Eva
A tapestry of thoughts on the nature of humanity and the nature of myths. Gray pulls together memoirs, poems, stories and philosophies that deal with man's rougher, more primordial edges. While we constantly increase our knowledge in science/technology, we somehow fail to do the same thing for ethics and politics. Here we repeat the same mistakes over and over.
“In the Babel we have created for ourselves, it is the silence of animals that both reproaches and bewitches us.”
Sterling's version of a space opera brimful of ideas and visions of the future. The evolution of humanity splits into two main factions/ideologies: the shapers (gene manipulation) and the mechanists (cybernetic enhancements). Either you're pro bacteria or con. The storyline jumps from world to world, constantly reinvents itself and never stays put. Everything is political and it's gritty and you love it.
If I'm not wrong, Ilya Prigogine is the only one to be referenced as a person of the past, as humanity is approaching his 5th level of complexity, posthumanism.
Same as in Hertzian Tales, Dunn and Raby advocate for designers to be more than just crutches for consumerism. Product design (not the one that actually makes it onto the market, but the one that could be showcased in galleries and on diverse media channels) could join architecture, film, literature, philosophy in imagining possible futures. Yet instead of predicting the future or solving future problems, these designs could be thought experiments that criticize, provocate and stimulate debate. Create multiple “what if” scenarios to make our everyday reality more mallable, so we don't lose track of “what could be” in this one-track consumer oriented world.
Airport buy, mainly because it had a Michael Cunningham recommendation on the sleeve. It's a charming story. In the 40ies two stepsisters set out for a big Hollywood American Dream story, but nothing comes easy, their lives get uprooted a couple of times as the story twists and turns. Colorful characters drift in and out, and sisters can be the most loving yet also the most cruel. Perfect to blast through on a day on the beach.
This started out fun, cyberpunk mixed with reference after references of 80ies pop culture. An adventureland quest to hunt down the most important inheritance of this dystopian future. But then you quickly realize that the writing is somehow lacking, that the story is not doing more than simply cueing more and more 80ies game trivia, and then you suddenly realize that this might be a YA novel. If you are a gamer you probably have a fun time reading this, if not, it's still quite entertaining but nothing more.
If you leave out Dyson's few ‘prophetic' interpretations, then this is an anthology of the Institute for Advanced Study's years when they built the MANIAC-0 (now: IAS machine) - one of the first computers based on the Universal Turing machine. Dyson untangles and entangles the many lives that came through Princeton during those years to help build the machine. We get biographies, quotes, lost documentation from the institute's archives, tales of housing logistics and partying engineers. And the story also visits Los Alamos, where the same people who build computers, work on the atomic and hydrogen bomb. At the center of this giant net of disciplines and ideas you find the genius tying everything together: John von Neumann.
Sometimes too detailed, sometimes not didactic enough, but i loved the portraits Dyson painted of these men and women, who dedicated their lives to jumpstart this digital world we live in now. Mainly i come away from the book with this understanding that the invention of the computer is naturally a wide-spread fuzzy collaborative effort where no-one truly stands out, but everyone builds on top of other's ideas.
Wow I loved this. It's 1979 and a rag-tag team of engineers is on their way of hacking out a new 32-bit minicomputer (then the size of a couple of fridges) in the basement the Data General in Massachusetts. And a journalist gets to watch. The dust jacket reads, Kidder wrote the book “with a reporter's eye, a novelist' heart, and a technician's understanding” and it's all that and more. It's about wire-wrapped prototype boards and chasing bugs, management styles and team motivation, burning out and finding new drives, vivid portraits of people full of excitement for building something new and innovative.
This book is quite incredible. You start with braille and simple light switches, make your way to oscillators, flip-flops and multiplexer, and suddenly you understand how computer hardware works. And that's coming from someone who already thought they “sorta” understood how it worked. I didn't really. Now I do. Best bottom-up education ever.
A gritty, slightly dystopian Robinson Crusoe story of a man being stranded on a desolate trashy traffic island between highways outside London. He is stuck in limbo, fights hunger, pain, a fevered mind, and starts a 2-3 week adventure with/against the island and it's Mad-Maxian inhabitants. Several times he self-sabotages his own escape, and seemingly alternates between despair and fascination for the effects the island has on him.
