A Delicate Truth, by John Le Carre

Maybe not a great book, but a very good one, and an interesting wrinkle. Certain spylike shenanigans occur, and then rather than Le Carre's usual cast of spylike people, the attention focuses on civil servants who start pulling threads on something that just doesn't look right. And in fact isn't right. But will governments allow their amoral fiascoes to be exposed? Haha, of course not, silly.

Never, by Ken Follett

Chosen by the company book club. It's a great airplane read, with some more spylike people doing spylike things, and then geopolitical tensions increase until the Uberplot takes over, threatening the world. But will governments come to their senses rather than following tit for tat escalation until everything gets out of control? Haha, of course not, silly.

Playing with Reality: HOW GAMES HAVE SHAPED OUR WORLD By Kelly Clancy

Not quite what I expected, but fascinating nonetheless. A historical look at how games have done more than amuse, but change how we look at war, economy, intelligence, etc.  Once upon a time, warlords played chess to hone their strategy. Then, in a bid to make it more pertinent as a simulation of battle, Kriegsspiel was developed, and that became a craze in the Prussian military (and beyond). I presume other wargames also developed out of this, but some people are going back to the original, including the Southern California Kriegsspiel Society, which meets at Strategicon according to Wikipedia. Game theory and how it is and isn't like the economic and political applications made of it in 'real life'. The development of game-playing software and its development from checkers to chess to Go to playing Atari 2600 games. DeepMind, which recently formed part of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for its protein folding solutions, also trained an AI to play Atari games.

Winter of the Gods, by Jordanna Max Brodsky

I gave it a chance, but I just couldn't get past the first few chapters. The Greek gods are alive and well in Manhattan. Just something about the overall tone and characterization -- not for me. Picked up for a pittance at a library sale -- I didn't realize then that it's a book 2 of a series, but that really wasn't the problem.

 The Science of  Human Obsession

The book won a number of awards when it came out in 2006, and has been incorporated into some college classes. It relates what is (or was then) known about the neuroscience of musical perception. 
I really enjoyed the earlier parts of the book that focused very tightly on the perception of sound and music, probably because it bridged the physics of sounds and music (that I know to some degree) with the neuroscience. Like, you may know that a plucked string or an organ pipe has many resonant frequencies other than the fundamental -- the one we think of as 'the' note it's playing. But we don't experience it as a group of separate frequencies, but as a unified note. And if a guitar and an oboe are playing the same note simultaneously, we don't experience it as a guiboe, but we hear the two instruments more or less distinctly.
As the book goes on, it moves from tones and notes to chords and songs and harmony and genres and musical tastes, and at each step along the way, it seems the connection neuroscience gets more diffuse. I can't fault the science for being what it is, but for me it was less compelling and interesting.

 

The Making of Incarnation

 

by Tom McCarthy

All bells and whistles

But very little substance to latch onto. While it has a soupçon of Borges, Neal Stephenson and Cheaper by the Dozen, it only reminded me of how much more enjoyable those would be.

Ostensibly a sort of deconstructed look at elements coming together in a science fiction blockbuster film, there's not much of a plot, just details that spin themselves out into disquisitions.

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The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
by Richard P. Feynman

A motley collection of shorter works by Feynman on vastly different subjects from different points in his career. Generally interesting, but no real blockbusters. His essay on 'cargo cult science' has a great theme of scientific skepticism.

Feynman also reads much better when he's been filtered through Ralph Leighton. His own writing is a bit rough. It's funny because he was such an engaging speaker, but I guess he needs that animating live touch.

 The Playboy Book of SF collects a lot of big names Bradbury, Le Guin, Niven, Vonnegut, PKD, Ellison... 

The collection comes from 1998, and some of the stories date back to the 50s. But not every author is a household name, and while most of these were *somebody* at the time, many of them were not yet undying giants of SF. Like most jumbled anthologies, the quality varies, and some age better than others. I will not approvingly one of my favorite shorts of all time, "Gianni" by Bob Silverberg. They use a time machine to resurrect Pergolesi and he gets pulled into the world of dubstep (more or less). The Apotheosis of Myra is pleasantly wwird. PKD's "I hope I shall Arrive Soon" was sadly retitled "Frozen Journey" for Playboy. Many of the authors take the license Playboy offers to add some sex, but not all.

