Kidnapped

For years, I thought this was the sequel to Treasure Island. It is not. It is an unusual tale of a a young man betrayed into captivity and his adventures in escaping. I never saw so many Scottish words in my life. My favorite was “drammach” which is when you make oatmeal with cold water - definitely a meal of desperation. I bought this copy at the bookshop next door to the Skunk and Goat Tavern. They had a big collection of Chiltern editions of classics - I’d never bought one before. They are very pleasing to hold and read, and the illustrations are great. The paper is very shiny, though, so sometimes glare is a problem. The story is a bit unconventional, and is sometimes a bit dull in a way that actually makes it seem real, because who would make up something that mundane? I definitely learned a lot about the realities of Scottish history. 

Lessons from the Art of Juggling

This book has been around for about 30 years, and I knew about it, but I always assumed it was more about management philosophy and less about juggling. But it is meaningfully about juggling. Probably 2/3 of the book is actually about juggling and 1/3 is about how lessons from juggling apply in your personal and professional life. There are definitely some excellent tips for first time juggler, such as learning to throw in a certain rhythm before you bother learning to catch, and a novel idea I’ve never heard before which is learning to catch one ball and letting another ball fall, intentionally and only when you are confident with that learning to catch a second or third ball. I want to experiment with using that technique when teaching new jugglers, to see if it works some parts of this book flirt with pseudoscience, such as the Alexander technique, but even if some of the claims for these techniques are overstated, they still make a good point: Being relaxed, and not fearful, will make all of your practice, more effective and more productive.

In all, it was a fast read, and it contains some thoughtful advice. It certainly is very respectful to the art of juggling.

The Overstory

 

This was a long book, and it took me awhile to read it. It would like to be read a little faster than I did (on and off for six months maybe), because there are a lot of parallel characters to follow. This is the second Richard Powers book I've read (the first was Orfeo) and his approach to novels seems to be to have his characters explore a technical topic of some kind. In Orfeo, it was avant-garde music of the 50s and 60s. In the Overstory, it is the science of trees. The novel was absolutely gorgeous and a delight to read. (Minor spoilers ahead). The structure of the story follows about a dozen characters who initially each have their own chapter, and then, mid-novel, they start to come together. It took me some time to realize that this was like the roots of a tree merging into the trunk. To my mind, this analogy continued, with the characters separating again, and each eventually flowering in their own way. 

Of course it is a story about how humanity is changing the environment. Typically these stories end focused on dire warnings, and I worried that Powers wasn't going to bring any further message than that - but instead he pulls a rabbit out of his hat, and executes a marvelous turn that had me in tears. More and more I have come to realize that viewing humans as something outside of nature does more harm than good. Highways are as much a part of humans as anthills are a part of ants. Of course humans are having a tremendous effect on the planet, as we have found better and faster ways to communicate. Modern man is a meteor that has struck the planet, and things are changing - they have to. We do indeed need help from all quarters - and this book helped me to understand where that help will come from. Also, I learned a lot about trees. 

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

As much as I liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I think I enjoyed this even more. I always like a story about a bookstore, and this is one of those. Literary and interesting, and full of amazing characters. Nobody writes a story about books like an author! Oh wait…

I heard there is a movie, I kind of don’t want to see it, because the characters are precious to me, and I’d like to keep them how I have them.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

This was a picture of the indie game world and the personalities in it that was so realistic I wondered how Gabrielle Zevin learned so much about it. There were little things that were off (eating fruit does not let Pac-Man eat ghosts, etc.) but so much, especially with the nature of deals and the motivations that game devs have was spookily accurate. I definitely recommend this to anyone in the game industry. And it got me reading other Zevin books. More importantly, it made me reflect on why I make games.

