Ever since I’ve gotten back home and don’t have immediate concerns, I’ve been catching up on reading. Here are reviews on the first batch:

With A Little Help

A collection of short stories by Cory Doctorow.

I’ve read most of the stories already in here, but it was a blast reading through them again, and picking up those that I haven’t read yet. Some notes on selected stories:

I’ve read The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away (yes, based on the joco song) before, but it’s interesting to read it after learning that other people are also interested in collecting data on the self under the banner of quantified self, how we’re doing it outside of a monastery.

After reading The Right Book, it makes me wonder why no one has tried making something like The Story so Far yet: or, someone’s tried starting it, but it keeps getting buried before it reaches critical mass. Maybe we could just start it as a forum game, and keep going until it attains critical mass.

Human Readable conflicts me: on the one hand, I want the ant simulators to win, because you can’t always ask your machines to explain themselves, similar to how many machine learning algorithms are black boxes. On the other hand, giving up that control and understanding essentially means we give up the control to the “matrix”: even if there is no malignant consciousness, we give up the control to the aether. And we love control, myself included.

Pester Power ends with a magnificent line. I’m very sad to hear that /usr/bin/god was never completed. And Charlie Stross working on a book about spam? I’ll have to keep an eye out.

Epoch has another set of lines that tickle my geek nodes: “Later that night, she took me home and we spent the whole night hacking replacement parts for her collection of ancient stand-up video games.” The fact that Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth commissioned the story is also cool: when I get rich and famous, I’ll have to remember I can commission stories.

I will gripe that unordered collections have no business being flattened into a linear strictly-ordered collection, and that as an ebook we can do better. I’d love to see how people display and navigate through an unordered collection.

TLDR: THE STORIES ARE AWESOME READ THEM ALL

Postsingular

Honestly, this book kind of sucked: I only got halfway through it before the wooden dialog, random plotting, and soft scifi pseudo-science slew my desire to keep reading, and this is coming from someone that will plow through utter shit just to finish it. This either means I’m getting better at rejecting books that aren’t worth my time, or that the book is worse than utter shit. I’m not sure.

Context

The 2nd latest work from Cory Doctorow, which is merely a collection of blog posts put into book form. I say merely, partly because I’ve already read most of the material in one form or another, and also because as I’ve said before, unordered collections presented as ordered feel wrong.

The essays themselves are wonderful, and a good thing about them being short, page-long essays is that I can’t really spoiler them, so I’ll just ramble a bit:

If I ever become a parent, I hope to be as good as integrating technology into family time as Cory is in Jack and the Interstalk (corrected for technological advancement).

Beyond Censorware brought to the fore that old dream that I could lead some class in primary or secondary education, because it’s too often that kids don’t meet good technologists until what I would argue is much too late. Of course, the fact that I’m a few nines high with regards to technology means I’ve traded off some social acumen, and it seems like being somewhat normal is a good thing for primary/secondary school teachers. Also, there’s the fact that if we treat money as whuffie (another Cory concept), then we don’t value teachers very much, and we get job destroyers off destroying jobs instead of teaching the next generation how to replace themselves with shell scripts.

When I’m Dead details how to handle deceased dude’s digital data. I once thought about creating a “dead-man’s” switch for myself/as a service so my encrypted digital data wouldn’t die with me, so it was instructive to hear Doctorow talk about why he wouldn’t use one (trust), and his solution (split the key, keep it with two other trusted people). Doctorow’s solution would work especially well with myself: I have several groups of friends that are widely physically and socially disparate from each other (6 steps non-withstanding). However, having friends maintain awareness of the key shards is problem-prone, whereas Doctorow has one closely trusted party (wife) and someone he pays to care (lawyer). I suppose this means I need to get married and get a lawyer, or get married twice on opposite ends of the globe.

The sentiments in Reports of Blogging’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated are obviously shared by myself.

It’s interesting to note that Doctorow thinks Search Is Too Important to Leave to One Company, since when I read that title I immediately think of DuckDuckGo.