Of Sound Mind by Nina Kraus
How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World 

Kraus is a researcher with a penchant for interdisciplinary looks at sound and the mind. There's a lot of great research on how the brain processes sound in terms of hearing and music and speech. But her penchant for everything leaves especially the latter half of the book more scattershot. Less a cohesive picture than a list of experimental outcomes.

The Rim of Morning by William Sloane collects two weird novels from the 1930s that feel like they dropped out of a parallel universe. The New York Review of Books resurrected them with an added intro by Stephen King. Both have science fictiony, horrory elements, but their general outline and shape is more akin to straight fiction. The closest comparison to the mood that leaps to my mind is something like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. A story of romantic, but possibly ill-considered, love. Manners and insults. But brooding dread and death lurking here and there. As for content, the first novel, To Walk the Night, is basically Lovecraft's Thing on the Doorstep, crossed with Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep. And then written by du Maurier. Some of the similarities make me hard to think it coincidence, but Sloane had the good fortune to have Lovecraft die before he published it. I keed. The second, The Edge of Running Water, is less interesting and even more ploddingly paced. Somehow, it's the one that was made into a movie with Karloff -- The Devil Commands (1941).

I've solved the case in Disco Elysium (Final Cut), though that's probably the least exciting thing about the game. Part choose your own adventure; part Infocom plus some graphics; part psychopolitical meditation -- it's really sui generis and a great experience, if you're up for it. The game was originally "refused classification by the [Australian gam] Board, making it illegal to sell in the country, due to its depiction of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, and violence, as well as showing "revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency, and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults""

I could try to say more, but it's like the Matrix -- you have to experience it for yourself. Great voice acting. Bonkers writing. There's enough depth in the decision trees that my replay has uncovered all sorts of novel things already, but I doubt there's so much that you could play it endlessly.

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Segueing into books, Virtual Cities is a nice midpoint. Subtitled An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities, the book describes 45 game cities from 1983's Ant Attack to very recent games. The author has degrees in urban planning, so some of his commentary is an interesting take on how realistic the cities are as a place where humans could live. I guess I had hoped for more information on design, both the visual design of the cities from an art and graphics standpoint, and from a game design standpoint. While each entry has a short 'Design Insights' section that covers some of this, it's very brief. Most of the text is given up to sort of a in-world guidebook description of the cities. Sometimes this diegetic stance has some wry humor, especially if you know the game. But I can't say I've played a lot of these games, so often they come of as in-jokes you don't get.

Each city also has a pretty well-executed map. But where the book really fails is with the images. Rather than use in-game generated images -- perhaps there were legal and copyright issues -- everything is rendered by the same artist, in a somewhat similar (and not overly accomplished) style. For Gabiel Knight's New Orleans, they work well enough, but for most others they don't provide a good feel of what the game is really like. Which is a shame, because the book itself is well-made. A solid-hardback with full color pages throughout.

Such a great concept, but a miss on execution.

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The Light Ages poses as something of a rehabilitation of medieval science. The book follows the career and environment of English monk John Westwyk, author of The Equatorie of the Planetis, a work in English describing the astronomical instrument of his invention, a modification of the astrolabe. So there's a lot of timekeeping, sacred calendars, astrology and models of planetary motion. While interesting (I now have a much better idea of how to use an astrolabe, and why it has the shape it does with that off center circle) there's precious little science to get excited about [and why should there be, since there really wasn't such a thing as science yet]. Some of the history is very interesting on its own, such as the fact that Westwyk joined the unsuccessful Despenser's Crusade against the antipope. Here's a few tidbits from my Kindle notes:

Why the days of the week are ordered as they are:
And the date of the Great Flood:

The Things That Are Not There, by CJ Henderson is hard-boiled private eye mashed with the Cthulhu Mythos. This is I guess the first of a series and ultimately this first story brings together a Doc Savage like crew of improbable people to fight the mythos. Not my cup of tea. More interesting was trying to figure out when it was set/written. It seemed contemporary, but there were no cell phones. Check pub date: 2006. Hmmm.... maybe it's set historical, but it doesn't read like something that's being set in a different time. And then Oriental is used to describe something that's not a rug. A deeper dive shows that it was first published in 1992 under a pen-name. Even that date is pushing it for unpreferred nomenclature.