Before Neuromancer and Snow Crash, there was Vinge's “True Names”, written in 1981. Hackers meet in cyberspace, a virtual representation of “data space” they call the “Other Plane”. Metaphors and symbols of magic are applied to this world - they are warlocks and wizards, they cast spells - modern-day sorcery in a completely networked world. There are battles in cyberspace, amassing computation power that goes to your head and makes you Gods, encryption schemes to trick those who control you because they know your true name, there's the NSA, conflicts over good and bad and governing authorities, a dormant yet evolving AI, even upload of consciousness. There's a lot in there (and it's a rather slim book) - ideas that Vinge doesn't nearly get enough credit for. I am glad I got here, finally.
Personal and philosophical meditations on what it means to get lost, to lose, to encounter the unknown. How we label unexplored places unknown territories on maps, yet still fill them with our fear and imagination instead of leaving them blank. The color blue runs through the book like a red thread. The blue of distance, of longing, blue as the color of the horizon, the light that got lost, dispersed. Other cultures don't get lost, they wander. Losing oneself as rite of passage. Embracing mystery, uncertainty, the unknowable, that what can't be possessed.
You can get lost in this book, in her stories, her meanderings around the subject, elegant and subtle, lyrical and personal, evocative and elusive, yet grounded in places, cities and wilderness. Relationships, memoires, anecdotes.
How to MacGyver your way to survival on Mars in case you end up stranded there. Highly entertaining, surprisingly many laugh-out-loud moments (if someone ever get's stranded on Mars, he better have that sense of humor) and lots of science and geekiness. Plus, it already has all the cheesy Hollywood-blockbuster moments pre-written. The whole world bonding together over one lost soul (hell, even China pitches in), the words echo the tear-jerker movie montages that will follow. I didn't even mind that that much, as it was a fun and exciting read, and tear-jerker moments are definitely better in book form, while they deserve more eye-rolling on the big screen.
My first Miéville, definitely not my last. Consider myself hooked. A mysterious setup that feels like scifi and fantasy but reveals itself to be complicated human psychology. Enforced perception and un-perception, superposition of spaces into one two three jurisdictions. Painting a familiar picture of opposing cultures, living side by side, yet not living with each other.
The fifth star is missing because the end of the crime-story felt like a bit of a let-down after all the build-up. When complicated details have to be communicated out loud as confessions at gun-point, it feels a bit forced. But everything else, amazing!
This was quite refreshing after having read probably way too many popular science books from this millenium. Storr wrote this in 1988. So there is no handholding of the reader, no attempts to be overly clever or funny, no constant referencing of modern culture or modern diseases like procrastination or internet-obsession. Just thorough research, thematic quotes, insights. Leaving enough breath to form your own opinion.
But his message is clear. Somehow we've been entrained that human happiness can only be achieved through interpersonal relationships (we might as well blame Freud for this as well). But Storr shows that a deeper encounter with one's self, and following one's interests can also lead to deep and meaningful happiness. That that ‘oceanic feeling' not only emerges from being/falling in love, but also from making sense of the world, the rush of scientific discovery, of creative expression.
Storr discusses the need for solitude (grief, sleep, contemplation), the capacity for solitude (stability in bridging one's inner and outer world), the effects of enforced solitude and the creative/productive effects of focusing on one's imagination. How our temperament informs our need and capacity for solitude: how some of us are drawn towards Abstraction (beauty in order, fear/independence of nature) and others towards Empathy (beauty in the organic, trust/absorption in nature). In similar fashion how we are either patterners or dramatists (H. Gardner).
The first half definitely had some eye-openers for me, while the second half probably had a few too many biographic details of famous artists, philosophers, scientists. All in all this was great, no wonder the book still gets this much praise.