Personal Data is as Hot as Nuclear Waste reiterates in my mind that we need to encrypt everything (shame on myself for not encrypting my mail! shame on myself for not encrypting my hard drives!), and with the increased capabilities of data mining, we need to add more obscurity just to keep the amount of anonymity level.

Memento Mori is an interesting look at how we fetishize old objects: aside from a straightforward fascination, they also act as ways to keep us honest about the promises of technology. I’m somewhat young (perhaps too young) to remember these past revolutions that promised the world and failed to deliver, but I’ll keep in mind curating my own memonto mori collection.

Cory also talks about sex in his books, writing for YA, his writing process/tools, email (both the problem of spam and how he controls his inbox), re-iterates the thesis that scifi is really about the present, fandom, r-reproduction, licensing, publishing MVPs, CC, Net Neutrality (since the book was published in late 2011, there’s nothing on the new challenges to the internet), the evils of DRM, why 3d movies are a gimmick, phishing, piracy (media piracy in particular), why we need statistical literacy, and 3d printing.

TLDR: I’ve you’re an avid reader of Doctorow’s blog, you might be familiar with the material, but it’s fun to go back and read this collection of “greatest hits”. If you don’t follow Doctorow, then these essays are fun, bite sized thoughts wrapped up in a nice box, which I highly recommend.

What’s next? Maybe Anathem, or the latest from Cory Doctorow (The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow), something by Charlie Stross, or something be Vernor Vinge. In other words, ALL THE SCIENCE FICTION.

• Attended some graduations
• Tweaked the Arimaa Icon set up to version 3 4 4.1
• Attended a Classical Revolution session in Seattle
• Re-read Neuromancer
• Made progress on finding housing. I detest looking for housing. In fact, I detest looking for most anything.
• Failed to finish Halo: Reach
• Got to the Silicon Valley without dying

Start work next week! I should be able to actually start finishing projects again, so heads up for that.

So what’d I do this week?

• Got sick with Viral Gastroentrisis again
• Finished The Glass Bead Game
• Hit up Seattle's Less Wrong Meetup group
• Finished Oryx and Crake
• Finished a project of mine. A small project, involving data visualization

Thoughts on book reading: I don’t quite get modern literature. Or any “fine” literature, for that matter. If I didn’t read the foreword for The Glass Bead Game, then I would have been totally lost. Heck, reading the foreword I get a glimpse into what people that know literature get out of reading literature, and much of the time I wasn’t getting that. Like with many things, once I knew that I was deficient in this area, I had an immediate urge to make myself not deficient. However, since I’d just be delving into more literature, a second thought tells me it wouldn’t be especially useful.

Oryx and Crake was a bit better: in particular, some people don’t know how to include technical riffraff into their work. However, Atwood does a good job of sprinkling technical tidbits throughout a text.

However, I’m not into the whole doom and gloom scenario put forth by Oryx and Crake. As I subscribe to secular humanism, I think that humanity is overall on a upward slope, not a constant degeneration. Just because I’m not into the scenario, though, does not mean I don’t think it’s important: even if we occupied several planets in the solar system (like Stephen Hawking says), we could potentially kill ourselves off with a single dedicated mad scientist (it brings to mind the saying “every 18 months, it becomes twice as easy to shoot ourselves in the foot” with respect to strong AI. I don’t know where it’s from, sorry). Something approaching protection from even deliberate attempts on the existence of humanity is interstellar colonization without faster-than-light drives, but I’m sure the only reason it seems safe is because I’ve been thinking about it for less than 10 years. And this is why I think HPMOR will end in tragedy: Harry will do almost everything right, but it won’t be enough, because you could do everything you were supposed to, and Nature is still allowed to kill you.

Some forewarning: this post is going to be somewhat awkward. Okay, more awkward than normal. I’m not really announcing anything (it’s been around a week since I could’ve announced anything) and nothing is coming up (at least, nothing planned). However, it’s been 2 weeks since I’ve written anything, so I figured I should post something.