Now Is Not the Time To Panic

I really enjoyed this. It is an exploration of the relationship between Art and Life, and as such is related to The Moon and Sixpence, Edward Scissorhands, and of course, A Bucket of Blood. To quote the immortal Maxwell H. Brock, “Life is and obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of Art.” It felt so genuine when I read it, and as the author explained in the afterword, that’s because it was. Many people don’t know what it is to be owned, to be consumed by art, to feel that purity from another world coursing through you, using you, taking you over to make something happen that you could never do, but somehow happens through you. But clearly, Kevin Wilson knows what that means. I definitely want to check out his other books.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

 

You might have noticed it's been a few years since I made any entries in this blog. I guess I got a little behind, and then it felt weird to catch up, because I'd missed so many entries. Anyway, I'm going to try to get back into it again, though my entries will likely be more brief than before. 

I read the first half of this, and skimmed the second half. It came out in 1978, which of course was a very different time than now in terms of media. Back then, television really was a dominating force in culture, and the author makes a lot of good points about the unhealthy side of television. 

To this day, as television has changed so much into an overfunded "pick what you like" streaming buffet, I still wonder at the power of film and video as media, and wonder at their future. Watching shows like "Ridiculousness" on MTV, which is all clips of people doing weird or dangerous things, a curated YouTube, I see how prescient that Ray Bradbury was describing similar shows in Fahrenheit 451. 

The author concludes that it is unlikely that we will be able to eliminate television -- but he also reminds everyone that doing so would not be impossible -- we would just have to believe enough in the downsides of it to decide to regulate it. We face the same question today with social media, arguably a more deleterious force that television ever was -- since television's business model requires a certain amount of decorum, and for better and worse, it shies away from too much risk taking. Social media leans the opposite way -- anonymity leads to too much risk taking, and too much cruel communication. Media of all kinds is just the human race talking to itself -- I hope we can find ways to make that communication kind and helpful. 

A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

This is one of those books everyone is supposed to have read, but I certainly never had. It's very powerful because he talks in detail about the realities of slavery, some of which I had never contemplated. Most disturbing was the fact that so many slave owners would get their female slaves pregnant. Frederick Douglass was most likely the son of his master, and that let him speak first hand of the horrors of what that means. Not only does it mean being ostracized by other slaves for being lighter, and being hated and punished by that master's wife, but also being treated worse than the others by the master because he wants to show that he is not giving any special treatment. He talks at length about the less obvious horrors of slavery, some of which gets deep into interesting human psychology. Observations about how the more religious a slaveholder is, the crueler they are likely to be are thought-provoking, as was his discussion of the nature of the Christmas holiday in slaveholding households, where slaves were encouraged to get drunk to the point of extreme discomfort so that returning to work seems more comfortable, coming away with the unconscious message that one is better off not being free. I particularly liked his tales of how he learned to read, and how the fact that his master forbid him learning to read served as a primary motivator to actually do it. One thing I thought was very clever was that after moving to the city, he would make friends with free white children, and challenge them to writing contests, learning from them in the process.
Eventually, he tells tales of attempting to escape, but unfortunately, when he does actually escape, he doesn't share details of how it actually happened, because he doesn't want to incriminate those who helped him. Maybe he tells that story in another of his works -- I wonder. Regardless, the thing that makes the book great is the frankness and the details. Reading it, it paints a clear picture of how barbaric life was just a few generations ago, and makes it hard to understand how slavery could have lasted so long.

Star Wars Super Graphic

This fun book by Tim Leong is a collection of cute charts and graphs of Star Wars information. I picked it up because, well, sometimes I'm expected to say intelligent things about Star Wars. I've never been a super fan, but I do appreciate the solidity of the world. Anyway, the book is fun. Some of the charts are just jokes with no real info, but others are very thought provoking. I think my favorites were a graphic showing all the times there has been a dismemberment (every movie but Episode I); how long it would take to watch all the movies (17 hours), read all the comics (18 hours), and read all the novels (81 hours); and a map showing the chronological travels of R2-D2. I really like any world solid enough that you can chart out things like that. One day, I hope to make a giant map of the complete travels of the TARDIS. No Episode 8 in this book, though, but now he's got an excuse for a new edition.