We reached a state of continuous technological progress for technology's sake instead of society's sake. Our tools and machines may have started out being adapted to our needs, but now it us who gets sculpted around technology. Aas machines more and more take over not only our physical but also our mental tasks, we end up de-skilled, disengaged and unhappy. The utopian vision of a work-free society falls apart with our inborn need to occupy ourselves, our bodies, our brains, with meaningful tasks.
Carr goes through different industries and demonstrates their growing dependence on computers and automation: the dangers of relying on auto-pilots (flight and cars), the trust in expert systems in medicine, reliance on GPS navigation, etc. And already the progress of automation opens up morality questions once machines will be able to drive, hurt, kill by simply following algorithms.
Obviously there is no solution in the book besides a wider uptake of the “adaptive automation” principle. Trying to position the tasks left to humanity on the upper ridge of the Yerkes–Dodson slope, bridging cognitive underload and cognitive overload. To keep us alert, to keep us occupied, to keep us happy.
The book leaves you with the message that next time you pick up a new tool or a new gadget, you should consider and evaluate what skills of yours it'll supplement and what skills it'll diminish.
A space opera based on a strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the principle that language influences thought. When learning the language, Babel-17, our protagonist first notices she starts to see new connections and similarities between unconnected concepts. Once fluent and able to think in Babel-17 her thought process speeds up and allows her to become a strategic mastermind. Yet there are also unwanted effects programmed into the core of the language.
The ideas are all there, but they are packaged into a rather fast-paced, character- and action-packed space opera that is too short to fully dive into all the linguistic and cognitive possibilities.
Long overdue, therefore not full of surprises, but very solid and still endlessly interesting. He starts with a 101 on music and sounds (pitch, timbre, tempo ..) and then tells us why our brain prefers certain harmonies and melodies over others. Why the church banned the ‘chord of evil' from music (Tritone), why our neuronal feedback loops get hooked on rhythms, and why Pinker was wrong in calling music “auditory cheesecake”. It don't think there has been or will be a book that had me singing out loud that often.
A city on rails that constantly needs to be moved to ‘stay at optimum'. The reasons for this are hidden from the major city population. The reader discovers the world together with the protagonist, who ventures into the past and the future of the city's pathway and slowly has to change his beliefs of what he thought reality was.
Amazing. Absolutely gripping even though there is not much action. Somehow it felt like Kōbō Abe's “The Woman in the Dunes” colliding with Greg Egan's “Incandescence”.
This is “A History of Reading”. “The History of Reading” would contain so many more chapters highlighting different aspects of reading, as outlined in this one's last chapter. And there is always more to say, but Manguel fills this one with the right amount of history, anecdotes and stories. About the object, the person and the act, the book, the reader and the act of reading. He, who read to a blinding Borges in his youth, knows he wrote this book for his family of bibliophiles and ties his wonderful historical exploration together with the characters and portraits of those who were as enchanted and as in love with books as this book's likely reader.
What do you get if you smash together information science, genetics, some Bach, some computer programming and a dash of cryptography? An intensely smart novel that only Richard Powers could write. Data retrieval, translation, pattern recognition and puzzle solving is all over this story, where librarians, system administrators, scientists and art historians mingle to create this double helix of love stories. Bach's Goldberg Variations are the red thread leading us through this partial mystery, and are also hidden in the structure of the story telling. As always with Powers the information content is high, but his protagonists and the plot still get front stage. Most of the time at least. Sometimes he goes off on inspired tangents on the nature of DNA and code and information at large, but these lengthy segments are too overloaded with wild associations and smart language riddles, that it's hard to follow. The first half of the book was easy, the second half a bit less.
Compendium piece to Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag's multidisciplinary sonArc::project. Besides documentation of his installations the book mainly consists of a collection of German essays by Wolfgang Hagen, Friedrich Kittler, Verena Kuni and others, that were part of the “electric salons” at tesla-Berlin in 2007. The salons were titled “domesticated lightning” and brought together scientists, media theorists and engineers. The essays deal with the nature of electricity and its impact on media, art, music, philosophy, communication ... They trace the history of electricity and focus on the romantic, haunted and strange, early instruments, ghost detectors, philosophical toys.
I could have done without the experimental layout of interlacing the essays across the pages.