First, a note about my latest project: Notesoble! Or something else. I haven’t exactly nailed down a name, since I lifted Notesoble from a similar project that just didn’t work out around a year ago, and it doesn’t quite reflect the character any more. So what’s it do, you ask? Well, it’s a documentation system meant to ease comprehension by harnessing the power of the computer. I think it makes much more sense when one looks at the motivation: currently, ebooks don’t use the malleability of computing power: sure, maybe they offer search, or easy dictionary look ups, or a fancy little applet with which to investigate Newtonian forces, but those are peanuts compared to the meat of the text, which is mostly unchanged from the normal prose filled tree-books of yore.

For instance, why doesn’t anyone highlight things listed in a line of prose? The content is obviously not important enough to break out into a list, but we can draw the eye immediately to the discrete elements of the list with a subtle impression. Likewise, why do we all read the same prose? On a second reading, one either wants less detail, or more. Heck, on a first reading people read for different levels of detail: why do we insist on bringing them the same level of detail?

Of course, the obvious answer is that that’s what good readers do; they don’t need these silly aids with which to read at whatever level they wish. However, I am arguing that it’s not about what one eventually figures out, but how fast one can learn it. If the structure of the page aids comprehension such that people do not have to think as much to learn the same amount… well, that’s my goal.

Such is the state of Notesoble after working on it for a weekend and then letting it ferment. I’ll get back to you guys once there are more better baked ideas, better propaganda, and better prototypes.

Jeez, has it really been a week since Devfest ended? Looking at my wrist, I discover that yes indeed, it has been a week since the end of Devfest (I’ll have to do a post-mortem post on Devfest 2011 sometime). And yet, my life is still hectic and fluffy, fluffy as expanding foam that fills every crack of the world with suffocating lemon smells. Some of it is due to the fact that I’m trying to catch up with reading that I neglected during Devfest, but I have a sneaking suspicion that much of it is due to the fact that yes, school is just this time consuming, especially since I’m not in classes where I already know everything.

I know I said I would, but I haven’t gotten my hands on a book on Bayesian Data Analysis: instead, I put out a warrant for a book on Visualizing Data. Hopefully, it provides some counterpoint to Tufte; ever since I read a stinging indictment on his work, I haven’t trusted my opinion on data visualizations. Since I don’t have a dead-tree book at the moment, I’m reading Pro Git in my spare time.

In random news, I found one of my really, really early attempts at creating a web site on Google Sites. It was pretty pathetic, and I had to euthanize it. Rest in bits, work of my past self. Hopefully, my future work won’t deprecate as quickly. Or maybe I should be hoping it will. Hmm.

And when the hell does Github turn over it’s commit counter for the week? This week of commits on Notesoble is making the rest of my projects look bad.

It’s been a long haul, but I’m done with Probabilistic Robotics, the beginning of my reading spree until the end of my time here at Columbia. If you don’t remember, I decided I should start a reading spree until I didn’t have access to the huge library at Columbia: hell, all that money has to be paying for something. But the fact that I said that back in October, and only now finished the first book says something about… something. It’s kind of complicated.

When I said I’m done with the book, I didn’t mean that I finished it from cover to cover. No, by the time I was halfway through the book it stopped being fun and started being tedious. The content of the book is relevant to my interests, but it was written in such a way that it didn’t really make sense how to transform the concepts to code. The psuedo-code was very math heavy, whereas lots of single letter variables represented potentially huge covariance matricies. My inexperience with matrix math didn’t help here: matrices were used everywhere, and it wasn’t immediately apparent how it all fit together.

I suppose the fact I didn’t try implementing any of this in code didn’t help. I know, big mistake on my part, but it seemed kind of… pointless. I don’t have any motivating factors right now, and the only thing I would really be interested in implementing would be the FastSLAM algorithm, but I couldn’t understand anything in that chapter (yes, I’ll take that hit to my geek standings. I did not understand something in a book).

Another topic of contention was my experience with probability: the author assumed a bit more familiarity with probability than I actually had, so I was kind of lost for much of the time. Sure, I know what the covariance is, but keeping everything straight in addition to the covariance wasn’t easy.

