Eva
Kevin Kelly shows us the similarities in the evolution of biological life and the evolution of technology. This is demonstrated with logarithmic graphs that are hard to dispute, and the always fascinating examples of similar lifeforms/technologies emerging simultaneously yet independently at different locations.
So, technology is this emergent phenomenon that accompanies biological life and seems to take over with rapid speed. And we are all scared. But: While the forces driving biological evolution (1. structural inevitability due to laws of physics, 2. guided by history, 3. adaptation due to natural selection) create a momentum that is out of our control, technological evolution does leave a certain amount of control to humans in its adaptive drive. Here Kelly gives us back a shred of hope that we are not total slaves of technology.
Kelly is pro technology, and he spends a large amount of time voicing arguments in response to all the Luddites of this world. The big points being that technology does more good than it does bad, and that all that is now criticized about new technologies will disappear once those technologies move beyond their infancy.
A story about the lovers, protectors and thieves of fine art. It's the story of one boy growing up amidst New York high society, a gambling father in Las Vegas, all the drugs a teenager can get his hands on, a love for antique furniture, art world crimes .. all the while dealing with the loss of his mother and the tragedy that brings a famous painting into his possession.
Young Boris - what a character!
Well this was a disappointment. It started out quite convincing, building up an atmosphere and mystery, but then it somehow went downhill from there. Quite steady downhill. The story telling was as if Pessl rather had written a movie script. The problem being that the movie in her mind was a horror/mystery/detective thriller that seemed to follow all the predictable rules of the trade. Having one clue lead to another, have characters voluntarily deliver large helpful monologues, and somehow have everything seemingly be tied up neatly in the end. And on the way you got a lot of reader hand-holding by reminding them of facts they had read about 50 pages earlier, just in case someone forgot.
This was fun!
Ullman gives us glimpses into her life (work and personal) as a software engineer and software consultant. The stories are interlaced with her musings on the technology in our lives, the lure of money and success, the global network, its the underlying machinery and the simplicity and allure of code in comparison to the messiness of real life.
Her anecdotes are highly entertaining and feel very familiar. She talks about the sexiness of shared minds when programming towards a software release date the next morning. How software developments start with a beautiful crystal of simplicity and then go on to become overladen and dark as the irregularities of human thinking invade on it.
She talks of moments where programmers retreat into worlds “closer to the machine, where things can be accomplished.” Where you start to prefer machines over humans for their inherent logic and their clear-set goals.
In her job as consultant she sits in between the people and their very human needs and the programmers that translate that need into a piece of binary code. She details her struggles of having to abstract down human thinking, human meaning into variables and states. And talks about how sometimes you need to protect clients from the greediness of technology when they realize what other information and control they can gain from a piece of software that primarily set out to do good.
The book is from 1997, and even though there is lots of talk about technology and programming languages, it does not feel dated at all, and seems every bit as relevant today as it must have been then.
Quite a book - depicting in scenes of realism mixed with subtle irony - the slow downfall of the family Buddenbrook. The story is placed between 1830-1880 in the north of Germany. Mann wrote it while aged 22-25, and the book seems to grow with him. None of the characters are your typical hero, they all have their faults, are proud, vain, self-opinionated. But Mann's description places you very close to them, you get to feel all their pains (and there are many painful episodes, ranging from tooth pain, the last stages of death to the pain of school quizzes) and moments of clarity (standing out is Thomas Buddenbrook's discovery of Schopenhauer). Mann paints his characters by repetitively reminding us of their visual trademarks, their “huebschen Oberlippe, weichen braunen Locken, blau umschatteten Augen”, and those descriptions will probably stay alive in my memory for a little while.
This one has been living unread in my bookshelf for too long, so i thought i'd power through it. Which was rather easy as most of what it talks about i've read elsewhere before. The major part of the book establishes the always astonishing facts (that ‘you' are no in control, and that there is a team of rivals inside your brain). The last two chapters then depart from this, and Eagleman talks about what we are now meant to do with that information. How to move the legal system from rating blameworthiness to rating modifyability, how to look at nature and nurture as never being independent, and how the scientific belief in reductionism has its limits. He ends stressing that science's stance of today - that the final discoveries about consciousness and mysteries of the mind are just around the corner - is an illusion.
Kandel tells his life story, researching the mechanisms in the brain that enable us to memorize. There is a lot of detail on the chemical activities in the neuron. Thorough enough that it might just stay in my memory.