4321

I heard about Paul Auster's novel novel in the London Review of Books. I always like unusual story structures, and also time travel, so the idea of a story told of four parallel lives of one person intrigued me. There is no sci-fi in it, it isn't really time travel. Just a storytelling structure where minor things are different in a person's life, and the ripple effects are illustrated. The chapters are numbered as 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1, 2.2, ... so that we cycle through the four lives of the four versions of the protagonist. For me, by far, the most interesting parts were the childhoods of the four Archie Fergusons. As the characters grew older, it felt like the author was dwelling on memories of political events from the sixties that surely were a big deal at the time, but to me felt stale and dull. The autobiography of the book shows through a great deal -- for many parts of it, one gets the feeling that the author has set aside storytelling in favor of remembering, which felt somewhat self-indulgent to me. I did the audiobook, read by the author, and I felt sure that I could hear a different tone in his voice when moving from storytelling into remembering.

In short, I liked the front parts better than the back parts, and did feel like it went on longer than was polite. It did manage to come around to a clever sort of conclusion. In some ways, the book made me think of Proust, the way it is self-indulgent, and so much about memory and detail. I didn't regret reading it, but on the other hand, I can't say I recommend it, either. Maybe if it was 40% shorter and had a few more surprises in it, I would. When it was focused on storytelling, I liked it -- but during the times where it felt like the author was writing for himself and not for us, I was sad because it makes the book feel like a clever idea that didn't really reach its full potential.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

I finally got around to finishing this book by philosopher Nick Bostrom. The book takes the point of view that once superintelligence (that is, greater than human intelligence) shows up, it will accelerate itself to quickly become incredibly powerful, and potentially very dangerous, possibly leading to the elimination or enslavement of the human race. This is a rational idea on the face of it, but the more I reflect upon it, the less it worries me. I think there are reasonable worries to have about superintelligence, but I don't think that extermination or enslavement are the real worries here. In short, here are...

 Five Reasons Jesse Schell Is Not Worried About Superintelligence. 
1) AIs are generally there to help humans. AIs are going to be created by humans, to serve human interest. There won't just be "one big AI", or "singleton" as Bostrom nerdily terms it, there will be thousands of AIs, created for thousands of purposes. The vast majority of these purposes will be for serving humanity, or at least serving certain subsets of humanity (corporations, institutions, nations, etc.). If some AI does want to destroy or enslave humanity, it will need to do so in opposition to the thousands of AIs that are trying to help humanity. It is kind of like worrying that human beings will destroy all cats. Yes, we could do that, if we all wanted to, but we don't want to. And even if 10% of the population really set their minds to destroying all cats, they would have a hell of a fight on their hands.
2) AIs have no meaningful competition with humans for anything. It is natural for humans to assume that intelligent AIs will have human-type wants and needs: most centrally, survival. But AI brains are likely not to have such a strong focus on survival as human brains. Humans must focus strongly on survival because we are so fragile. We only live a short time, and can only reproduce for an even shorter time. Further, our brains are insanely fragile. Deprived of oxygenated blood for five seconds, and our brains undergo irreversible chemical reactions that completely destroy them. AIs don't have to worry about any of this. They can be backed up, paused, rebooted, and replicated endlessly. So, except in cases where it is engineered into them, they won't be struggling for survival, and certainly not in a competitive way with humans.
3) Intelligence is overrated. Philosophers and other intelligent people naturally have a bias towards overvaluing intelligence. But in reality, intelligence and power do not seem strongly correlated. Take a look at lists of the most intelligent people and the most powerful people. If the most intelligent people can't take over the world, why would the most intelligent machines be able to do it? Further, who is to say that the value of intelligence continues to increase linearly as "thinking power" increases? Perhaps, as with many things, there are diminishing returns after a certain point, and it is not out of the question that we are near that point already.
4) Hardware exceeds expectations, software never does. When predicting the future, two common mistakes are to undervalue how much computing hardware will improve, and to overvalue how much software will improve. Brains are software. And, yes, we're making great strides towards improving AI -- but the idea of software suddenly getting super great overnight by training itself seems unlikely, because true intelligence involves such a complex matrix, and it can't be achieved simply by thinking, it must get there through doing and getting feedback, which can be fast for things easily simulated, but slow for things that can't. Say, for example, you wanted an AI to get good at playing with a dog. Using evolutionary AI techniques, you would need the AI to play with a dog in millions of experimental iterations, and comprehend the dog's reaction. It's just not practical. This isn't to say that AI won't advance -- it will, and it can on one-dimensional simulable problems. But that's a small subset of intelligence, and for that reason, I suspect that the 2020's (and probably 2030's) will be the decade of AI idiot savants.
5) The revolution will be slow. I've been following AI closely for thirty-five years. In the 80's, I assumed, as did many others, that we'd have human level AI by the year 2000. Turns out it's way slower than that, and we have a long, long way to go. We are going to see some amazing advances, but like all software, it is going to be flaky, slow, problematic and disappointing. We are going to have decades to figure out how we are going to deal with it, and being humans, we are going to make it all about us, all about serving our needs. This isn't to say that there won't be problems, accidents, and disasters. There will be -- just like there are computer viruses. But computer viruses won't destroy computing, any more than viruses will wipe out life on earth -- it just isn't in anyone's interest, not even the interest of the virus.