Hence, my next book will be a book on Bayescraft, and getting myself familiar with probabilistic ideas. Since I’m in the middle of a Devfest hackathon, I can’t exactly get up and go get a book, but I’ll be sure to have it waiting for me when the storm ends.

And just FYI, sometime, I’m going to read Probabilistic Robotics again and win.

Also, I should note I have no kindle. It’s okay, it means I’m not trying to hack it into my life, which would undoubtedly sink huge amounts of time.

EDIT: Right! I forgot to talk about Devfest! The Devfest at which I played a non-trivial role! I didn’t botch my role as workshop facilitator, which is a big win, although I need to learn how to wield a big stick and get people to stop talking, either on stage or off it. Aside that, the tutorials covered lots of ground in relatively little time (it wasn’t necessarily good: some of the audience’s eyes were glazing over, although I should note that most of the audience was a very quiet crowd. It gives me a new appreciation for a responsive audience). So yeah, cool. My big contribution to Devfest is made, and from here on out I essentially just have to code. So far, I just have a gimp plugin published, so… I guess I’ll get started on another one. Good times.

So a friend of mine recently-ish filled out one of those Q/A lists about books on tumblr, and it got me thinking about books I haven’t read, and it got me thinking. Specifically, one of the books mentioned happened to touch on an anomaly in my reading habits, one of the few books that I’ve read out of sequence in a series without going back to read everything. I do believe I read it for a book reading contest in my junior high days (Battle of the Books, I do believe. Came close to winning the school-wide contest a few times, but those last couple rounds were always too tough to break), which meant that I wouldn’t have spared thought to reading an entire trilogy just to get at the last book.

However, this recent touch rekindled my interest in the Abhorsen series (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, by Garth Nix), since, well, it sounded like there was a whole lot more character development happening than the last book let on (you mean that warrior was a librarian earlier?). So I grabbed the entire series, sat down, and started reading last night. And well, now it’s tonight, and I’ve ended the last book in the last hour. Not sure if my game is slipping speed*comprehension-wise (yes, I’m multiplying them together), but any reading should help, right?

So thoughts… I’m actually not that tired. Sitting all day and reading doesn’t drain that much energy. Yes, this is what I did all day rather than go to San Fran.

Oh, you mean about the actual books? First, I should say that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has completely ruined fantasy genres for me. Okay, maybe not completely, since the Abhorsen series has a particular sticking point that engaged my mind, but I’m sure can’t read about magical worlds without hearing “I do now claim this territory in the name of SCIENCE!” echo through my head. Particular to the Abhorsen universe is the fact that magic and technology do not mix (not unique by a long shot, but useful as a category). I can’t help but think of a quote from the Clark, who said “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (or something like that). From that perspective, you have one magic, and another, and they oppose each other. Since one is ‘deeper’ than the other, it wins when the two conflict. Simple enough. However, when one can see (or at least outline) all the steps involved in making a grenade, then it’s much less apparent how the tech-magic conflict works. Decomposing all the steps leads to mechanical steps you can undertake anywhere (or else swords couldn’t be smithed in the Old World, for instance), such that it doesn’t make sense that there is any tech-magic conflict.

I know I’m complaining about a fantasy story not making sense. Shush.

So, the plot makes so much more sense now. Nix tries to recap at the beginning of each book, but they really have to be read in sequence, as separate volumes of a large work. Actually, the first book and the last two are fairly decoupled, and the recapitulation from the second could cover for not reading the first (although it would smooth out the story telling to just read everything; sometimes obscure cross-references are made).

Forgive me for skipping through, I’m getting pretty tired.

However, I must say that this might be the first time I’ve consciously noticed character development. I personally think that it’s just due to heightened awareness, and Reading Marathon powers, but I’ll have to burn through a couple more stories before I figure out if I got the hang of it or not.

Anyways, I’m really tired. I’ve been staring at the screen for a few minutes, so I’ll take my leave here.