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The Book of Merlyn by TH White was originally a fifth book of The Once & Future King. On the whole, I think the publishers were right to 'exclude' it, though some of the best parts were inserted into the earlier parts of the book. It is a bit too polemical as an antiwar manifesto, as perhaps could only be the case when the pacifist White was facing WWII.

Pray for Thomas Mallory, Knight, and his humble disciple, who now voluntarily lays aside his books to fight for his kind.

The story, such as it is, is Arthur on the eve of The Battle of Camlann with Mordred, is reunited with Merlyn and some of his other animal tutors, who rag mercilessly on the human race for being horrible warlike monsters. The episodes of Arthur with the ants and the geese are here, and they fit somewhat better philosophically in this argument about warfare and nature, but are much better put into the Sword in the Stone, which I guess White did in later editions when it was clear 'Merlyn' was not going to be published at all.

The version I have is apparently the first publication of it in this form, published by the University of Texas from the TH White papers kept there. The introductory essays are also illuminating, particularly about White's sadistic streak that brings to mind Agravaine. Also, for an academic press, the illustrations by Trevor Stubley are surprising and excellent.

--

On the Map, by Simon Garfield

An enjoyable romp through mapmaking from the very beginnings to Google Earth and Skyrim. Lots of entertaining details.

Most of you know I spend quite some time battling the forces of ignorance and wrongitude in weird corners of the Internet. Young Earth Creationists, antivaxxers, climate change denialists, COVID-19 denialists, flat earthers, conspiracy theorists, Obama birthers, etc.

Often when I report on these shenanigans, I'll point out the errors in fact and inference that people are making, and make some comment like, "Haha, I know that you, Dear Reader, would never fall into such folly. Because, by virtue of being on my friends list, haha, no doubt you are right thinking and virtuous, and would never make such errors."

But I can't say that any more. Because it turns out some of you suck at critical thinking, and I'm here to call you out.

Maybe you were always a dunderhead, or maybe it's a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or Russian disinformation, or the very nature of social media. But if the goal is to get to the Truth, you're not helping when you push falsehoods, even if you are on 'the right side'.  

But I do have a solution to offer. You can learn how to think critically. And you can practice it and get better at it, until it becomes second nature. 'Oh sure, I know how to critically think', you assert. That's just what the flat earthers say who pick away at the arguments of the globetards. So the first, and possibly most important, lesson is this:

The baloney detection kit is not a weapon to be used on occasion to defeat the arguments of people you disagree with, it is a defense that should be always on to protect you from accepting something as true without sufficient evidence. Possibly even a statement you have already accepted, but should reconsider.

If you only pull out your baloney detection kit when you're trying to find some niggling detail in someone else's argument so you can safely ignore it and go on with your life, you are using it wrong. That's exactly what science deniers do. It's just a defense mechanism. Confirmation bias in action.

It's what conspiracy theorists do. Conspiracy theories are a short-cut to proper thinking. The real world is complicated; conspiracy theories are usually quite simple. But there is no short-cut to proper thinking.

The Baloney Detection Kit was the catchy (and work-safe) coinage of Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon-Haunted World. So you don't have to learn some aspects of critical thinking from me, you can learn them from him, either the full text of that passage, or this excellent condensed summary. But allow me to quote and amend a bit here.

OK, now to you dummies.

Case 1: Umbrella Man is an object lesson in 'reserving judgment' and 'keep a long memory'. No not this Umbrella Man. That's a totally different conspiracy theory. This one was the guy instigating rioting in Minneapolis in the wake of the George Floyd killing at the end of May. Early on, there was wild social media sharing of this fucking bullshit, I mean baloney. Anonymous texts from an anonymous person, posing as the ex-wife of Umbrella Man identifying him as a member of police. This is crap evidence. Did I get any thanks for pointing out that this is crap evidence? Of course not. It's just like telling a young earth creationist that Mount Saint Helens is crap evidence that the earth is 6000 years old. They don't thank me either.

As they say, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. This lie about wicked policeman guy flew for most of two months, until we found out the truth, that Umbrella Man was a white supremacist asshole. Even when we knew that the particular policeman pointed out in the bullshit had an alibi, the believers implausibly sidled over to "well, it wasn't him, but it was some other cop". How can that even make sense, you chowderhead? Your bullshit evidence fingered a particular cop by name. How does he suddenly morph into a random cop based on the same evidence? If OJ didn't do it, it doesn't mean some other NFL running back did it. It only makes sense if you've been infected by some kind of conspiracy theory. A simplification of a complex world. Something like ACAB.