I suspect that the most positive thing that will arise from the development of superintelligence will be that it will force the human race to figure out what we actually value. Technology will bring the problematic gifts of immortality and superintelligence, and we'll be given the choice of giving up humanity for something theoretically better. But are these things better? We'll have to decide what it is about humanity that we value. Is life better if we give up negative emotions? If we give up suffering? If we give up death? Being forced to confront these questions will be good for us. Personally, I think that superintelligence is far less dangerous to our humanity than immortality is, since so much of what it means to be human is centered on survival of the individual and the species. I suspect, looking back from the year 2100, we will find that immortality was the real peril to our species.

Those are my thoughts for now. I did appreciate all the thought that went into this book, it gave a lot of good structure to think about and react to. For no good reason, it makes use of words like "propaedeutic," but they serve as a good illustration as to why intelligence of any kind is unlikely to conquer the world anytime soon.

Wonderland

I was excited to see this book by Steven Johnson, especially given that I've liked some of his previous books, such as The Invention of Air, and Everything Bad Is Good For You. The central premise is that most serious advances in civilization begin in pursuit of pleasure, and often play. I believe this very firmly, it is part of what makes my life so interesting -- by focusing on new kinds of play, one is necessarily at the leading edge of technology, for while "serious" applications need new technologies to be at a certain level of maturity to be useful, playful applications can sculpt themselves around the strengths and weaknesses of the technology as it exists. One example I think of often is Hey You, Pikachu, the voice recognition game that Nintendo released in 1998. Of course, at that point the technology was so primitive that it often misunderstood what the player was saying, but the choice of Pikachu, who is mischievous and frequently disobeys his trainer, made it seem like it was part of the design. Johnson's book is full of dozens examples of this sort, going back to the beginnings of music, taverns, photography, and much else. The book was full of many stories I was very familar with (Hedy Lamarr using player piano technology to invent frequency-hopping torpedos, for instance), but also many about which I had never heard, including:

• Inventor of the stereoscope
• The origin of "phantasmagoria"
• Edison being scared by a lion at the first theme park
• Abner Doubleday almost certainly didn't invent baseball
• Dice were added to chess, then taken away again
• Native Americans discovering isoprene
• The Game of Chess by Jacobus de Cessolis
• Cardano predating Pascal re: probability theory
• The existence of the Claude Glass. 

In all, it was a pleasing book, that I'm glad I read. I always have too many books around, more than my shelves can handle, and it is not a pleasing thing on the psyche. I have a pipe dream that I'll have an entry in this blog every day. Who knows? Maybe I can do it!

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.

Dear Data

A thought-provoking book in which two artists (Giorgia Lupi and Maria Popova) spend a year making colorful charts of everything in their lives. It is a great reminder that data makes us see things differently, sometimes leading to insight, but also sometimes interfering with human experience.