But he also gives us the portrait of the life of a scientist, how he picked his research topic, his decision to change career, how important collaborations are. The journey is interesting as his career spanned over quite substantial changes in the relationship between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
And, as an Austrian, it was obviously very interesting and sad to hear about his problematic relationship with his motherland.
A stream of Kerouac-like impressions of drugs, booze, sex, swimmingpools, airplanes, told by a travelling drugs-salesman in a not-to-far slightly dystopian future, who dips too deep into his own medicine which causes memory-loss. The whirlwind of anecdotes and short story snippets is entertaining and the language poetic, but quickly grows boring, as no real story-development happens. But then, about half way in, our hero overdoes his drugs and lands in a clinic, where he undergoes treatment for his complete memory-loss. The change in the storyline got me invested again, as it even included a first-person account of a Penfield stimulation experiment.
Gleick speaks of things one has heard of before, but he does it in such an elegant and explanatory style, rich of anecdotes and never boring. He tells the story of information, its transmission, compression, quantification, definition and spins a web from early telegraph technologies, to redundancies in language, Claude Shannon's formula, how information ends up being entropy and the opposite of entropy, universal Turing machines, information never not being physical and today's information overload.
I am very much a fan of Greg Egan's hard scifi. Here he presents us with two stages in the development of society and intelligence. One world that has reached, discovered and understood all there is, and struggles with finding balance and reason to live their eternal lifes. And one that is just in the process of awakening and developing a thirst for knowledge (or so it seems).
The story of the inhabitants of the splinter feels like a visit to a more substantial version of Abbott's Flatland. Even though not 2-dimensional, there are parallels in how the reader is transported into a world that is not understood. Egan let's the reader discover the world together with the protagonists by using for example foreign words to describe their geometry that only slowly start to make sense.
And even though Egan tackles some difficult physics when he lets his heroes discover orbital motion, gravity and the space-time continuum, the user is not necessarily required to follow it all. Because the main message of the book is not the physics, but the pretty universal dilemma that too much knowledge doesn't make you happy.
Peter Seibel interviews 15 giants of the world of computer programming. I pretty much didn't know any of the programmers before, and my programming skills are definitely far from any of their standards, but this book was an amazing read.
The interviews create detailed portraits, zooming in on the craft of programming, and feature everyone's thoughts, opinions, life-stories, tips and tricks about how they program, what languages they use, how they debug, and if they start bottom-up and top-down. Seibel asks questions about how they got into programming; if they consider themselves scientists, engineers, artists or craftsman; and how they recognize great programming skills.
We hear hands-on stories about team management of coders, enforcing of strict coding syntax standards, finding the balance between quick-and-dirty and over-optimized code, and a lot of bashing of C and C++ and their use of pointers.
Lessons i will take away from this book:
> Read other people's code, a lot!
> Write readable code, instead of extensive commenting
> Learn more languages
With few exceptions most of the interviewees started learning the craft in the area of punch-cards and teleprinters, and have been influential for the discipline by inventing operating systems, programming languages or writing the bible of programming.
I'd really like to see a version of this book showcasing today's media-art coders. But in general, there really should be a XXXXXX-at-Work for every discipline there is. Hearing personal accounts, behind-the-scene stories about the field you are passionate about ...
A meditation on a famous code one-liner in the programming language BASIC. The book demonstrates the elegance of the simple line of code producing a fascinating output. It reflects on the one-liners programming language (Basic), visual output (maze), required functions (randomness), required hardware (Commodore 64), re-interpretations (in processing) and playful extensions (complimentary maze walker). There is no need to give every chapter the same amount of attention. But when you end the book, you are left with a high respect for the thoroughness and meticulousness with which the book's 10 (!) authors executed their mission.
In 1917 Sigmund Freud claimed that the unconsciousness is “the third blow” to narcissistic humanity (after Copernicus and Darwin). That free will, rationality and a sense of self might be mere illusions. Soon after Freud fell out of favor and so did the notion of the unconscious. But it is very much on its way back, considering the amount of recent related scientific experiments and published books. Tallis' book from 2002 was probably a frontrunner.
The subtitle fits: a history of the unconscious. Tallis presents in informative and insightful way how we discovered, studied and tried to make sense of all the processes, memories and knowledge that lie below our awareness level. How the concept of the unconscious went from philosophy to spiritualism to scientific knowledge. From Mesmerism, dream interpretation, lucid dreaming to subliminal stimuli, Libet's half second and the evolutionary advantage of self-deception. There are definitely stories to tell, and Tallis' book was a interesting read.