Now let's get something straight. Just because I don't believe All Cops Are Bastards, doesn't mean I believe All Cops Are Beneficial. Both are simplifications of a complex reality. To presume I do would be to commit the fallacy of a false dichotomy. 

Case 2: Lynching in Palmdale?

in the middle of June, Robert Fuller, a black man, was found dead hanging from a tree in Palmdale, California. It was initially considered by the city as "an alleged death by suicide."

My initial response was "A terrible thing, but I hope the initial determination of suicide holds up, because the alternative is horrible."

So because I hoped this was right, I went looking only for evidence that confirmed this opinion. WRONG!!!

I reserved my fucking judgment, and (because this was an important issue) I kept a long memory.

Meanwhile, other similar cases emerged in the news, possibly because the media became sensitive to the topic, including that of Malcolm Harsch which had happened even earlier in Victorville. And soon, the story was being spread through social media -- by some of you, my lamebrained friends, that these were lynchings being perpetrated by or at least covered up by the police. Medical examiners are practically police, so we shouldn't listen to them either. Ultimately the unsourced information that spread like wildfire was that 5 black men hanged from trees had been ruled suicides. As snopes notes, it's not even clear who these 5 men are supposed to be. But for some that can be identified, further evidence has come to light, and they are in fact almost certainly suicides.

In the case of Harsch, video evidence of the event emerged and the family was satisfied. “On behalf of the family of Malcolm Harsch unfortunately it seems he did take his own life.”

Robert Fuller had a history of suicidal ideation. 

This one left a note.

I confess I know less about the NY case than the CA ones, but as far as I can tell, the family has quietly accepted it as suicide.

So what was the evidence that these were lynchings in the first place? It seems to me that the only 'evidence' that they weren't suicides was the fact that the police said they were suicides. That's some fucked up conspiracy theory bullshit right there.

Case 3 Oh god the stupid thing about anarchists is too stupid to even talk about. But suffice it to say my comments received as warm a welcome as I usually get from flat earthers. AAABastards/Beneficial is just as terrible a short-cut to thinking as ACABastards/Beneficial.

But for all these cases, the truth finally got its shoes on weeks, even months, later. So please stop spreading bullshit based on poor evidence. Even if. ESPECIALLY IF it punches your buttons. Because that's where you are vulnerable. Sometimes there is a conspiracy. Those Russian disinformation specialists are not imaginary. Their job is to punch your buttons. 

Work on that baloney detection kit.

 You Look Like A Thing And I Love You, by Janelle Shane

The book seems to be a reworking of material Shane has shared in her AI weirdness blog. On the one hand, it shows, on the other hand, it makes for light entertaining reading.

I was a little disappointed that the scope of the book focuses on various flavors of machine learning AI (as opposed to symbolic or strong AI). Of course, the latter is a super hard problem, but it's of infinitely more interest.

But the book does reinforce the idea that machine learning AI is terrible and terrifying. If you set it the task of winning at chess and other games, it does an amazing job, because it's easy to 'reward' the program with victory or points. But when the goal is to teach an AI to, for example, act as a customer service agent, or identify what's in a picture, or drive a car down the street, it's harder to train them when the victory condition is 'act like a human would act'.

So the book is a compilation of more or less hilarious and horrifying failures of AI. The basic idea is to train your AI to absorb training data and make a bajillion connections so that it can spit out more of the same. The problem seems to be that we're bad at setting tasks, bad at giving clean data, and bad at making the original judgments the AI is trying to emulate. One of the common examples is text generating AIs, where you train your AI on recipes or Harry Potter novels and let it make up its own once it gets the hang of it. Another common thing of the sort is the autocomplete or Google's help in finishing your search request, which is how "Why won't my parakeet eat my diarrhea?" became a thing. Once the AI randomly latched onto that as a cromulent phrase, people making google searches also latched onto it. That's some serious click bait there. And thus the problem. The Google AI takes those clicks as 'rewards' that it is very accurately predicting what people were going to ask.

