physicalism," the idea that physics can describe everything. He argues that if the decay of particles can't even be predicted by physics, how could anything more complex? All the talk of free will and falsification reminded me of a theory of my own: that any being that feels it has free will can never experience falsification of free will. For, you can only prove to me that I don't have free will by showing me my future actions, and if you do that, I can deviate from them. This sounds sort of silly, but the more I think about it, the more important it seems. If I knew more philosophers, I would bother them about it, because though I've read a lot about the nature of free will, I've never heard this idea mentioned.

Anyway, Muller's book was enjoyable, and certainly gave me a lot to think about. I certainly hope I live to see the day that quantum measurement is understood. Most fascinating is the fact that if Muller's theory can be proved, it would have a significant impact on the world of philosophy. I guess we'll see... in the future.

The Friars Club Encyclopedia of Jokes

I got this book as a birthday present, which is fine, I like joke books. This is indeed, an encyclopedia of jokes, at 500 pages, organized alphabetically by topic. Some are contributed by famous members of the Friars Club, others are unattributed. But imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a joke I wrote in the book! So, this book was published in 1997, and back in 1992, when I was working at Bellcore, I submitted this questionable joke to rec.humor.funny. And what do you know, right there, on page 95, there it is. It's a crazy world when a book written 20 years ago has a joke in it that I wrote, and I never even knew about it. I'm not sure I'd call it an honor, exactly, the majority of jokes in this book are pretty weak ("If exercise is so good for you, why do athletes have to retire by age 35?"), and many of them are painfully racist and sexist. Some I liked, though:
"Do you suffer from arthritis?" "Of course, what else can you do with it?"
"How do you know when there's a singer at the door?" "They can't find the key and they don't know when to come in." 
"It's not an optical illusion... it just looks like one."
In any case, I got an interesting story out of it!

The Elements of Eloquence

I loved this book. I tend to do a lot of public speaking as well as writing, and so finding the right turn of phrase that makes a point particularly compelling is something I think about a lot. And this book is about that, and nothing else. In it, Mark Forsyth makes the bold argument that tricky turns of phrase are largely what makes Shakespeare great, and then illustrates dozens of them, each in its own chapter. Some are well known by their names, such as Personification and Alliteration, but many more have cryptic names (Anadiplosis, Diacope, and Epizeuxis, for example) even though the effects themselves are very familiar. Were I still young, I would likely set about memorizing these cryptic terms and using them in conversation. Thank goodness I'm no longer young. But still, I will keep this fun, clever book around, as a reminder about the clever little tricks that make for excellent prose.