About 150 short articles, ranging between 1 to 4 pages (perfect for breakfast literature) from big names like V.S. Ramachandran, Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, Kevin Kelly, Rudy Rucker, David Eagleman, Sam Harris - each presenting what serves as their answer to the 2012 Edge.org question: “What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?”
In the hitlist of answers:
Advocating for uncertainty. Carlo Rovelli writes “The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge.” Several articles declare it is important to educate the public on probability values, to avoid ridiculous scares that are fuelled by misunderstandings of numbers (see vaccines, airport security scanners, ..). Top of the list are definitely also the issues concerning climate control, and how facts can be misinterpreted. In total there are lots of stabs on the general uneducated state of most Americans. And at societies stubborn preference for mediocrity instead of finding win-win situation through collaboration and compromise.
I especially enjoyed:
- David Eagleman's “The Umwelt” which talks about the limits of our senses and how each organism assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality out there.
- Lee Smolin's “Thinking in Time versus thinking outside of Time” where he advocates for a perspective of truth where the ultimate truth doesn't lie outside our universe but within. In that way objects and ideas only exist once they are invented. Every feature of them is a result of their history and everything about them is negotiable and subject to improvement by the invention of novel ways of doing things.
- Amanda Gefter's “Dualities” which talks about how we should sometimes replace our typically boolean thinking and embrace the scientific concept of dualities instead, that radically different theories can both be true and represent the same underlying reality.
Bor's theory of consciousness says that consciousness emerged to guide our mind's attention and working memory, to help with storing, recalling and processing the patterns we perceive in the world around us. Chunking - the grouping of information into more memorable segments - is at the heart of man's advantage over animals. It allows us to increase the limits of our working memory and therefore process and analyse more complex patterns.
Bor explains his theory by starting from zero, starting all the way down with genetic evolution. Even though there is content you've likely heard before, he does find interesting ways of telling the story. I especially remember finding his description of the Chinese Room thought experiment to be very insightful.
“Perhaps what most distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ravenous desire to find structure in the information we pick up in the world.”
When we are children every sensory stimuli excites us, as it represents new and undiscovered territory. Over our lifespan we lose that childlike excitability as we store more and more patterns into memory. Bor suggests the power of meditation to try to retrieve some of that fresh insatiable state of mind that children have.
Not that compelling. Somehow the storyline stagnated after a quite interesting first half of the book. And the big reveal at the end didn't add much either. The only thing that got me excited was when McEwan build the Monty Hall problem into the story. - And at least i got to train my Swedish skills.
Great collection of the various medical conditions and altered states that play tricks on our mind and make us see/hear/feel things that aren't really there. Sensory deprivation, psychedelics, visual migraines, narcolepsy, etc.
Some fascinating conditions: Polyopia - perceiving multiple copies of the same visual image. Or the temporal variant of it: Palinopsia - images persist to some extent even after their corresponding stimulus has left. Or the Doppelgänger syndrome: perceiving a neutral mirror image of oneself.
My favorite Oliver Sacks anecdote is him taking a mix of cannabis, amphetamines and LCD and setting out to experience the color indigo, which he'd never managed before. He succeeds and has a very indigo trip. Afterwards he continues to look for indigo, yet without success, until years later he visits a classical concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During the break - all high on music - he visits the Egyptian jewellery section of the museum and he manages to see indigo again. But only for the short duration for his music-caused ecstatic state.
Illusions, priming, rubber hands, self-tickling, neurotransmitters, ambiguity, Bayesian observers, hard-wired knowledge, mirror neurons ... Christopher Frith touches upon a vast multitude of facts, experiments and theories about how our brain interacts with the world, and he does it in a highly engaging fashion. A lot of the content i've read about before elsewhere, but somehow Frith manages to tie elements together smoothly and makes you see new connections.
I liked the style of including more detailed graphics and notes on experiments alongside the main writing, that you could choose to explore or ignore based on interest.
Perception is a fantasy that coincides with reality - our brain creates models of the world and constantly tries to adapt those models based on sensory experience.
Fantastic book. About how our understanding of light - and simultaneously our world-views - changed over the course of humanity (and keep on changing). About how essential light is to our understanding of reality. About the mystery that keeps us digging deeper. About the need to develop new senses and new organs of cognition.