But mostly they're just odd, like the motto hearts Shane recently posted:



Other examples look at trying to decipher what's in a picture. For training data, the AI used people-generated descriptions of pictures and then went number crunching away. Now ask yourself, honestly, how many times have you described a picture by saying, "It has zero giraffes in it." probably never. But if there were a giraffe in the picture, you'd probably be likely to mention it. So the AI has seen a few pictures that are described as containing giraffes, but it has never seen a picture described as having zero giraffes in it. The result is that the AI often declares that there are giraffes in pictures that do not contain giraffes.

This kind of bias in the sample has real-world consequences as well. An AI trained to make hiring or loan application decisions turns out to be very good at modelling the human-generated data and discriminating against the same kind of people the employers and banks do. Since the AIs are rather opaque black boxes, it's hard to root out such bias, since we don't really know what the AI is paying attention to.

A related example from driving. The researchers thought they were teaching the AI to keep the car in the middle of the road, and not driving off the sides. Instead, they seems to have taught the AI to keep the green grass at fixed locations on either side of the field of view. When the car went onto an overpass, the green disappeared and the car was flummoxed.


Great, amusing read that shines a light on some important issues as inevitably medical and financial data gets churned through AIs like this.

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The Witchfinder's Sister, by Beth Underdown

I found this a disappointment. Matthew Hopkins was an English witch-finder who had a brief, but very nasty career. I was ready to get my hate on, but the Hopkins of this novel does not seem to much resemble the original. As the title suggests, the book follows Hopkins' [entirely fictional] sister Alice as she returns to join his household after she is widowed. There are dim family secrets that slowly get winkled out, but the action stays on Alice, so much of the witchfinding occurs offstage. It does provide a slow excruciating crescendo as our narrator gets ever more closely involved with the witchfinding and the deplorable details emerge.

But the motivations provided by the backstory conflict with what we know of the real Hopkins, and the author toys with witchcraft being real, which seems like a bizarre step. If people really can and do magically murder people, it's worth finding them out. The tragedy of the witchhunts is that it was all bullshit.

This got picked up by the NYT/PBS Newshour's Now Read This book club. It's been an interesting experience seeing a more general audience deal with a speculative work. I think there was more than the usual amount of "Nope. I'm skipping this one." And even among those who joined in, there was a surprising amount of "I don't understand what's going on!"

I don't think it's that inaccessible, but I wonder how much I have been 'trained' to understand modern speculative fiction by having consumed a lot of it and followed its progression. Maybe if you haven't read Anne McCaffrey and Katherine Kurtz, it's hard to absorb The Fifth Season. But again, I don't think it's that hard to take in, even if the world and reality is very different from our own.

In fact, it's so different that I'm somewhat surprised so many people think the book has some trenchant relevance to discussions of climate and race. I mean, surely it's there - persecution and control, and largescale climate effects on an entire world - but apart from very loose analogies, it doesn't seem very applicable. 

The story itself is interesting and engaging as you learn more about the world, and its characters. But... not enough for me to go on for a whole trilogy. Another common complaint in the book club (and a merited one) is the choice of a first book of a trilogy.

Subtitled An Unnatural History, the book looks into the effect that human beings are having on the extinction of other species on Earth. The title refers to the five established major extinction events that have happened over the course of Earth's history, where large fractions of the species living on earth have gone extinct. The sexiest one is the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

It's hard to deny the overall concept that our influence on the planet is causing a similar extinction event similar in size to these. Kolbert focuses on a number of particular research groups studying a particular species or groups of species that is under threat. These are really great looks at how science operates, and what scientists do, and paints a vivid picture of the facts and conclusions. At the same time, I think that in addition to these embedded journalist pieces, the book could have used a better summary and conclusion to tie everything together to suggest the overall impact. But perhaps that's just too huge to tackle and loses some immediacy in its hugeness. People will care more about that adorable squeaking bat over there suffering from white nose syndrome than about "37% of all species on earth".

There's also good variety among the cases and causes. Ocean acidification affecting corals, predation of moas and other prehistoric fauna that isn't around any more, climate change shifting habitable zones -- if you live on flat land, and the climate warms up, you can move north to stay at the right temperature. But if you live on a mountainside, all you can do is go up in altitude. Not only does the temperate zone shrinks, but if your mountain isn't tall enough, it vanishes.

Now that humans have air travel and poke our noses all over the place, things come along for the ride. Species that never would have run into each other do so now. Sure, we know about how smallpox affected Native Americans, but this story is being played out many times over, including the white nose syndrome decimating some bat populations in North America, caused by a European fungus that doesn't much bother European bats.